When Was Jericho Destroyed? What Kenyon's Excavation Layers Reveal

Kathleen Kenyon's work at Jericho in the mid-20th century was groundbreaking, as she meticulously excavated the site and employed innovative stratigraphic methods. Her findings led her to date the destruction of Jericho to around 1550 BC, at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, and to conclude that no walled city stood there when Israel arrived. Kenyon's redating of the destruction layers, previously thought to correspond with the biblical conquest, implied that Jericho had fallen more than a century before Joshua's arrival, challenging earlier readings of the archaeological evidence for the conquest.

However, this perspective was later contested by Bryant Wood, who reexamined the pottery and stratigraphic evidence from the site. Wood's analysis, published in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1990, argued for a destruction date closer to 1400 BC, which aligns with a 15th-century Exodus timeline.

The Jericho stratigraphy preserves evidence that both supports and complicates the conquest narrative. Kenyon's excavation documented a destruction layer with collapsed mudbrick walls, burned remains, and stores of carbonized grain: details consistent with the account of a city burned after a seven-day siege (Joshua 6:15, 24) in the season of harvest (Joshua 3:15). Wood argued that Kenyon's sample, from two small excavation squares in a poor quarter of the city, was too limited to support her date. Whether the collapsed walls and burned grain belong to the 16th or 15th century BC turns on pottery typology and on radiocarbon dating: a 1995 study of the burned grain placed the destruction in the late 17th or 16th century BC, while Wood's reading of the pottery points to about 1400 BC.