Todd Bolen and Claude Mariottini both recently pointed to Expedition Bible: Jericho Unearthed. Claude urged his readers to

[w]atch the DVD online by clicking here and then decide for yourself whether the archaeological evidence negates or confirms the fact that the city of Jericho was destroyed just as it was described in the book of Joshua.

I decided to follow Claude’s advice to “see for myself.” Actually, I already know quite a bit about the debate surrounding the historical value of the narratives in the biblical book of Joshua, so I watched with a bit of a critical eye, an eye especially focused on whether I could recommend this video to students just getting introduced to these issues. The video certainly seems well produced, and the program provides some very useful information for viewers new to archaeology and/or the Jericho debate, but certain aspects of the video’s content actually obscure important issues.

Before I share my own view of the video’s pros and cons, I should note that you can watch the video online—and Expedition Bible deserves commendations for this generosity. The Flash video player on Expedition Bible’s web site offers excellent video quality, but no video controls, so you might want to watch the video on blip.tv instead, where you have a standard suite of video controls (pause/play, rewind, fast-forward, and a time counter).

The Good

Around 4:14 in, the program launches into a lively and helpful description of a tel. The use of an actual layer cake as an “object lesson” (I smell evangelical Sunday schools) may prove too cute for some tastes, but students just learning about tels for the first time could benefit from watching 4:14–5:45 of this program.

From about 8:30–13:20 the program shines (with one important blemish that I’ll describe below), identifying the three major excavations at Jericho, and providing a very cool 3D model of Middle Bronze Age Jericho based on the excavation reports. The section ends with a reasonably good discussion of the place and deportment of the collapsed mud-brick wall—mostly simple facts that no one disputes.

The Bad

Shortly after the helpful introduction to tels, things start to go a little bit awry. The video features two archaeologists, Peter Parr, who dug with Kathleen Kenyon at Jericho, and Bryant Wood, known mainly for his recent (since 1990) attempts to re-establish John Garstang’s date c. 1400 BCE for the destruction of Jericho City IV—and especially its mud-brick walls—over against Kathleen Kenyon’s date of c. 1550 BCE. Starting about 6:03 into program, Wood tells viewers:

As we excavate the material from the tel, however, it is silent. Very rarely will you find a written document that’s going to tell you who lived here, when they lived here, why they abandoned their city, why their city was destroyed. … So you have to depend on written texts, historical records, to interpret what you’re digging up in that tel.

Apparently Wood didn’t get Bill Dever’s memo:

For more than a generation now, nearly every history of ancient Israel, every Old Testament theology, has mindlessly repeated the assertion that archaeological data can only be “subjectively” interpreted, or worse still that in the end archaeology is “mute.” … But as a colleague in biblical studies has observed … the Hebrew Bible is “mute” for you if you do not know Hebrew. Or, as I like to put it, “archaeology is not mute, but some historians are deaf.” (Did God Have a Wife?, p. 62)

Wood only implies here what he will baldly state elsewhere, namely, that the book of Joshua is an “historical record.” But Wood begs the question by assuming, rather than demonstrating, that the book of Joshua is indeed an historical record. Watch for this proposal—“the archaeological remains are mute, so you need a text to interpret them”—to come back later in the program’s logic.

The video then takes viewers on a gratuitous detour to a site near Qumran cave 4 and an excavation led by Randall Price—if you think you’ve heard that name before, Price is the Liberty University professor who set out in late 2008 to find Noah’s ark. Price’s excavations at Qumran have no relevance whatsoever to the archaeology of Jericho, except that Price will gladly go on camera to say that “It’s extremely important [to use the biblical text in the archaeology that's been done at Jericho to interpret what's been found there], because one, it’s a historical document” (the bracketed words are the host’s). Once again, the central question of the video—whether the book of Joshua provides reliable historical information—is taken for granted.

To shore up the viewers’ esteem for the historical accuracy of the book of Joshua, Wood tells us (slapping his hands together to emphasize the point):

The Bible is an ancient text [slap], and the book of Joshua is an ancient text [slap], and so we know the story in the book of Joshua is an ancient [slap] account [slap].

Presumably, however, Wood does not believe every ancient account that presents a narrative! The mere fact of age does not guarantee accuracy—never mind that “ancient” is a ridiculously broad term. Wood’s repeated use of the word “ancient” is a transparent attempt to lead viewers to consider the book of Joshua roughly contemporaneous with the events (presumed, not shown, to be real-world events) described therein. The simple repeated use of the word “ancient” cannot, however, actually establish this point, and few if any modern biblical commentators regard the book of Joshua as having been composed contemporaneously with the Israelite entry into (or emergence in) Canaan (whenever and however that happened). Right at the end of the video, however, Wood tries to make exactly this claim: “It had to be somebody who was there and witnessed these events and recorded it at the time. An eyewitness account—that’s the only answer. There’s no other answer.” I recommend Bill Schniedewind’s work on literacy in Bronze Age Canaan and Iron Age Israel and Judah as a counterpoint to this claim. Certainly, the idea of anybody producing in Biblical Hebrew an eyewitness chronicle of a Middle Bronze Age event is grossly anachronistic.

