Research-Theology, History, Science

The Recent Discoveries at Jericho

SIEGFRIED H. HORN Professor of Archeology and History of Antiquity, S.D.A. Theological Seminary

The excavations of Jericho that have recently been resumed are not yet completed and will be continued for several more seasons, but the discoveries made thus far have changed our understanding of Jericho's history so much that a discussion of these recent findings for the readers of THE MINISTRY is necessary. Recent articles describing the latest (1953) expedition to Jericho have antiquated much that was written previously on that city, including my discussion of the fall of Jericho made at the Bible Conference in September, 1952, and then published in Our Firm Foundation, volume 1, pages 73-75. That statement was based on all published material available at that time, but is now totally antiquated.

I visited Jericho twice in November, 1953, during my stay in the Near East, once spending the greater part of a day on the mound. With the help of the published reports, pictures, and drawings, I made a careful study of the archeological remains of ancient Jericho that have come to light in the recent excavations. In addition to this work on the mound itself, I had the opportunity of meeting in London Dr. Kathleen M. Kenyon, the director of the Jericho expedition. She was very helpful in answering questions and clearing up a number of problems that were still in my mind. How ever, the following discussion of the excavation results is based only on the published reports and not on confidential information. Nevertheless, this article profits from the firsthand acquaintance with the archeological evidence studied at Jericho and the discussion with the expedition's director.

Modern Jericho is a flourishing city in the lower Jordan valley. At its northern edge lies Tell es-Sultdn, which has been pointed out for centuries as the site of Old Testament Jericho. In 1868 Charles Warren made some preliminary explorations that did not materially increase our knowledge of Jericho's ancient history.¹ From 1907 to 1909 Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger excavated parts of the mound, but found its ruins confusing and disturbed by later building activities and erosion. Owing to the fact that Palestinian archeology was still in its in fancy, the final conclusions of this work, published in a large volume,² were very unsatisfactory, and later had to be revised by the excavators when explorations carried out on other sites showed that their interpretations of certain evidence could not be maintained.

Because of this unsatisfactory state of affairs, Prof. John Garstang began a new excavation in 1930, working on the ancient mound for six seasons until 1936.3 Garstang had been an old hand in the science of archeology. He had been working for many years in Egypt and Turkey before he was appointed director of the Department of Antiquities of Palestine after the first world war. When Garstang began his excavations he found the ruins of the ancient mound to be again very confusing. However, the fortunate discovery of the ancient city's cemetery enabled him to clear up a number of obscure problems. The contents of the tombs, including a number of Egyptian seals, called scarabs, proved that the city's population had existed until the Late Bronze Age (1600-1200 B.C.).³ Since no later scarabs were found than those of Amenhotep III (1412-1375 B.C.), he concluded that the city's existence had ceased during that king's reign.

Comparing the pottery of these datable tombs with that found on the mound, and studying the remains of the city's ancient walls, he came to the conclusion that Jericho had experienced four main periods. In each of these periods the city had possessed defensive walls that in turn had been destroyed. The first and second cities, represented by the lowest city walls found, were explained by him to have existed in the Early Bronze Age, and he dated them from 3000-2000 B.C. The walls of the third city, covering a much larger area, were dated by Garstang from 1900-1600 B.C. The fourth city was reduced to the size of the first two cities of the Early Bronze Age, according to the excavator.

