This article, The Deconstruction of the Walls of Jericho; is an abridged version of The Bible: No Evidence on the Ground; by Zeev Herzog, Professor at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University. He participated extensively in collaboration with other archaeologists in excavations at ancient sites relevant to Biblical legends. He has written on the city gate in Palestine and its neighbors, as well as two excavation reports, and has written a book summarizing the archaeology of the ancient city. Republished in the Biblical Archaeology magazine from Ha’aretz | October 1999 | Zeev Herzog
I am sharing an article by leading Israeli archaeologist Professor Zeev Herzog because it is important for understanding the history of Christianity, and especially crucial for debunking the false “Judeo-Christian” narrative.
After 70 years of intense excavation in the land of Israel, archaeologists have learned: The patriarchal stories are legendary, we did not reside in Egypt nor did we make an exodus, and we did not conquer the land. Also, there is no mention of the empire of David and Solomon. Those interested in this topic have known these facts for years, but Israel is a stubborn nation that does not want to hear about it.
Here is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the land of Israel: The Israelites were never in Egypt, they did not wander in the desert, they did not conquer the land in a military campaign, and they did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to accept is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, described in the Bible as a regional power, was at best a small tribal kingdom. Many will also be unpleasantly surprised to learn that the God of Israel, YHWH, had a female consort, and that early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the final phase of the monarchy, not at Mount Sinai.
Most of those who work in the interconnected fields of the Bible, archaeology, and Jewish history – and who once entered the field searching for evidence to confirm the biblical story – now agree that the historical events related to the emergence of the Jewish people are radically different from what that story says.
Below is a brief overview of the short history of archaeology, with emphasis on crises and the big bang, so to speak, of the last decade. The key question of this archaeological revolution has yet to penetrate public consciousness but cannot be ignored.
Inventing the Biblical Stories
The archaeology of Palestine developed as a science relatively late, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, in tandem with the archaeology of imperial cultures such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. These resource-intensive regions were the primary target for researchers seeking impressive evidence from the past, usually in the service of major museums in London, Paris, and Berlin. This phase effectively bypassed Palestine, with its fragmented geographic diversity. The conditions in ancient Palestine were not conducive to the development of a vast kingdom, and certainly no major projects such as Egyptian temples or Mesopotamian palaces could have been founded there. In fact, Palestinian archaeology did not arise from museum initiatives but from religious motives.
The main incentive for archaeological research in Palestine was the land’s connection to the Holy Scripture. The first excavators in Jericho and Shechem (Nablus) were biblical researchers looking for remnants of cities mentioned in the Bible. Archaeology gained momentum through the activities of William Foxwell Albright, who mastered the archaeology, history, and languages of the land of Israel and the ancient Near East. Albright, an American whose father was a Chilean-born priest, began excavating in Palestine in the 1920s. His declared research approach was that archaeology was the primary scientific tool for refuting critical claims against the historical veracity of biblical stories, particularly those of the Wellhausen school in Germany.
The school of biblical criticism, which developed in Germany in the second half of the 19th century, led by Julius Wellhausen, questioned the historical reliability of biblical stories and claimed that biblical historiography was formulated and largely ‘invented’ during the Babylonian exile. Biblical scholars, especially Germans, argued that the history of the Hebrews, as a continuous series of events beginning with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and continuing through the journey to Egypt, slavery, and the exodus, culminating in the conquest of the land and the settlement of the tribes of Israel, was in fact simply a later reconstruction of events for theological purposes.
Albright believed that the Bible was a historical document that, although having undergone several stages of editing, still fundamentally reflected ancient reality. He was convinced that if the ancient remains of Palestine were uncovered, they would provide unequivocal evidence of the historical truth of the events relating to the Jewish people in their land.
The biblical archaeology that developed after Albright and his disciples led to a series of extensive excavations at important biblical sites: Megiddo, Lachish, Gezer, Shechem (Nablus), Jericho, Jerusalem, Ai, Gibeon, Beth Shean, Beth Shemesh, Hazor, Ta’anach, and others. The path was straight and clear: every new find contributed to building a harmonious picture of the past. Enthusiastic archaeologists who adopted the biblical approach set out to search for the ‘biblical period’: the period of the patriarchs, the Canaanite cities destroyed by the Israelites during the conquest of the land, the borders of the 12 tribes, the settlement period sites, characterized by ‘settler pottery’, ‘Solomon’s gates’ at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, ‘Solomon’s stables’ (or Ahab’s), ‘King Solomon’s mines’ in Timna — and some are still diligently searching, having found Mount Sinai (on Mount Karkum in the Negev) or Joshua’s altar on Mount Ebal.
The Crisis
Gradually, cracks began to appear in the picture. Paradoxically, a situation arose in which a mass of findings began to undermine the historical credibility of the biblical accounts instead of strengthening them. A crisis phase occurs when theories within the overall thesis cannot address an increasing number of anomalies. Explanations become difficult and inelegant, and the pieces do not fit together smoothly. Here are a few examples of how the harmonious picture collapsed….
https://milos.io/the-deconstruction-of-the-walls-of-jericho/
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