Word: jericho
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...crisp autumn day last year Palestinian negotiators returned home from the opening of Middle East peace talks in Madrid to a rousing welcome from their once skeptical constituents. Thousands of Palestinians lined the streets in the West Bank city of Jericho, waving olive branches and whooping with joy. It seemed that finally the Palestinian masses had embraced the idea of bargaining -- instead of fighting -- for their future...
...most dramatic events chronicled in the Old Testament, but for generations scholars have debated whether the Israelites' assault on Jericho was fact or myth. Over the past three decades, the consensus has gone against the biblical version. The late British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon established in the 1950s that while the ancient city was indeed destroyed, it happened around 1550 B.C., some 150 years before Joshua could have shown...
Kenyon's dating of Jericho's destruction was based largely on the fact that she failed to find a type of decorative pottery, imported from Cyprus, that was popular in the region around 1400 B.C. Its absence, she reasoned, meant that the city had long since become uninhabited. But Wood, an ancient-pottery expert now at the University of Toronto, argues that Kenyon's excavations were made in a poorer part of the city, where the expensive imported pottery would have been absent in any case. And he says that other pottery, dug up in Jericho in the 1930s...
Except for the disputed dating, Kenyon's discoveries at Jericho were largely consistent with the Bible story. For one thing, she found that the city's walls had fallen in a way suggestive of sudden collapse. Many scholars think the destruction was caused by an earthquake, which could also account for a temporary damming of the Jordan River described in the Bible. Moreover, Kenyon found bushels of grain on the site. That is consistent with the Bible's assertions that Jericho was conquered quickly. If the city had capitulated after a long siege, the grain would have been used...
...thick layer of soot at the site, which according to radioactive carbon-14 dating was laid down about 1400 B.C., supports the biblical idea that the city was burned, not simply conquered. Finally, Egyptian amulets found in Jericho graves can be dated to around 1400 B.C. as well. Says Wood: "It looks to me as though the biblical stories are correct...