Image Details

Zen Radovan

Ai from the air. The remains of the Israelite settlement at Ai and an earlier Bronze Age city can be seen atop this terraced hill about four miles east of Raddana (where the inscribed jar handle shown in the previous photo was found).

The Book of Joshua says Ai was the second city, after Jericho, to have been conquered by the Israelites when they entered Canaan—and there’s the rub: Archaeological research indicates that there were no fortified cities at either Jericho or Ai when the Israelite conquest is said to have occurred. Jericho and Ai, Frank Moore Cross asserts, were destroyed at different times well before the emergence of Israel.