Dead Men Tell Tales

by Harry Rimmer

Most of us can remember how recently it was the fashion for the opponents of the Bible to laugh at those who believed in the historicity of Joshua’s strange conquest of the Canaanite city of Jericho. The collapse of the walls of that ancient city has long been a source of mystery to the scientific student, and of hilarity to the unbeliever. The faith of the intelligent is vindicated, however, and the laughter of the unbeliever is stilled, by the exhaustive work that archeology has done in the vicinity of Jericho.

The site has been explored a number of times, but the most comprehensive and conclusive work was done by the 1933 expedition that was headed by Dr. Garstang. The walls of Jericho were mighty, and as long as they stood the city was impregnable to the armed forces of antiquity. The unusual structure of Jericho’s walls was manifested when they were uncovered from the dirt and debris of centuries. The word “walls” is properly given in its plural form as there were outer and inner walls that entirely encircled the city. There was, first of all, surrounding the city completely, an outer wall, which seemed to have been held up as much by faith as by gravity!

Ever since we had the first opportunity of personally examining the geology of Jericho and noting the insecure structure upon which those walls were builded, our own private wonder has not been that the walls fell down; rather we have been bewildered by speculating as to what in the name of physics ever held them up! Perhaps it was the binding of the buildings that anchored the outer wall to the inner wall, and made a sort of tripod structure of the whole, which accounted for this phenomenon. Some fourteen feet back from the outer wall and roughly paralleling the convolutions of the former, there was an inner wall of the same height as the outer one. Across these two walls great beams had been laid, and dwellings constructed upon this unique foundation. The outer wall was pierced by the one gate, in exact accordance with the description in the Book of Joshua.

There is no natural explanation to account for the unique evidence of the collapse of these walls. They were not undermined by military engineers, for they all seem to have collapsed around the entire circumference of the city at one and the same time. They were not shaken down by an earthquake. This would have resulted in a haphazard piling of the wall material in a number of different directions. It seems as though a mighty blast had been set off in the center of the city, thrusting the walls outward, in what might roughly be described as a circle. This collapse of the walls naturally resulted in the wrecking of the houses builded thereon. When the preliminary clearance had been made and the excavators came down to these great ruins, every demand of the Book of Joshua was satisfactorily met by the conditions there uncovered.

In the remnants of the houses found in Jericho there was overwhelming evidence of a systematic destruction by fires that were set to sweep the entire ruin. Among the most interesting and significant of the charred evidences were the great stores of burned grain which showed that even the food of Jericho had been dedicated to the fire, as Joshua had commanded.

When the discoveries of Jericho were first publicized, Dr. Garstang could find only one apparent contradiction between the record of Joshua and the evidences in the city. That was in the time factor, or chronology, that was involved. In the cemetery of Jericho upon its excavation, there were found two seals of the Pharaoh Amenhetep the Third. Since this monarch reigned probably at least a hundred years after the time of Joshua, it was difficult to reconcile the apparent discrepancy. The apparent difficulty, however, dissolves when we consider the possibility of later intrusion.

Before the excavations at Jericho could begin, it was necessary for the workers to clear away the remains of a fortress of Ramses, the monarch who headed the nineteenth dynasty, which in turn followed that of the dynasty of Amenhetep the Third. Since this site had been temporarily used by the Egyptians two hundred years after its destruction, it is highly probable that it might also have been temporarily visited by them the century immediately following its destruction. If the presence of two seals of Amenhetep are to be taken as a date factor in view of the fact that burials at that site were by intrusion, then a great case could be made for a later date by the ruined fortress of Ramses.

The pharaoh who ruled in the day when Joshua led the conquest of Canaan was most probably Tuthmosis the Third, who reigned contemporarily with the Queen Hatshepsut until he was sufficiently entrenched to overthrow her dominion. This queen, as all the evidence most clearly suggests, was most probably the one who drew Moses out of the Nile. The contemporary and collateral evidence is fairly conclusive, so that this fact is generally accepted. Relegating the one anomalous discovery, then, to the probability of intrusion, we find that Jericho, perhaps more than any other site in antiquity, has vindicated the record of the Old Testament text.

In this very connection, it is interesting to note how the queen Hatshepsut came into the record, and first interested the student of apologetics. The eminent archeologist, Flinders Petrie, found a tablet on the slope of Mt. Sinai which was written in an archaic script that baffled every attempt to decipher its mystery for nearly thirty years. But at long last Professor Hubert Grimme, who held the chair of Semitic languages at the University of Munster, made out two words. One of these was the ancient Hebrew name for God, which in this form of writing appeared as “JAHUA.” The other word that Dr. Grimme succeeded in reading was “HATSHEPSUT,” who was known from her monuments and obelisk.

With this key, the table was quickly deciphered, and was ascribed to Moses. The text as it appeared follows: