Why god destroyed jericho

He noticed that biblical names are preserved in Arabic with slight distortions. For Example, A-Riha is Jericho. In a single day, he identified 17 biblical cities. Altogether, he identified more than Most are correct. In the late 20th century, the archaeologists Carl Watzinger and Ernst Sellin brought spades to this venture.

They excavated the city of Jericho, and sure enough, they discovered the ruins of the city walls. The world was stunned. The walls of Jericho were discovered! They had proved the Catholics wrong. The Old Testament It is not prefiguration and oracle. It was real history! In Watzinger himself cast some doubt on this discovery, gaining himself no glory.

Then in the s, the British archaeologist John Garstang , the chairman of the Department of Antiquities in the Mandatory Palestine, re-excavated Jericho and declared Watzinger and Selin to have been correct after all: These were the walls almighty God destroyed. Meanwhile, Judith Krause Marquet, a young Jewish woman born in Ilaniya in the Galilee, came back from the Sorbonne with a degree in archaeology. She and her husband Yves Marquet prepared to excavate Ai, the second city conquered by Joshua.

Identifying Ai was no great challenge, based on the Bible, which repeatedly states that the city is in the region of Beth Aven and east of Beth El. Unfortunately, she died of tuberculosis in Subsequently her husband published the results of the dig.

His conclusion: The city of Ai did not exist at the time to which scholars date the period of Joshua, the late 13th century B. Scholars at that time preferred to ignore these finds. Later the Book of Joshua was explained as etiological story, meaning, a story that is told backward to explain an existing fact.

Thusly the author killed two birds with one stone, explaining why there is a mound and that stealing sacred property will be severely punished. The heap of stones in the muddy valley, according to the biblical narrative, marked the burial site of the thief Achan, the horned viper, for stealing from the revered booty, causing the first attempt against Ai to fail.

Etiology is not literal reading and not all agree that e-Tell is the remains of Ai, not that anybody has postulated an alternative location. Jericho experienced a similar process. In the s the ruins were re-excavated by the British archaeologist Dame Kathleen Kenyon. She discovered that the walls Watizenger, Selin and Garstang excavated had been destroyed about 1, years before the postulated time of Joshua.

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Swedish Svenska. Back to Blog. What do we do with violence in the Bible Part 3 by Andy Patton 1 year ago. Table of Contents. Who Were the Canaanites, Really? Many Canaanites Were Spared Most often, even if a city or region was to be taken, its inhabitants were not to be destroyed.

Three Conventions of Ancient Battle Narratives The conquest accounts use extreme battle language to describe what Israel was doing in Canaan. Battle Idioms Ancient cultures had literary idioms—or figurative language that says one thing but means another—just like we do. Conventions of Exaggeration As modern people, we expect a level of journalistic accuracy when it comes to historical accounts, but ancient cultures had a different understanding of things.

Rhetorical Bravado Rhetoric often employs figurative language and conforms to the conventions of a literary tradition. Finding Jesus in the Conquest Though the conquest remains a difficult section of Scripture for many reasons, we hope a clearer picture of the context and the scope of the conquest helps ease some of the tension we all feel when reading these passages. In Christ, God himself suffered violence so that violence might be ended forever.

They will be slaves there and will be oppressed for years. Gen However, I will judge the nation that they serve, and later they will leave there with many possessions. Gen Now as for you, you'll die peacefully, join your ancestors, and be buried at a good old age. Gen Your descendants will return here in the fourth generation, since the iniquity of the Amorites has not yet run its course.

Although one of the oldest cities in the ancient world, Jericho was not continuously occupied up until Israelite times. Whether or not the neolithic people who lived in Jericho were Semitic people related to the the Canaanite people of biblical times is indeterminate.

Some time around BCE Jericho became abandoned. Archaeologists have found a number of layers, showing occupation and abandonment over the subsequent years of history. The pioneer of archaeology in Jericho, Kathleen Kenyon, found remains of the walls which had surrounded Jericho, but no evidence of any walls that had been destroyed during the 15th to 13th centuries BCE, the time ascribed to Joshua.

Another difficulty is that archaeologists find no evidence of a unified military conquest of Canaanite cities in the Late Bronze Age. Lawrence E. Stager says in 'Forging an Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel', published in The Oxford History of the Biblical World , page 97, of the thirty-one cities said to be taken by Joshua and the Israelites, twenty have been plausibly identified with excavation sites; of these, only Bethel and Hazor show discontinuities consitent with invasion at approximately the same time, and it is even debated whether the destruction of Hazor XIII was as late as that of Late Bronze Age Bethel.

This means that the city-dwelling Canaanites were secure and prosperous, although there may have been minor skirmishes between the rulers of neighbouring cities. It also means that biblical stories of walled cities are not supported by the evidence. This date is rather later than the traditional conquest date of approximately BCE, but is suggested by Finkelstein and Silberman because of presumed references to Rammesside pharaohs in the Exodus narratives.

On page 82, Finkelstein and Silberman tell us that Jericho was entirely unoccupied, with no trace of a settlement of any type in the thirteenth century, so there is no answer to a question of who the inhabitants were at this time. At the earlier period of around BCE, there was a small village, but again no walled city. These villagers were probably West Semitic, like the coastal Canaanites. An Israelite conquest in BCE is also untenable since the discovery of the Amarna letters, which show that Palestine was under unchallenged Egyptian rule more than half a century later.

The Cambridge Ancient History , volume II Part 1, supports the archaeological consensus that Jericho was destroyed at the end of the Middle Bronze Age and re-occupied on a small scale in the second half of the 15th or early in the 14th century BCE. The inhabitants of this unfortified village were subsistence farmers. Final destruction of Bronze Age Jericho occurred soon after BCE, consistent with the findings of Finkelstein and Silberman that the village was unoccupied in the thirteenth century, the earliest period consistent with Book of Exodus references to Rammesside pharaohs.

Jericho has a history spanning thousands of years, with waves of occupation and abandonment, possibly by different ethnic groups at different times.

However, the question seeks to establish who the occupants were at the time of the biblical conquest under Joshua. This question is unanswerable, as it is now clear that there was no unified conquest and because the site of Jericho was unwalled and probably unoccupied at the very time of this supposed conquest.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man-and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things.

Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped the creature rather than the Creator Romans The inhabitants of Canaan were neither ignorant nor innocent victims of an angry God. They had been committing terrible sin knowing full well of the true and living God.

Because they rejected Him and His forgiveness God harshly judged them. Since the text and audio content provided by BLB represent a range of evangelical traditions, all of the ideas and principles conveyed in the resource materials are not necessarily affirmed, in total, by this ministry.

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