The ruins of its walls were found by him as overlaying the Early Bronze Age walls and were explained to be those of the Late Bronze Age city. They were dated by him to have existed from about 1575 to about 1400 B.C. Since these walls of his fourth city showed that they had been destroyed by an earthquake, Garstang concluded that their destruction was the one described in Joshua 6.⁵ These findings seemed to corroborate the Bible story so well that students of the Bible were delighted to see how the spade of the excavator apparently demonstrated the correctness of a Bible story that every Christian knew since childhood. It is only fair to say that the accuracy and reliability of Garstang's excavation reports have never been challenged by any archeologist. His declaration that the double city wall of his fourth city belonged to the Late Bronze Age remained equally unchallenged until the excavations of Dr. Kenyon began. It was only his date for the fall of his fourth city that was not uniformly accepted. He had given 1400-1385 B.C. as the date of the city's fall, whereas Prof. W. F. Albright dated it from 1375-1325, and Pere H. Vincent as having occurred at 1250 B.C. or shortly 'thereafter.⁶

Findings of Recent Excavations

One of the reasons for resuming the excavations at Jericho was this divergence of opinion among scholars about the fall of the fourth city. The Palestine Exploration Fund and the American Schools of Oriental Research, which joined forces in this new enterprise, were fortunate in securing as director one of the most able field archeologists of this time.

This expedition has so far completed two seasons in the winters of 1952 and 1953, and preliminary reports have been published.⁷ The third campaign began in January, 1954. Dr. Kenyon and her staff have opened some of Gar stang's old digs and also cut a wide new trench through the western half of the mound. Carefully observing all archeological evidence, they found corroboration for the conclusions of Garstang with regard to the first three cities, but discovered that the walls of Garstang's fourth city belonged to the Early Bronze Age, and not to the Late Bronze Age, as Garstang had thought.⁸ Hence it was found that the city walls, which, according to the evidence Garstang discovered, had been destroyed by an earth quake, and which had been taken by students of the Bible to represent those that fell in Jericho's time, were actually destroyed several centuries earlier. During the new excavations nothing of the later city's remains has been found. The tombs, however, have proved that Jericho existed until the 18th Dynasty, as Garstang correctly concluded. The upper levels of the mound have apparently been destroyed so thoroughly and washed down from the top of the mound in such a way that nothing seems to have remained there that is later than about 1600 B.C. It is un certain whether archeological material on that mound will be found in the future that will be of any help in explaining the story about the fall of Jericho as given in the book of Joshua, although the possibility exists that further explorations, which are planned for several more seasons, may eventually bring to light some of the ruins of the later city. That the mound had possessed a population until the fourteenth century is shown by the con tents of the tombs.

The reader may ask why I still adhered to Professor Garstang's explanation as late as 1953, when volume 1 of Our Firm Foundation and the first printings of volume 1 of the Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary appeared,⁹ al though results of the first season of the new expedition under Miss Kenyon's direction had been published. The fact is that those published reports gave no indication that the walls of Garstang's fourth city had been erroneously dated. Miss Kenyon stated very cautiously that in the sections excavated by her no traces had been found of the Late Bronze Age city, which was the one destroyed by Joshua.¹⁰ Remarks to that effect were included in my published statement.11 It was only in November, 1953, during my stay in Jerusalem and my study of the Jericho material, that I became aware of the real results of the recent excavations, as they have since then been published, especially by Profes sor Tushingham, as far as the fourth city of Garstang is concerned.

While it has to be admitted, therefore, that the excavations failed to shed any light on the history of the Jericho of Joshua's time, in which the student of the Bible is most interested, discoveries of a sensational nature were made in the earliest levels of that old city. These have been described in the preliminary reports mentioned in footnote 7, and need no discussion in this article, which has only the purpose of rectifying previous statements made by this writer and warning our ministers not to use any longer statements about Jericho that were published before the excavation reports of 1953 be came available.

Caution Regarding Excavators' Earliest Dates

However, one word of explanation may be added concerning the early B.C. dates given by the excavators for the earliest levels that came to light in the ruins of Jericho. There is no question that the levels underlying the remains of Jericho of the second millennium are much older, but how old they are is guesswork. This was candidly admitted by the excavators in one of their most recent articles, in which they stated: "How early this was in years is guesswork; an estimate might be about 5000 B.C." ¹² Hence, any dates given for the earliest levels of Jericho do not need to disturb anyone who does not believe that such early dates are possible.

