When did the walls of Jericho fall?

Question

Accepted Answer

By the Bible's own reckoning, in the year Israel crossed the Jordan, forty years after the Exodus: about 1406 BC on the chronology the map follows, or in the thirteenth century BC on the later dating that many scholars prefer. The city is the mound of Tell es-Sultan beside Elisha's spring, 22 km east of Jerusalem, 250 m below sea level. Whether the ruins show a wall falling at either date is disputed, and the answer has swung back and forth for a century. Since 1997 an Italian–Palestinian expedition under Lorenzo Nigro, at first with Nicolò Marchetti, has dug the mound again; it places the burning of the Middle Bronze city in the sixteenth century BC, and Nigro argues for a smaller settlement in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, its remains largely cut away by later levelling. Joshua says that “Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in”; Rahab's house “was upon the town wall, and she dwelt upon the wall”; on the seventh day, when the priests blew and the people shouted, “the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city”. Joshua cursed whoever should rebuild it, and Kings records that in Ahab's days “did Hiel the Beth-elite build Jericho: he laid the foundation thereof in Abiram his firstborn, and set up the gates thereof in his youngest son Segub”. Hebrews sums up: “By faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they were compassed about seven days.” The mound carries a Middle Bronze city with a sloping rampart and a mudbrick wall on a stone base, which fell in a fire; its bricks lie heaped at the foot of the wall. John Garstang, digging in 1930–1936, dated the fall to about 1400 BC and called it Joshua's. Kathleen Kenyon (1952–1958) showed by the pottery that the city was destroyed about 1550 BC, which she linked with the Egyptian expulsion of the Hyksos, and found almost nothing of a town about 1400 and nothing of one about 1250; radiocarbon dates on grain from the burnt city, published in 1995, agree with her. Bryant Wood argued in 1990 from the pottery and scarabs that the destruction belongs after all to about 1400 BC, and some conservative scholars follow him; most archaeologists hold Kenyon's date and take the story as a later telling, while others answer that erosion has carried off the Late Bronze town.