This morning in my class we talked about the fall of the Walls of Jericho. Since Jericho has been on my mind today I decided to share a few more pictures from my visit to the tell in 2012. I decided to focus on the trenches from the Kenyon expedition.

Here is a view looking out through the west trench. Kathleen Kenyon excavated three trenches at Tell es-Sultan (Jericho) from 1952 to 1958.

This trench was the main trench and cut through the many layers of the city. The stratigraphy of the trench does show fallen walls, but Kenyon dated the destruction of the city to 1550 BC which is about 150 years before Joshua.

However a reexamination of the results from early excavations (including the Kenyon excavations) show that Jericho was indeed occupied at the time of Joshua.

At the eastern end of the trench is a tower that is know as the Neolithic Tower. Kenyon dated the tower to 8,000 BC. The tower was buried by the time of Joshua, but would have been an impressive tower at the time of construction as it was about 25 feet tall.

This trench is the south trench and is seen here from ground level. The stone wall in the foreground is the revetment wall that circled the city. The outer wall of the city was made of mud bricks and was built upon this earlier revetment wall. This is the wall that fell during the conquest of Jericho by Joshua.

I can imagine the amount of work that was done to excavate this trench since I have now been on an archaeological dig. However, most of the manual labor was done by local workers instead of volunteers as it was in our case.

I do not have pictures of the north trench as we did not go to the far end of the tell. Perhaps someday I will go back and get more pictures :-).

Next week in class we will be talking about the Sin of Achan. Do you know what his sin was?

Steven