From about 8:30–13:20, the program shines, identifying the three major excavations at Jericho, and providing a very cool 3D model of Middle Bronze Age Jericho based on the excavation reports. The section ends with a reasonably good discussion of the place and deportment of the collapsed mud-brick wall—mostly simple facts that no one disputes.

The quality of the section from 8:30–13:20 is not entirely even, and that otherwise laudable stretch of the program contains at least one example of highly tendentious exegesis and one example of question-begging. At one point Wood tells the host that “on the seventh trip around, we’re told in the Bible that the mud-brick wall collapsed and it fell outward and down to the base of the stone retaining wall.” Can you find all that in your copy of Joshua 6:20? Wood’s remarkable claim derives from his idiosyncratic reading of the word ‏תַּחְתֶּיהָ, literally “under her/it,” in Joshua 6:20. Wood takes חוֹמָה, “wall,” as the antecedent of the חָ— suffix, “she/it,” and glosses ‏וַתִּפֹּל הַחוֹמָה תַּחְתֶּיהָ as “the walls fell down beneath themselves.” For comparison, let me tell you that the LXX has ἔπεσεν ἅπαν τὸ τεῖχος κύκλῳ “the entire wall fell [down] all around [the city]“; NJPSV uses “collapsed,” NIV “collapsed,” NRSV “fell down flat.” Most commentators use something like “collapse,” but don’t actually comment on the phrase. In my brief search, I could not find any commentator discussing what seems to me an obvious ambiguity: should we indeed consider the antecedent of the חָ— suffix to be חוֹמָה “wall” or ‏תְּרוּעָה “shout” (“the wall fell down under [the influence of] the shout”)? At any rate, if the suffix refers to the wall, then תַּחְתֶּיהָ would not naturally be taken as “outward and down,” but “straight down, right there, in place” as in ‏וְעָמַדְנוּ תַחְתֵּינוּ “we will stay where we are” (1 Sam 14:9) or ‏וַיָּמָת תַּחְתָּיו “and he died right there” (2 Sam 2:23 Qere; see Waltke and O’Connor’s Syntax, §11.2.15.b.2–3 for these examples).

As for the question-begging, I should acknowledge that “Middle Bronze Age” is my language, not that of the host or anyone in the program. The host, and Wood, simply use vague language like “at that time” or “in the days of Joshua,” completely skirting the difficult issues of dating the collapsed wall and establishing the biblical timeline—both of which one should do independently before one tries to link the two. Nobody disputes that the mud-brick wall around Jericho City IV fell down! The questions that remain open to go when and why the wall fell down. But the host speciously argues:

So the Bible says that the wall came tumbling down. The archaeologists then came and dug Jericho, and what did they find? They found a collapsed city wall. This fits perfectly with the description from the ancient text.

This argument deploys “guilt by association” in a reverse fashion. Because the biblical story describes a collapsing wall, and because a wall once collapsed at Jericho, we are supposed to jump to the conclusion that the biblical story relates events exactly as they occurred. That conclusion does not follow, however; the evidence does not warrant it. At most, the evidence warrants the conclusion that the biblical narrator accurately described the condition of Jericho’s walls after (how far after cannot be specified) some traumatic event. The walls themselves do not reveal the proximate cause of their collapse. Here’s where the seed planted earlier in the video comes to fruition. Back at about 6:03, Wood told the audience that you need a text to interpret “mute” archaeological remains. I just finished reading The Associate by John Grisham. It describes a location in East Rutherford, New Jersey called “the Meadowlands,” and further describes an occasion on which a football team called the “New York Jets” beats another football team called the “Pittsburgh Steelers” by three touchdowns. Suppose that, 3,400 years from now (or 3,550 years from now, take your pick), some archaeologist excavates the Meadowlands and also happens to have a copy of The Associate. In the debris, the archaeologist finds lots of Jets memorabilia, and a yellow towel. Should he then assume that everything else in The Associate is historically accurate? Of course not, but that’s exactly how the program invites viewers to treat Jericho vis-a-vis the book of Joshua.

