Story

Joshua and the Conquest

c. 1200 BCE

Biblical Narrative

After the walls of Jericho came down, Joshua did not rest. The Book of Joshua frames the conquest in two great campaigns and a long settlement. First the central thrust: Jericho fallen, then the disaster at Ai because of Achan's hidden plunder, then Ai taken on the second attempt by ambush and the king of Ai hung on a tree until evening. Then the Gibeonite ruse — a delegation in worn-out sandals and moldy bread, claiming to come from a far country — and Joshua's covenant with them, sworn before he checked their story.

When the southern kings — Adoni-zedek of Jerusalem, Hoham of Hebron, Piram of Jarmuth, Japhia of Lachish, Debir of Eglon — heard that Gibeon had made peace with Israel, they marched up against Gibeon. Joshua came up from Gilgal all night, fell upon them at dawn, and the Lord cast great stones from heaven upon them at the descent of Beth-horon. On that day Joshua spoke to the Lord and said in the sight of Israel: Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Aijalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the Book of Yashar? The sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.

The northern campaign followed at the waters of Merom, where Yavin king of Hazor had assembled a coalition of horses and chariots like the sand on the seashore. Joshua hamstrung the horses and burned the chariots; Hazor itself, the head of all those kingdoms, he burned with fire. Joshua took the whole land, the hill country, the Negev, the Shephelah, the slopes — though the Book is honest enough to add: there remained yet very much land to be possessed. The Anakim were cut off from the highlands but remained at Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod.

When Joshua was old and stricken in years, he gathered the tribes to Shechem and renewed the covenant beneath the great stone under the oak. Choose you this day whom ye will serve, he said, but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. The people answered: God forbid that we should forsake the Lord. Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God, took a great stone and set it up under the oak, and said: Behold, this stone shall be a witness, for it hath heard all the words of the Lord. Then Joshua died, a hundred and ten years old, and was buried at Timnath-serah in the hill country of Ephraim.

Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.Joshua 10:12

Archaeology · History · Genetics

No biblical narrative has been so worked over by archaeology as the conquest. The classical models, formulated in the mid-twentieth century, are three. William Foxwell Albright's military-conquest model defended a literal reading: a Late Bronze Age destruction horizon at sites such as Hazor, Lachish, and Bethel was, on Albright's reading, the archaeological footprint of Joshua's campaigns around 1230 BCE. Albrecht Alt's peaceful-infiltration model proposed instead a gradual settlement of pastoralists from the eastern steppe into the highlands. George Mendenhall and Norman Gottwald's peasant-revolt model recast the conquest as an internal Canaanite uprising — disenfranchised peasants throwing off the yoke of the lowland city-states.

The archaeological record refuses to confirm any of the three cleanly. Hazor's monumental Stratum XIII was indeed destroyed by fire late in the 13th century BCE; Yigael Yadin and, more recently, Amnon Ben-Tor have argued that the destruction is most plausibly attributed to incoming Israelites, on the grounds that no other party had motive to topple Hazor's Canaanite cultic statues with their faces deliberately mutilated. Lachish Level VII fell c. 1150 BCE — too late for an Albright-style conquest. Jericho and Ai, by contrast, were essentially unoccupied at the time the Bible places their destruction; this, more than any other datum, was the hammer that broke the conquest model.

Israel Finkelstein's highland survey (The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement, 1988) established the picture that now dominates: a wave of small unwalled villages — over 250 of them — appearing in the central hill country from Galilee to the Negev after 1200 BCE, on previously unoccupied land, with a distinctive material culture (four-room houses, collared-rim jars, virtually no pig bones). Whether these settlers were ex-Canaanite peasants, ex-pastoralists, ex-mercenaries, or some mixture, they were the demographic base of historical Israel. The Merneptah Stele of c. 1208 BCE, which names Israel as a people in Canaan, places this emergence on the historical map.

What the Book of Joshua remembers, then, is probably not a single twenty-year campaign but a much longer and more layered process: a slow turnover in which highland villages grew into a federation, the lowland Canaanite cities decayed under Sea Peoples pressure and Egyptian withdrawal, and a few sites — Hazor preeminent — were violently destroyed by parties whose identity is still argued. The literary unity of the Book of Joshua is the achievement of later editors, probably Deuteronomistic, who shaped older campaign-traditions into a single national epic of conquest under a single charismatic leader.

The conquest as the Bible tells it is a literary and theological construction; the emergence of Israel in the highlands is an archaeological fact. The relation between the two is the central problem of Iron Age I biblical history.Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (2001), paraphrased