The well-known D. H. K. Amiran, professor of the Hebrew University at Jerusalem, has actually pointed out that even in modern times one occupation level after another may be formed in quick succession in Palestine. From his observations he sounds the following important warning: "There is one definite lesson for archaeology from recent history: the disintegration of villages or the formation of a tell [mound created by ruins of an ancient city] is by no means a slow and gradual process taking generations to become effective. Quite the contrary: it is a quick process taking no more than a few years." ¹³ No one needs, therefore, to be disturbed in reading that Jericho had been a walled city and produced sculptured heads "7000 years ago." Such dating is, in the words of the excavators, merely "guesswork."

Isaiah 65:20

OTTO H. CHRISTENSEN Department of Biblical Languages, Emmanuel Missionary College

Some years ago there came into my possession a supposed French translation of Isaiah 65:20, which, it was claimed, clarified this difficult text, which even in our oldest Hebrew manuscripts is unintelligible. At that time I did not question the authority of such a translation (rather it should be called an interpretation). Since then I have heard of other sup posed translations of this text, and to Seventh-day Adventist ministers, who are supposed to be men of the Book, and who should know whereof they speak, a word of caution regarding such supposed translations is not out of place. No matter into what language a verse of Scripture is translated, it comes from the same He brew, Aramaic, or Greek source. And any translation differing from that source would be merely a matter of personal interpretation, unless an earlier superior source can be made available.

The Hebrew forms the source for all translations from the Old Testament, because that is the language in which it was written, with the exception of certain portions in the Aramaic. Sometimes translations older than the Hebrew source as now available may be of great value if investigated and used with great care. In this particular verse of Scripture the Hebrew, as well as the four available editions of the Syriac Peshitta, which originated probably in the second century A.D., according to the best scholarly information, but which went through a number of revisions, offers no help. One might have hoped that the amazing discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, which included a complete copy of the book of Isaiah, would have given us some light on this text. According to the best scholars it was written around 100 B.C. and thus antedates the earliest Hebrew manuscript of the Old Testament by about 1,000 years. But by comparison it was found that it is identical with our Hebrew printed text of which our English Old Testament is a translation. Thus any translation based on these and differing from our present English text, be it ever so enlightening, is only an interpretation. As ministers, we should be aware of this.

The Syro-Hexapla

There is, however, some light on this text from the Syro-Hexapla, which stems from a very early Hebrew source. The Syro-Hexapla is a faithful translation into Syriac by Bishop Paul of Telia in Mesopotamia, A.D. 617-618, of Origen's 5th column in his Hexapla. Bishop Paul also copied with great care Origen's critical symbols and notes. A large part of Bishop Paul's work, containing the prophets and most of the Hagiographa, and written in the 8th century A.D., is now found in the Ambrosian library at Milan, Italy. It was photolithographed by Ceriani in 1874 and a copy is available for scholars in the University of Chicago library.

Origen's original manuscript was used by Bishop Paul in Caesarea, where it had been kept and where Jerome consulted it in connection with his production of the Latin Vulgate. It was probably destroyed by the Saracens in the early seventh century, shortly after Bishop Paul's translation of Origen's 5th column into Syriac. Origen, according to Ira Maurice Price, was the "greatest Biblical scholar of the early centuries." The Ancestry of Our English Bible (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1949), p. 74. Origen found in existence and use in his day, besides the Old Testament in Hebrew, the LXX and the three Greek versions by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotian. In his research he complained that every manuscript contained a different text from the others; so he conceived the idea of comparing these and producing therefrom the best possible manuscript or ver sion. In doing this he planned the Hexapla six columns as follows: (1) the Hebrew text; (2) a transliteration of the Hebrew by Greek letters; (3) Aquila's version; (4) Symmachus' version; (5) the LXX as revised by himself; (6) Theodotian's version.

