Biblical Archaeology - Jericho

The story of the attempt to match up the archaeology of ancient Jericho with the account given in the Hebrew Bible has come to be regarded as something of a cautionary tale in the history of Biblical archaeology. Laughlin in Archaeology and the Bible (2000) invokes Jericho in precisely that way, as the most generalized example that he can find to warn against trying to force archaeological data onto a hermeneutically Procrustean framework derived from the Old Testament:

For the student interested in "Biblical Archaeology" there are two sets of data: the archaeological and the biblical. The Bible can no longer be accepted uncritically as a "historical" account of ancient Israel, if by historical we mean all the modern connotations of that term. Rather the Bible interprets through theological, and even mythological, lenses what archaeologists must interpret through scientific/historical ones. The case of the story of...
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