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At the crest of the embankment was a similar mudbrick wall whose base was roughly 46 ft above the ground level outside the retaining wall. On top of that was a mudbrick wall 6 ft thick and about 20–26 ft high (Sellin and Watzinger 1973: 58). The retaining wall was some 12–15 ft high. The mound, or “tell,” of Jericho was surrounded by a great earthen rampart, or embankment, with a stone retaining wall at its base. An in-depth analysis of the evidence, however, reveals that the destruction took place at the end of the 15th century BC (end of the Late Bronze I period), exactly when the Bible says the Conquest occurred (Wood 1990). She concluded that the Bronze Age city of Jericho was destroyed about 1550 BC by the Egyptians. Unfortunately, she misdated her finds, resulting in what seemed to be a discrepancy between the discoveries of archaeology and the Bible. The meticulous work of Kenyon showed that Jericho was indeed heavily fortified and that it had been burned by fire. The Jericho of Joshua’s time could not be found-it was lost! Through our research, however, we have found the lost city of Jericho, the Jericho attacked by the Israelites.īefore the Israelites entered the promised land Moses told them, “You are now about to cross the Jordan to go in and dispossess nations greater and stronger than you, with large cities that have walls up to the sky” (Dt 9:1). he would not have been able to capture a great walled city of Jericho, because there was no city of Jericho in these periods… the huge ruins of the Hyksos city gave rise to the folktale attached to the hero Joshua (1965: 190, 200).Īccording to Kenyon’s dating, there was no city for the Israelites to conquer at the end of the 15th century BC, the Biblical date for the event. Miss Kenyon’s work has presented scholars with the hard fact that if Joshua was active with the incoming Israelites either c. Franken, a member of the Jericho excavation staff, stated,

Kenyon concluded, with reference to the military conquest theory and the L B walls, that there was no archaeological data to support the thesis that the town had been surrounded by a wall at the end of LB I (ca. Holland, who was editor and co-author of Kenyon’s excavation reports, summarized the apparent results as follows:

It is a sad fact that of the town walls of the Late Bronze Age, within which period the attack by the Israelites must fall by any dating, not a trace remains.…The excavation of Jericho, therefore, has thrown no light on the walls of Jericho of which the destruction is so vividly described in the Book of Joshua (Kenyon 1957: 261–62).