This work took him twenty-eight years. His purpose in his own column was not to restore the original text of the LXX, but to make it correctly and adequately represent the Hebrew original. The 5th column, his revision, was the most important of the six. In his revision, where manuscripts differed, he chose the best translation that he could obtain of the original He brew. Where words in the Hebrew were not represented in the LXX he inserted by asterisk such translation as was found in one of the other three versions, preferably from Theodotian. Where a passage was found in the LXX with no equivalent in the Hebrew he marked it by an obelus. Thus he used as a basis for his column the Hebrew of his day, that is, the Hebrew text of the first half of the third century. At the present time our chief source for the text of Origen's 5th column of his Hexapla is the Syro-Hexapla, as the original Origen's Hexapla has long since perished, and only portions have been discovered. This extant copy of the Syro-Hexapla is only about 150 years from its original, and so reduces very materially any possibility of error in copying. Inasmuch as Bishop Paul of Telia in A.D. 617-618 used Origen's original manuscript, which was still extant in Caesarea at that time, it brings us back to a Hebrew source used by Origen some time not later than A.D. 240, as the Hexapla was completed in that year.

"Shall Be" Instead of "Shall Die"

Now, as to the text of Isaiah 65:20, the difficulty is entirely eliminated if "shall be" is substituted for "shall die" in the first part of the last half of the verse, and "the one who is a hundred years old" is made the subject which is perfectly permissible in the Semitic language. That is exactly what the Syro-Hexapla does, and evidently is what was found in Origen's column of his Hexapla.

Thus we have in the Syro-Hexapla nehewah (Hebrew yiheweh), "shall be," in place of nemtith "shall die" (He brew yamuth), and in the last clause of the verse we have the additional word demareth (Hebrew 'asher meth), "who dies," which has been omitted in other texts, indicating a con fusing by a copyist of the location of this word "die."

Evidently Origen had either an ancient manuscript of the Hebrew or of the LXX, or a copy of an ancient manuscript which had not made this error. This slip in copying would have been very easy in the ancient Hebrew before the use of the square character, as may be observed by the form of the letters in the Isaiah Dead Sea scroll. By a slight carelessness in writing, "shall be" can very easily be mistaken for "shall die." This having been done, the next step would be to omit "who dies" in the last column, as having already been written and to avoid an antithesis. As a result the text was left with a confused thought. The correcting of these as they appear in the Syro-Hexapla makes the verse agree in good sense with the context and clarifies the meaning. Translated from the Syro-Hexapla literally, the verse reads: "Nor shall be there the one who dies in her youth nor the elder who will not fulfill his days; for a son of one hundred years shall be a child, but the sinner who dies, a son of one hundred years, shall be ac cursed."

With this our present LXX agrees in the main, and one might have hoped that the Isaiah manuscript of the Dead Sea Scrolls, dated now by most scholars as c. 100 B.C., would have verified this reading. However, the original LXX Old Testament was translated sometime be tween 285 B.C. and 100 B.C., and Isaiah was undoubtedly not the last book to be translated. We would no doubt be safe in setting c. 200 B.C. as a probable date for the translation of Isaiah into the Greek. At any rate it was apt to have been translated from a text of some earlier date than the Isaiah manuscript of the Dead Sea Scrolls. We know, further, that Origen had access to the LXX of his day as well as to some early Hebrew manuscripts. If the Hexaplar reading did not appear in the Hebrew text to which he had access, it must have been the reading of the LXX manuscript or manuscripts available to him, whose source was evidently older than the text of the Dead Sea scroll or from a different family of manuscripts whose origin antedated the scribal error by which this verse became unintelligible. Thus the above Syro-Hexaplar reading, translated directly from Origen's column of his Hexapla, may have a more ancient authority than the reading in the Isaiah scroll, and upon this basis this reading would be worth considering. At least it has some support from ancient manuscripts, and the fact that it agrees in good sense with the context is of great weight in its favor and in favor of these conclusions.