Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Niels Peter Lemche <npl AT teol.ku.dk>]

> Shalom to all!
> 
> Here and there we hear (most recently on this list from Prof. Lemche) the
> common opinions concerning the conquest of Ai in Josh. 7-8:
> 
> 1.  Ai is located at a-Tell.
> 2.  a-Tell was abandoned many years before Joshua's supposed conquest.
> 3.  Therefore, the story in Joshua is fictional.
> 
> However, there is at least one great difference between a-Tell and the Ai
> narrative that puts this theory in doubt: the size of Ai according to
> Joshua.  Both in chap. 7, and in chap. 9, Ai is referred to as a small
> city, smaller than Gibeon or Jericho.  However, a-Tell is one of the
> largest tells in Israel.  So we cannot say that a later writer used the
> conquest story to explain the ancient ruin.
> 
        [Niels Peter Lemche]  
        How??? The Israelite force that is beaten off counts 30.000 men
(Josh 8:3), the killing of people in Ai count 12.000 persons (Josh 8:25). I
will say that this counterargument has little to do with the narrative, some
may say eisegesis and not exegesis. And there is nothing in Josh 9 about the
size of Gibeon.


> This leaves two possibilities:
> 
> 1.  Ai is not a-Tell.  I'm not familiar with all the scholarly work
> written
> on the subject, but among the scholars living here (north of Jerusalem,
> not
> far from a-Tell), there are a few opinions where Ai should be (each
> scholar
> thinks it's near the town he lives in!  :-) ), the best-known being Rabbi
> Yoel Bin-Nun's location of Ai at Khirbet Marjameh.  Unlike the a-Tell
> area,
> there is enough room there to hold a very large army as the one described
> in Joshua.
> 
        [Niels Peter Lemche]  
        [Niels Peter Lemche]  The two expeditions from the 1930s and the
1960s by Margit-Krause (or whatever her naame was) and Joseph Callaway  set
out to find biblical Ai, and surprise, it was not there. Same with Jericho,
Sellin and Watzinger at the beginning of the 20th century, Garstang in the
1930s, Kenyon in the 1950s, and whatever they did, they couln'ty find it at
the time it was supposed to be there.

        By the way, this discussion is also bypasing the modern discussion
about restructuring the transmission from the LB to the EI period. It is
simply way away from what is going on in scholarly circles.

> 2.  Ai was a small city built on the ruins of a-Tell.  This would explain
> the name of Ai (meaning "ruins"), the size of the city in Joshua, and the
> lack of evidence of any settlement at the time of conquest (much of the
> Tell has not been excavated).  I was told this was the opinion of I.M.
> Grintz, although I have not read his article.
> 
        [Niels Peter Lemche]  
        There was, as I said a small settlement around 1200. Same picture as
in so many other places in the area at this time (cf. Finkelstein's
surveys). It soon disappeared again with the concentration of these
scattered settlements into bigger ones towards the middle of the EI I
period.

        The only thing that would probably be needed is to check
Finkelstein's Samaria survey to see whether he has been around the tell
proposed as Ai during this exchange.

        NPL


> This does not, of course, prove the accuracy or early dating of the
> conquest narratives.  However, I believe I have shown that the opposite
> cannot be proven from the archaeological finds at a-Tell.
> 
> Kol Tuv,
> Baruch Alster
> Kochav Ya`akov, Israel
> 
> 
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