HistoricalChristian.Faith

Was Jericho's "City IV" destroyed c. 1400 BC (Wood) or c. 1550 BC (Kenyon)?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — a genuine chronological dispute over a single burn layer, but one in which the strongest independent datum cuts against the early date: everyone agrees the fortified Bronze Age town at Tell es-Sultan ("City IV") was violently burned, and the fight is purely when. Bryant Wood's revival of Garstang's c. 1400 BC date rests on a real but minority reading of the pottery; against it, high-precision radiocarbon of short-lived charred grain from the destruction layer itself returned c. 1562 ± 38 BC, and the one radiocarbon figure Wood cited for 1400 collapsed on a known calibration error. So weigh this as contested-leaning-against the c. 1400 reading — a less-probable dating on current evidence, not a clean draw · advanced for c. 1400 by John Garstang, Bryant Wood and Associates for Biblical Research, and Titus Kennedy; for c. 1550 by Kathleen Kenyon, Piotr Bienkowski, and Bruins & van der Plicht

What this page does and does not decide. This is a flagship instance of the larger early-date vs. late-date chronology dispute, narrowed to one site. If City IV fell c. 1400 BC, there was a walled Jericho for an early-date Joshua to take; if it fell c. 1550 BC (end of the Middle Bronze Age), then on every proposed conquest date — early (~1400) or late (~1250) — there was no fortified Jericho standing to be destroyed, and the biblical siege has no city. The destruction facts — the fierce fire, the mudbrick wall fallen outward, the unplundered grain — are common ground and are not re-argued here; this page weighs only the date, because on the date the whole correlation with Joshua 6 stands or falls. This is a radiometric and ceramic dating question, not a question about the miraculous: the wiki's rule against ruling out the supernatural bears on whether walls can fall by God's hand, not on when a carbon sample died.

The claim

"The pottery, stratigraphic considerations, scarab data, and a Carbon-14 date all point to a destruction of the city around the end of Late Bronze I, ca. 1400 B.C.E. … Kenyon's analysis was based on an argument from silence."

— Bryant G. Wood, restating the case of "Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho?" (1990) against Kathleen Kenyon. Wood charged that Kenyon dated City IV to c. 1550 BC largely from the absence of imported Cypriot Bichrome ware in a small, poor sounding — and argued that the local pottery, correctly read, is Late Bronze I. Against him, Kenyon's redating and the subsequent radiocarbon work place the burn at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, c. 1550–1562 BC. The question here is not who is more faithful to the Bible but which date the dirt and the pottery, taken whole, best support.¹

Who advances it

The c. 1400 BC (Late Bronze I) date was first proposed by John Garstang, who excavated Jericho in 1930–36, tied his burnt "City IV" to Joshua, and dated it to about 1400 BC. It was buried for a generation by Kathleen Kenyon's more rigorous 1952–58 excavation, then revived in 1990 by Bryant G. Wood of Associates for Biblical Research, whose Biblical Archaeology Review article is the load-bearing modern statement; Titus Kennedy's 2023 synthesis in Religions restates and extends it. The c. 1550 BC (end of Middle Bronze) date is Kenyon's, and is the mainstream position: it was defended in detail against Wood by Piotr Bienkowski and given an independent, sample-based anchor by Hendrik Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht's 1995 radiocarbon study; the current Italian–Palestinian excavations under Lorenzo Nigro continue to date City IV's fall to the Middle Bronze Age. Because the early date is the archaeological prop of the wider early-date conquest scheme, this is one of the most keenly contested single dates in biblical archaeology.²

The evidence for

For c. 1400 BC (Wood, steelmanned). Wood's case runs on four lines, the first his primary one. (1) Pottery. He argued that diagnostic forms in the destruction debris fit Late Bronze I rather than Middle Bronze — conical bowls with concentric circles on the interior (which he called "a strong diagnostic indicator for the latter half of Late Bronze I," with parallels at Hazor, Lachish, Ashdod, and elsewhere), carinated bowls, everted-rim cooking pots, and red-and-black decorated ware — and charged that Kenyon's Middle Bronze verdict rested on the absence of imported Cypriot Bichrome ware from one small, poor trench, an argument from silence. (2) Stratigraphy. He correlated the destroyed city (his Phase 52) with Late Bronze IB strata at Shechem, Lachish (Fosse Temple I), Hazor, and Megiddo. (3) Scarabs. A cemetery northwest of the tell yielded scarabs running through the Eighteenth Dynasty — Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Amenhotep III — which he read as evidence the site was in use across the fifteenth century. (4) Radiocarbon. He cited a British-Museum radiocarbon date of 1410 ± 40 BC from charcoal in the destruction debris, apparently converging on his ceramic date.³

