Historicity
The prevailing scholarly view is that Joshua is not a factual account of historical events.[4][42][43]: 4 The apparent setting of Joshua in the 13th century BC[43] corroborates with the Bronze Age Collapse, which was indeed a time of widespread city-destruction. However, with a few exceptions (Hazor, Lachish), the destroyed cities are not the ones the Bible associates with Joshua, and the ones it does associate with him show little or no sign of even being occupied at the time.[44]: 71–72 The archaeological evidence shows that Jericho and Ai were not occupied in the Near Eastern Late Bronze Age,[45] although recent excavations at Jericho have questioned this.[46]
According to Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, the story of the conquest represents the nationalist propaganda of the 8th-century BC kings of Judah and their claims to the territory of the Kingdom of Israel;[42] incorporated into an early form of Joshua written late in the reign of king Josiah (reigned 640–609 BC). The Book of Joshua was probably revised and completed after the fall of Jerusalem to the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 586 BC, and possibly after the return from the Babylonian exile in 538 BC.[5]: 10–11
In the 1930s Martin Noth made a sweeping criticism of the usefulness of the Book of Joshua for history.[47] Noth was a student of Albrecht Alt, who emphasized form criticism (whose pioneer had been Hermann Gunkel in the 19th century) and the importance of etiology.[47][48] Alt and Noth posited a peaceful movement of the Israelites into various areas of Canaan, in contradiction to the Biblical account.[49] American archaeologist William F. Albright questioned the "tenacity" of etiologies, which were key to Noth's analysis of the campaigns in Joshua.
The site of Et-Tell (identified as Ai) was first excavated by Judith Marquet-Krause.[50] Her investigations in the 1930s showed that the city, an early target for conquest in the putative Joshua account, had existed and been destroyed, but in the 22nd century BC.[47] Some alternate sites for Ai, such as Khirbet el-Maqatir or Khirbet Nisya, have been proposed which would partially resolve the discrepancy in dates, but these sites have not been widely accepted.[51] In 1951, Kathleen Kenyon showed that City IV at Tell es-Sultan (Jericho) was destroyed at the end of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2100–1550 BC), not during the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BC). Kenyon argued that the early Israelite campaign could not be historically corroborated, but rather explained as an etiology of the location and a representation of the Israelite settlement.[52][53] Although this destruction is dated to 16th century by carbon dating, scholars propose that this destruction could be ascribed to either Ahmose I (1549–1524 BC), whose royal signet was found in the necropolis in a slightly later LB I tomb, or Tuthmose III (1479–1425 BC), whose scarab was recovered from a cemetery northwest of Jericho.[54]
More recently, Lorenzo Nigro of the Italian-Palestinian Expedition to Tell es-Sultan has argued that there was a later settlement (City V) at the site during the 14th and 13th centuries BC.[46][55] He states that the expedition detected Late Bronze Age II layers in several parts of the tell, although its upper layers were heavily cut by leveling operations during the Iron Age, which explains the low amount of 13th-century materials.[56] Nigro says that the idea that the Biblical account should have a literal archaeological correspondence is erroneous, and "any attempt to seriously identify something on the ground with biblical personages and their acts" is hazardous.[57]
In 1955, G. Ernest Wright discussed the correlation of archaeological data to the early Israelite campaigns, which he divided into three phases per the Book of Joshua. He pointed to two sets of archaeological findings that "seem to suggest that the biblical account is in general correct regarding the nature of the late thirteenth and twelfth-eleventh centuries in the country" (i.e., "a period of tremendous violence").[58] He gives particular weight to what were then recent digs at Hazor by Yigael Yadin.[58]
Archaeologist Amnon Ben-Tor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who replaced Yadin as the supervisor of excavations at Hazor in 1990, believed that recently unearthed evidence of violent destruction by burning verifies the Biblical account of the city's conquest by the Israelites.[59] In 2012, a team led by Ben-Tor and Sharon Zuckerman discovered a scorched palace from the 13th century BC in whose storerooms they found 3,400-year-old ewers holding burned crops.[59] Sharon Zuckerman did not agree with Ben-Tor's theory, and claimed that the burning was the result of the city's numerous factions opposing each other with excessive force.[60]
In her commentary for the Westminster Bible Companion series, Carolyn Pressler suggested that readers of Joshua should give priority to its theological message ("what passages teach about God") and be aware of what these would have meant to audiences in the 7th and 6th centuries BC.[61]: 5–6 Richard Nelson explained that the needs of the centralised monarchy favoured a single story of origins, combining old traditions of an exodus from Egypt, belief in a national god as "divine warrior," and explanations for ruined cities, social stratification and ethnic groups, and contemporary tribes.[62]: 5
Lester L. Grabbe states that when he was studying for his doctorate (more than three decades before 2007), the "substantial historicity" of the Bible's stories of the patriarchs and the conquest of Canaan was widely accepted, but today it is hard to find a historian who still believes in it.[63]
Ann E. Killebrew writes that, while archaeological findings at Hazor and the Mount Ebal altar and a few literary elements suggest that the Book of Joshua may preserve some real memories of Israel's early history in Canaan, "consensus exists that, whatever its sources (either oral and/or written), the conquest account as narrated is historically problematic and should be treated with caution."[64]
In 2005, Pierre de Miroschedji published an article in the journal La Recherche. He wrote:
In general, no serious archaeologist today believes that the events narrated in the Book of Joshua have any real historical basis. Archaeological surveys, especially in the early 1990s, have revealed that the Israelite culture arose in the hills of the central part of the country, as a continuation of the Canaanite culture of the previous era.[65]
The consensus of historians is that the ancient Israelites did not enter Canaan from outside and did not conquer it in a military campaign.[66][67][68]
“there is little that we can salvage from Joshua’s stories of the rapid, wholesale destruction of Canaanite cities and the annihilation of the local population. It simply did not happen; the archeological evidence is indisputable.” This is the judgment of one of the more conservative historians of ancient Israel. To be sure, there are far more conservative historians who try to defend the historicity of the entire biblical account beginning with Abraham, but their work rests on confessional presuppositions and is an exercise in apologetics rather than historiography. Most biblical scholars have come to terms with the fact that much (not all!) of the biblical narrative is only loosely related to history and cannot be verified.[69]