Numerous examples of such question-begging plague the presentation. For example, during an excruciatingly long segment of “filler” video of a couple of people in “biblical” garb harvesting wheat with old-fashioned scythes, the host claims, “We know both agriculturally and archaeologically that Jericho was attacked after the wheat harvest had been taken in.” By “archaeologically,” the host refers to the burned jars full of grain that Jericho’s several excavators discovered therein. Wood claims, and Parr mildly agrees, that the fact that the grain jars were full indicates they were burned not too long after the harvest. However, neither the grain jars nor the walls, nor the burn layer, nor anything else about Jericho City IV, demonstrates archaeologically that the city was attacked at all. The host has taken the conclusions that he wants viewers to reach, and has turned them into (illusory) data points. I can’t even bring myself to comment on Wood’s contention that the grain jars demonstrate Israel’s obedience to God’s command not to plunder the city. No, I take that back; I simply must point out that the burned jars could just as easily testify to the haste with which inhabitants of Jericho fled the city to get away from an accidental fire they could not get under control.

Finally, about 2/3 of the way through the program, the issue of dating comes to the fore. Both Wood and Price, predictably, simply cite 1400 BCE as the date of the conquest, Price explicitly drawing on 1 Kings 6:1, Wood implicitly doing so. You know how the math works. “Historically we know,” the host says, “that Solomon began building the temple in 966 BC.” That level of confidence is much higher than the biblical data can actually support (we have no archaeological data to support any such claim), and the math also requires taking the “forty years” in the wilderness quite literally (despite all the problems that attach to that, for which see the commentaries on Numbers). At any rate, virtually the entire remainder of the program gets devoted to Bryant Wood making his pottery-based case that Garstang was right to date the walls’ collapse to around 1400 BCE, and Kenyon was wrong to date the walls’ collapse to around 1550 BCE.

Wood criticizes Kenyon’s dating of the mud-brick wall’s collapse by characterizing her reasoning as an argument from silence; she failed to find a certain kind of Cypriot ware, and based much of her dating on that absence. This video, too, is notable for what it does not contain. Specifically, the program (like Wood himself) places all the weight for dating the wall’s collapse on the pottery. Despite the program’s emphasis on the grain jars, neither the host nor any guest ever mentions the radiocarbon dating of the grain in the jars, which supports Kenyon’s dating and may even suggest that Kenyon dated the destruction a little too late (see Hendrik J. Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht, “Tell Es-Sultan [Jericho]: Radiocarbon Results of Short-Lived Cereal and Multiyear Charcoal Samples from the End of the Middle Bronze Age,” Radiocarbon 37.2 [1995]: 213–220; see the abstract from Radiocarbon or a report about the study in Science News). Now Bruins and van der Plicht have some odd ideas about how interpret their ¹⁴C data, ideas that bring us right back to Simcha Jacobovici and the Thera eruption. Despite that bit of quackery from the researchers (who seem to presuppose the historicity of the biblical battle of Jericho narrative, asking only about the date), the ¹⁴C data still places that fire 180 years before Wood’s biblically-derived date for the battle of Jericho.

Moreover, in yet another display of question-begging, the program does not even touch on the big argument between the proponents of a 15th-century BCE date for the exodus (like Wood) and proponents of a 13th-century BCE date for the exodus, never mind those who regard the book of Joshua as completely fictional, and those who regard the book of Joshua as containing some actual but confused memories of events spanning a much longer period of time than Joshua’s posited lifespan. This omission seriously compromises the presentation. At the beginning of the program, when Gabriel Barkay appeared on screen to say that the walls of Jericho collapsed in the Middle Bronze Age, and therefore have nothing to do with Joshua and the Israelites, I thought perhaps the issue would be taken up, since the 15th-vs-13th-century debate obviously underlies Barkay’s statement. But nothing ever came of it; the video ignored this issue completely.

The Ugly

As Price talks about Dead Sea Scrolls fragments of the book of Joshua, a Dead Sea Scroll floats on the screen—but it’s the Temple Scroll, and has nothing to do with the book of Joshua.

Conclusions

In his post pointing to the video, Claude Mariottini recommends:

Watch the DVD online by clicking here and then decide for yourself whether the archaeological evidence negates or confirms the fact that the city of Jericho was destroyed just as it was described in the book of Joshua.

Sorry, but that just won’t work—because the program simply ignores evidence and arguments contrary to the producers’ and main guest’s thesis. It does not, therefore, equip viewers to decide for themselves, because it withholds important considerations from the audience. Viewers who watch Expedition Bible: Jericho Unearthed and do not take the time to more fully investigate the subject will not truly find themselves well-informed enough to make the decision Claude invites. The slanted presentation will lead them not to an independent conclusion, but toward the conclusion the producers invite.