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Bryant G. Wood

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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 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 1930s, John Garstang excavated the site and determined that the destruction of Jericho IV must have occurred near the end of the Late Bronze Age, that is, about 1400 BC, and he therefore identified the destruction with the biblical story of Joshua. Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s, using more scientific methods than had been available to Garstang, redated Jericho IV to 1550 BC and 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, based on on a re-analyis of pottery shards, stratigraphic considerations, scarab evidence, and a single radiocarbon date, therefore caused a considerable stir. Wood's findings were controversial, but in 1995 additional C14 measurements were made on previously recovered samples from 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 is also involved in efforts to reconcile the Biblical account of the destruction of the city of Ai by Joshua with the archaeological evidence that the traditional location of Ai, et-Tell, excavated most recently by Joseph Callaway, was abandoned during the entirety of the Middle Bronze and Late Bronze Ages.) Wood directs excavations at an alternative site, Khirbet el-Maqatir, which he contends may be the biblical city of Ai, and which 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 a viable location for Ai in terms of Biblical narrative).

References

  1. Bruins & van der Plicht, 1995, p218
  2. 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.

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