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Bryant G. Wood is a biblical archaeologist and Research Director of the Associates for Biblical Research. He is known for his 1990 redating of the destruction of Jericho to accord with the biblical chronology of c. 1400 BC - the proposal was later (1995) questioned, and Kathleen Kenyon's dating of c. 1550 BC remains the date for the site accepted in the majority of scholarly publications.

Biography

Wood attended Syracuse University, graduating with a B.S. in mechanical engineering, later earning a M.S. in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy NY. He later pursued Biblical and archaeological studies and received an M.A. in Biblical History from the University of Michigan in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Syro-Palestinian archaeology from the University of Toronto in 1985. Wood is a specialist in Canaanite pottery of the Late Bronze Age. He is author of The Sociology of Pottery in Ancient Palestine: The Ceramic Industry and the Diffusion of Ceramic Style in the Bronze and Iron Ages (1990), as well as numerous articles on archaeological subjects. In addition, Wood serves as editor of the quarterly publication Bible and Spade.

Wood received international attention for his proposed redating of ancient Jericho, arguing for the historicity of the Biblical account of the capture of the city by the Israelites. He has also written on entry of the Philistines into Canaan and on historicity of the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Jericho

According to the well-known story in the biblical book of Joshua, Jericho was the first Canaanite city to fall to the Israelites as they began their conquest of the Promised Land - an event which the Bible's internal chronology places at around 1406 BC. In the 1920s, John Garstang determined, based on two considerations and independently of the biblical chronology, that the destruction of Jericho must have occurred near the end of the Late Bronze Age, that is, about 1400 BC. These two considerations were first that the Late Bronze Age was the time in which large walled cities flourished in Canaan, and archaeology had already determined that this was not true in the centuries after 1400. The second consideration was that a match of Canaanite cites listed in the book of Joshua matched the mention of these cities in the annals of pharaohs of Egypt's 18th Dynasty, "more particularly in the records covering the hundred years between the conquests of Thutmose III and the decline of the Empire under Akhenaten, 1475-1375." After making these observations, Garstang noted that this happened to be in agreement with the Bible's chronological note in 1 Kings 6:1, but this was entirely secondary as far as he was concerned; in biblical interpretation he followed the doctrines of Julius Wellhausen, popular in Garstang's day, that theorized that the Bible's historical accounts were written at a much later date than the events described and thus were not completely trustworthy. Later, his excavations at Jericho in the early 1930s unearthed a destruction layer corresponding to the termination of City IV which was in agreement with the date of ca. 1400 that he had earlier postulated, and which he therefore identified with the biblical story of Joshua. This date was therefore derived by archaeological considerations from Canaan and from Egyptian historical records. It was not derived from the Bible and then imposed on archaeology, as is occasionally stated by those who have not read Garstang's own writings on the subject. It was therefore a shock when Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s, using more scientific methods than had been available to Garstang, redated Jericho City IV to 1550 BC and claimed to have found no signs of any habitation at all for the period around 1400 BC. Wood's 1990 reversion of City IV to Garstang's original 1400 BC therefore caused a considerable stir.

In 1995 additional C14 measurements were made on previously recovered samples from Jericho's City IV. The analysis of these samples was not made specifically to test the controversy surrounding Wood's dating, but were an effort to establish an independent radiocarbon chronology for Near Eastern archaeology (the existing chronology, initally established by William F. Albright in the 1930s, is based largely on changes in pottery types); the results were published by Bruins and van der Plicht (Radiocarbon 37:2,1995), who concluded that "the fortified Bronze Age city at Tell es-Sultan (Jericho City IV) was not destroyed by ca.1400 BC, as Wood (1990) suggested."

Khirbet el-Maqatir

Wood directs excavations at Khirbet el-Maqatir, a city which he contends may be the biblical city of Ai. The traditional location of Ai, et-Tell, was excavated most recently by Joseph Callaway and was found to have been abandoned during the entirety of the Middle Bronze and Late Bronze Ages. Khirbet el-Maqatir has produced pottery of the Early Bronze, Middle Bronze, Late Bronze I, Iron Age I, late Hellenistic/early Roman, and Byzantine periods. Based on initial finds, including a small Late Bronze I fortress in areas A, D, E, and G, Wood's "preliminary conclusion is that the LB I fortress meets the Biblical requirements to be tentatively identified as the fortress 'Ai, referred to in Josh. 7-8." Nearby Khirbet Nisya has also been suggested, by excavator David Livingstone, as an alternative location for Ai.

References

1. Garstang 1931/1978, pp. 52-55.
2. Ibid., p. 53.
3. www.biblicalchronologist.org
4. Bruins & van der Plicht, 1995, p218
5. Wood (2000), 29.

Bibliography

• Manfred Bietak and Felix Höflmayer, "Introduction: High and Low Chronology," pp. 13-23 in The Synchronization of Civilisations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Second Millenium B.C. III, eds. Manfred Bietak and Ernst Czerny, Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschanften, 2007.
• Bruins & van der Plicht, "Tell es-Sultan (Jericho): Radiocarbon Results of Short-Lived Cereal and Multiyear Charcoal Samples from the End of the Middle Bronze Age," Radiocarbon 37:2, 1995.
• John Garstang, Joshua-Judges, Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1978 reprint of 1931 edition.
• Bryant G. Wood, "Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho? A New Look at the Archaeological Evidence," Biblical Archaeology Review 16(2) (March/April 1990): 44-58.
• Bryant G. Wood, "Dating Jericho’s Destruction: Bienkowski Is Wrong on All Counts, Biblical Archaeology Review 16:05, Sep/Oct 1990.
• Bryant G. Wood,"The Walls of Jericho," Bible and Spade 12:2 (1999), also available
• Bryant G. Wood, The Philistines Enter Canaan, Biblical Archaeology Review 17:06, Nov/Dec 1991.
• Bryant G. Wood, "Khirbet el-Maqatir, 1995-1998," Israel Exploration Journal 50 no. 1-2 (2000), 123-30.

External links

• The Bible vs. Modern Scholarship; Interview by John Elliott
• Wood's interpretation of the Jericho evidence
• Is Bryant Wood's chronology of Jericho valid? A critical examination

• Articles with topics of unclear notability from September 2007
• American archaeologists
• Biblical scholars
• Biblical criticism
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute alumni