Ai

Ai was a town in the hill country east of Bethel, near Beth-aven (Genesis 12:8; Joshua 7:2). Its Hebrew name always carries the definite article and is given as "the heap or the ruin". It was the next town Joshua attacked after Jericho (Joshua 7:2; 8:1-2). Its site is debated between two candidates, et-Tell and Khirbet el-Maqatir. The conquest of Canaan dates from about 1406 BC (some date it about 1250 BC).

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Abram's altar

Abram pitched his tent in the hill country with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east, built an altar there and called on the name of the LORD (Genesis 12:8). Coming back from the Negev, he returned to the altar between Bethel and Ai and called on the LORD there again (Genesis 13:3-4).

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The defeat and the fall of Ai

Joshua sent men up from Jericho to spy out Ai, and about three thousand men who went up fled before its men, who struck down about thirty-six of them (Joshua 7:2-5). The defeat followed the taking of things devoted to destruction by Achan, who was stoned in the Valley of Achor (Joshua 7:1, 24-26). The LORD then told Joshua to treat Ai and its king as he had treated Jericho and its king in the fall of Jericho, except that Israel could keep the plunder and livestock (Joshua 8:1-2). In the second assault, recounted in the conquest of Ai, Joshua set an ambush between Bethel and Ai, west of the city, and drew the men of Ai out, with the men of Bethel joining the pursuit; the ambush then entered the city and set it on fire (Joshua 8:9, 14-19). Joshua burned Ai and made it a permanent heap of ruins, "a desolation to this day"; twelve thousand men and women fell, and the king of Ai was hung on a tree, with a large pile of rocks raised over his body (Joshua 8:25, 28-29).

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Ai in the lists and later Scripture

The king of Ai, "which is near Bethel", is listed next after the king of Jericho (Joshua 12:9), and Gibeon was a city "larger than Ai" (Joshua 10:2). The men of Bethel and Ai are numbered at 223 in Ezra's list and 123 in Nehemiah's (Ezra 2:28; Nehemiah 7:32). One older reference work reads the "Aiath" of Isaiah 10:28 as Ai, on the Assyrian army's road toward Jerusalem. A town of the same name in Ammon is a different place.

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Et-Tell

Most scholars identify Ai with et-Tell, a site about 2 miles (3 km) from the village of Beitin. The archaeologist Judith Marquet-Krause excavated it from 1933 to 1935 with funding from Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and Joseph Callaway directed a series of excavations there from 1964. The excavations revealed four strata from the Early Bronze Age (3500-2000 BC), when a prosperous city flourished there, and two from an Iron Age I village. Marquet-Krause found no occupation of the site in the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1550 BC) or the Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 BC), and later descriptions of the excavations report the same gap. The next settlement was a village of the Iron Age I period, from about 1200 BC. Callaway counted the village at Ai among the hundreds founded on hilltops and supported by farming. John Bimson, writing in 1981 on the date of the Exodus and conquest, judged that the long-held identification of Ai with et-Tell "may be erroneous" and that the absence of Middle Bronze Age remains leaves the difficulty unresolved even on the theory his own book offers.

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Khirbet el-Maqatir

Bryant Wood, who directed the excavation of Khirbet el-Maqatir for the Associates for Biblical Research, holds that it is the Ai of Joshua 7. His excavations there began in 1995 and, as Wood reports them, uncovered a fortress of the Late Bronze I period (1550-1400 BC) destroyed by fire. Wood also reads the archaeological data from the site as support for the 1406 BC date of the conquest.