time.[91] In addition, since the Israelites remained semi-nomadic residents in Canaan immediately after the conquest, they did not rebuild the city either, and thus cannot be expected to have occupied Hazor.The second clue to substantiate the plausibility of Joshua’s being the destroyer of Late Bronze I Hazor is how this view allows for the veracity of the long period of time implied between the conquest of the city in ca. 1400 BC and the later defeat of the future Canaanite overlord, who is the second jabin of Hazor recorded in the Bible, during the judgeships of Deborah and Barak. The currently-popular solution advocated by Yadin and Ben-Tor, namely that Joshua destroyed and burned down Hazor in the middle or middle third of the 13th century BC, can neither account for all of the historical elements in Joshua 11 and Judges 4, nor satisfy the correlation between the archaeological record and the Bible. The usual solution is either to debunk one of the two biblical accounts as non-historical or to change the order of events through interpolation, as did Yadin.However, the view that Joshua burned down Hazor in ca. 1400 BC naturally accounts for the subsequent yet delayed Canaanite occupation of Hazor (during Late Bronze IIA-IIB/III), as the Israelites—who should not be expected to have inhabited the city anytime soon after its destruction—did not settle in cities such as Hazor. The post-conquest Israelites are well known for their semi-nomadic lifestyle,[92] ingrained in them by 40 years of wandering in the desert (Num 32:13), and for their fear of possessing the territories of their tribal allotments that were administered by Joshua (Josh 17:12; Judg 1:27–2:6; 18:1–31). In contrast to what followed at Hazor after the destruction of the Late Bronze I city, the destruction of Late Bronze IIB/III Hazor was followed by an Israelite occupation during the Iron IA Age (ca. 1200–1150 BC).[93] This archaeologically verifiable fact renders a Late Bronze IIB conflagration under Joshua inconsistent with the subsequent historical information in the Bible, which reveals that another Canaanite city succeeded the one that was destroyed in Joshua’s day.[94]VII. CONCLUSIONAn examination was made of the destruction of 13th century BC Hazor, which has become the trendy era of choice for the conquest of the city described in Joshua 11. The material evidence for the destruction of the Hazor of this period clearly points to the Israelites as the culprits, due in part to the distinct, ritualistic desecration of religious and cultic objects. However, chronologically this destruction fits into the era of the judges, and the context of Judges 4 bears out that not only was the king of Hazor killed, but the city was destroyed and, in large part, burned down by the persistent Israelites. Moreover, the narratives of Joshua 11 and Judges 4 were seen to describe two different encounters, both since their respective episodes were separated in time by over 150 years, and since “jabin” is actually a dynastic title (i.e. loan-word) meaning “king,” implying that these accounts refer to two different monarchs,
And thus two completely independent reigns.
If Hoffmeier is correct that Hazor provides the only possible evidence for a conquest in the 13th century BC, then late-exodus proponents are officially left without any conflagrated cities that lend support to their view.With all of this established, an examination of the archaeological record of the Hazor of the 15th century BC was made, in order to determine whether evidence exists for a fiery destruction that can be harmonized with the date of the Exodus and Conquest as determined by a literal interpretation of 1 Kgs 6:1. Evidence of such a great conflagration was found by Yadin in the lower city, and by Ben-Tor in the upper city, the latter of which occurred during the seasons of 2000 and 2001. Ben-Tor attributes this destruction to Thutmose III, but for several reasons this pharaoh effectively can be eliminated from contention as the actual destroyer: the epigraphical evidence both of conquests under Thutmose III and his son Amenhotep II, and of the subsistence of Hazor nine years after Amenhotep II’s final Asiatic campaign, along with the archaeological evidence both of a large gap in time between the destruction of Hazor at the end of Late Bronze I and the next occupational phase, and of Hazor’s subsistence during the short reign of Amenhotep II’s son and successor, Thutmose IV.No other rivaling nations or Canaanite city-states are legitimate possibilities for the attackers who decimated Late Bronze I Hazor, so ANE history can judge the Israelites only as a perfectly plausible option. In fact, their nomination is supported both by the chronological data in the biblical text, the post-destruction occupational gap, and the long period of time implied between this city’s destruction and the later defeat of the subsequent jabin during the judgeships of Deborah and Barak. Therefore, the only tenable solution for dating the destruction of the Hazor of Joshua 11 is to place it firmly at the close of Late Bronze I, as the biblical narrative matches perfectly with the archaeological evidence that relates both to Late Bronze I and the transition into Late Bronze II. The Israelites were the first occupants of the city after the close of the Late Bronze Age, so the destruction of the final Late Bronze Age city cannot be associated with the destruction of Joshua 11, as another Canaanite occupation and destruction followed that of Joshua’s day, which is made abundantly clear by the narrative in Judges 4. As Wood put it, “The simple (and biblical) solution is that Joshua destroyed an earlier city at Hazor in ca. 1400 BC, while Deborah and Barak administered the coup de grâce in ca. 1230 BC.”[95]This conclusion, borne out by the evidence presented in the preceding discussion, strongly supports the chronological framework of the early-Exodus position, and thus the literal interpretation of numbers such as “480th” in 1 Kgs 6:1. Biblical scholars and teachers would do well to give the biblical text its full day in court before acquiescing to the interpretations of archaeologists or other scholars who use arguments from silence (e.g. the complete lack of material evidence for the Israelite inhabitation of Canaan from 1400–1200 BC) to make claims such as the Israelites’ inability to have occupied the Promised Land before the 13th century BC, especially since such conclusions fan the flames of non-inerrantist, liberal scholars determined to undermine the historicity of the Bible. As Aharoni warned, “Don’t reject the historicity of the Biblical text so easily.”[96] The Bible should be interpreted literally, whenever possible, even though popular scholarship may tempt biblical scholars to take the easy road by reverting to allegorism when interpretive difficulties are encountered or when the pressure to fall in line with the consensus of the scholarly world seems too daunting to overcome.No cuneiform tablet has yet emerged at Hazor—nor may one ever surface, even if an archive is found—that reads, “Joshua has arrived!” But relanguage software
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