Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Jonathan D. Safren" <yonsaf AT beitberl.beitberl.ac.il>]

Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG wrote:
and maybe the bricks or stones remaining above ground, from the walls 
and the houses, were deliberately taken away in connection with the 
curse on rebuilding the city (6:26).

Is there anything in this speculative reconstruction which conflicts 
with the archaeological record?


Dear Peter,
The main problem in trying to reconstruct a supposed Joshuan conquest
of Jericho is that this story is only one of a number of unhistorical conquest
narratives in the Book of Joshua.
      Take, for example, the conquest of Ai,
a city which had been destroyed many hundreds of years before the appearance
of the Israelites, had never been reconstructed, and even whose name had
been forgotten - Ai means "heap of ruins", similar to tel. Or the narrative
of Joshua's campaign against the Northern Coalition, headed by Jabin, king
of Hazor, a story reduplicated in Jud. 4. Or the herem of the Canaanites
- peerhaps a local phenomenon, but when transferred to the national scene,
wishful thinking of a late monotheist.
     Actually, the problem begins with the whole
historiographical concept of the Book of Joshua, a unified conquest of
Canaan, by a whole God-fearing People of Israel under the leadership of
Joshua, according to the program laid down in Josh. 1 and summarized in
Josh. 23. What the author of Joshua intends to present as "history", or
more properly, "salvation history", is by and large unhistorical, but many
of the details presented inadvertently, as it were, between the lines,
contain valuable historical information.
     For example, Josh. 14: 6, "...Caleb, the son
of Yefuneh, the Kenizzite...", or Josh. 15:13, "And to Caleb, the son of
Yefuneh, he gave a portion among the Judahites..." - from which we can
learn that Caleb and the Caslebites were not originally Judahites or Israelites
(assuming that the Judahites were originally Israelites - not necessarily
so), but Kenizzites, one of the Canaanite peoples mentioned in Gen. 15:19.
Sincerely,
Jonathan D. Safren
Dept. of Biblical Studies
Beit Berl College
Beit Berl Post Office 44905
Israel