For c. 1550 BC (the mainstream). Piotr Bienkowski answered Wood point by point in Biblical Archaeology Review: the destruction pottery lacks the diagnostic Late Bronze I characteristics Wood claims, the absent Cypriot imports really do argue against a Late Bronze date, and the Bichrome ware Wood invoked belongs to a later "Middle Building," not to the City IV destruction. The scarabs, on a cemetery not stratified to the burn, attest continued visits to the site, not a standing fortified city in 1400. And the decisive datum is radiometric. Wood's 1410 date came from apparatus later found to carry a systematic calibration error (the British-Museum lab's 1980–84 dates, including the Jericho sample BM-1790, were subsequently revised — the Jericho figure to roughly 3300 ± 110 BP, i.e. the mid-second millennium, not 1410 BC), so the early radiocarbon prop collapsed. Then Bruins and van der Plicht (1995) high-precision-dated eighteen samples from the destruction horizon, including six short-lived charred cereal grains from the burn layer — grain from the last harvest before the fire, the ideal sample because it fixes the year of destruction rather than the age of long-lived timber. The weighted average was 3306 ± 7 BP, calibrating to a destruction c. 1562 ± 38 BC. They concluded that the city was not destroyed by c. 1400 BC as Wood had suggested. Nigro's ongoing excavations uphold a Middle Bronze fall for City IV.⁴

Adversarial assessment

What holds on each side. Wood's pottery argument is not frivolous: reading Palestinian ceramic sequences is a craft with real disagreement at the Middle–Late Bronze boundary, and his charge that a Middle Bronze verdict drawn from the absence of imported ware in a small trench is methodologically fragile has force in the abstract. The mainstream case is stronger on two independent grounds that do not depend on adjudicating the pottery at all: the imported-ware chronology (whose absence Wood must explain away) and, above all, the radiocarbon — and the radiocarbon here is unusually clean, because the short-lived grain removes the "old-wood" problem that plagues charcoal dates and pins the sample to the destruction year itself.

Where the early date is overstated. Three of Wood's four props are weaker than presented. The radiocarbon prop is not merely weak but withdrawn: the 1410 date rested on a lab error since corrected, so it can no longer be cited for 1400 as though it still stood. The scarabs date a cemetery, not the burnt city, and so speak to site-visitation, not to a fortified town standing in 1400. The stratigraphic correlations inherit exactly the boundary ambiguity they are meant to resolve — they are only as firm as the Late Bronze I ceramic call they presuppose. That leaves the pottery as the real load-bearer, and it is a minority reading contested by ceramic specialists. So the early date reduces, on inspection, to one disputed ceramic argument against a convergent case of imported-ware chronology plus sample-anchored radiocarbon.

The live wrinkles, stated fairly. The radiocarbon record for Jericho is not uniformly tidy. A large 2000 study of the site's samples produced a wide scatter, yielding dates as far apart as 1347 ± 85 and 1597 ± 91 BC depending on the material and the layer — so a single crisp number oversells the precision of the whole corpus. And Nigro's excavations posit a later occupation phase ("City V") with Late Bronze remains at the tell, to which some early-date defenders now point for a fourteenth-century Jericho. Neither wrinkle, though, rehabilitates a c. 1400 destruction of City IV: the scatter still centers on the second half of the second millennium and its best-controlled subset (the short-lived grain) lands at c. 1562 BC, and a thin, unfortified Late Bronze presence is not a walled city to be stormed. The honest reading is that the burn that fits Joshua 6 so strikingly is the one dated, on the best evidence, to c. 1550 BC.⁵

Assessment

Contested, leaning against the c. 1400 BC date. This is a real dispute — Wood's ceramic argument is a genuine minority position held by a trained archaeologist, not a crank thesis, and the Middle–Late Bronze pottery boundary is a place where specialists honestly differ. But it is not a balanced tie. Three of the four lines Wood advanced for 1400 are weak or withdrawn (the radiocarbon prop collapsed on a calibration error, the scarabs date a cemetery not the city, the stratigraphy only restates the pottery call), leaving one contested ceramic reading to carry the early date against a convergent mainstream case: the imported-ware chronology and, decisively, high-precision radiocarbon of short-lived grain from the burn layer itself at c. 1562 ± 38 BC — the single strongest and most independent datum on the site, and it points to the Middle Bronze Age. So the c. 1400 reading is a less-probable dating on current evidence, not a false one and not a coin-flip. The stakes are the same as for the wider chronology dispute, of which this is the flagship case: if City IV fell c. 1550 BC, there was no fortified Jericho for any proposed conquest — early or late — to destroy, and the otherwise-striking correlation of the burn layer with Joshua 6 loses the one thing that would make it Joshua's Jericho: a date. This is one input to the general destruction-layers-cluster test of whether the burnt Late Bronze cities Joshua names synchronize into a single campaign at all.

Sources