Footnote 6 – Redating the Exodus

Bryant G. Wood’s recent findings concerning Jericho suggest a somewhat different approach to redating and explaining the MB II C destructions. These findings are contained in his paper “Jericho Revisited: The Archaeology and History of Jericho in the Late Bronze Age,” read at the Symposium Who Was the Pharaoh of the Exodus? held in Memphis, Tennessee, April 23–25, 1987, under the auspices of the Near East Archaeological Society (publication forthcoming). Analyzing the recently published pottery from the tell of Jericho, Wood shows that the city fortified in MB II C actually survived through LB I and was destroyed about 1400 B.C. It now seems likely that other cities thought to have been destroyed at the end of MB II C also continued into Late Bronze I, and were destroyed in that archaeological period. This may be the case also at Khirbet Nisya, where local LB I pottery seems to continue after MB II C.

Thus instead of considering a wholesale redating of the end of MB II C, we should perhaps be thinking in terms of extending the occupation of several MB II C cities down through LB I. It nevertheless seems certain (in the light of Bietak’s work) that MB II C ended in the 15th rather than in the 16th century B.C. so that we have at least two waves of destruction within that century, the first at the end of MB II C and the second at the end of LB I. The first wave may in fact have resulted from campaigns by Thutmosis III or his successors, with only the second being the work of the Israelites. Much more detailed work, of the sort done by Wood on the Jericho pottery, is now required to clarify the situation.