The Search for Ai

Three Excavations, One Result

The mound called et-Tell sits just east of Bethel, about 15 km north of Jerusalem, and it has been dug three times. J. Garstang made soundings in 1928. J. Marquet-Krause dug three seasons from 1933 to 1935 for Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and her conclusion was the one that has stood ever since: the place was unoccupied from about 2400 BC until about 1200 BC. J. A. Callaway then ran nine seasons from 1964, in the field into the early 1970s and publishing to 1976, under the joint auspices of the American Schools of Oriental Research and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he taught. He confirmed her result rather than overturning it.

What the three excavations found is a large Early Bronze city, destroyed around 2400 BC, and then nothing at all for something like a millennium — no Middle Bronze occupation, no Late Bronze occupation. Around 1200 BC a small unfortified village of roughly three acres was built over the ruins on the acropolis, and it was abandoned again around 1050 BC. There was no walled city at et-Tell after about 2400 BC.

That is a problem whichever date for the conquest a reader holds. Joshua 8 describes a king, a gate, warriors, and a city burned and made a heap. The fifteenth-century date puts that around 1400 BC, when et-Tell was already a thousand-year-old ruin; the thirteenth-century date puts it around 1200 BC, when there was an unwalled hamlet on the acropolis and nothing to take. The name itself is part of the puzzle, because Hebrew ha-Ai means "the ruin," and Joshua 8:28 says Joshua made it "a heap forever, even a desolation, to this day." Callaway did not hide from any of this. He proposed in 1968 that Joshua 7 and 8 preserved the capture of that unfortified Iron Age village, and then, in a 1987 essay, abandoned that thesis and acknowledged the contradiction between the narrative and the finds. Changing your mind in print about your own excavation is not a common thing and it is worth saying so.

Either the Site Is Wrong or the Account Is

That is the fork, and an article that blurs it is not being kind to anybody. If et-Tell is Ai, then Joshua 7-8 does not describe an event that happened at et-Tell at any proposed conquest date. If the account is describing a real capture of a real city, then Ai is somewhere other than et-Tell. There is no third option that leaves both propositions untouched, and every proposal below is a way of taking one horn or the other.

The literary answer takes the second horn about the account. M. Noth argued in 1935 that Joshua 8 is an aetiology — a story that grew up to explain a conspicuous ruin, of the kind that ends "to this day." As one standard reference states the logic: with an aetiology it is normally only the thing explained that is historical, which is to say the ruin, not the explanation of it. Z. Zevit developed the literary and stratigraphic case in BASOR in 1983, and D. E. Fleming has treated it more recently. A. Mazar's synthesis reads the Iron I settlers as having built peacefully on a mound long forsaken, with nothing suggesting a conquest. This is the majority position in the field, and it is the one the app's own home position sits least comfortably with — which is exactly why it is set out here in its own terms rather than waved at.

The relocation answers take the other horn. D. Livingston proposed Khirbet Nisya, dug it for fifteen seasons from 1979 to 2002, and argued that Bethel is not Beitin either — because moving Ai forces you to move Bethel, and that is the cost of the proposal rather than a detail. B. G. Wood and Associates for Biblical Research proposed Khirbet el-Maqatir instead, about a kilometre west of et-Tell, and dug it across fourteen seasons between 1995 and 2016. Khirbet Haiyan and Khirbet el-Hudriya were both proposed and both eliminated by soundings in the 1960s that showed them to be Hellenistic and later. And it should be recorded that W. F. Albright, who made the et-Tell identification standard, wrote privately to Livingston on 23 February 1970: "You can take it from me, and from Callaway and others, that there just isn't any other possibility for Ai than et-Tell and that Bethel can only have been modern Beitin. Since 1921 we have examined and reexamined the whole countryside, and there just isn't any archaeologically viable identification."

What Khirbet el-Maqatir Has, and Why the Field Has Not Followed

The Maqatir case deserves stating properly, because it is usually either swallowed or sneered at. ABR reports a fortress with a north-facing gate, only one chamber surviving, robbed in antiquity, with six lower socket stones suggesting an original four-chambered gate and a western wall about four metres thick. A scarab found in 2013 inside the fortress near the gate, on bedrock in a sealed locus with four diagnostic refired Late Bronze I sherds, they date preliminarily to the eighteenth dynasty. Much of the Late Bronze I pottery is refired — white and rock-hard — which they read as a site-wide conflagration, and they report that fourteen seasons produced no pottery relating to the fortress after about 1400 BC. On that basis they date the fall to about 1406 BC, derived from the 480 years of 1 Kings 6:1. To their credit they also report against themselves: a second scarab, found in 2014, came from a locus disturbed by looters, and they say so.

Two things count against it, and neither is a slur. The first is size. Maqatir is about one hectare; et-Tell is about eleven. Joshua 8 describes a place with a king and a gate, and a one-hectare fortress can be argued to fit that, but it is a small thing to hang a national tradition on. The second is that the identification has not been accepted. R. A. Mullins and A. M. Maeir have both published against it, the pottery dating is disputed — the sherds Wood reads as Late Bronze have been read by others as Middle Bronze — and mainstream treatments of the settlement question either reject the proposal or do not engage it. Excavation ended in 2016 and the final report has begun to appear, but the volume published so far covers the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods; no Bronze Age volume carrying the Ai argument could be traced for this article. That is not a verdict on the evidence. It is a statement about how much of it is available to be checked, which is a different and prior question.

One more fact belongs here because it shows the argument is live rather than tribal: Associates for Biblical Research was founded by D. Livingston to solve this exact problem, and ABR now publicly rejects its founder's site, stating that Khirbet Nisya did not satisfy the biblical criteria because it was unfortified in the Late Bronze Age. Two directors of the same institution, backing two different mounds, each against the other. Where the app stands: et-Tell's occupation gap is a hard, three-times-confirmed fact and no amount of goodwill dissolves it; the relocation proposals are serious attempts by serious people that have not yet persuaded the field, and the honest report is that this question is open rather than closed in either direction. Two things are worth adding for a reader who finds that uncomfortable. Some of the sharpest disagreement here is between evangelicals — B. G. Wood and J. K. Hoffmeier have argued the conquest date against each other in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, and Livingston and Wood backed different sites. And a great deal of what circulates about this site, on all sides, is quotation at second hand: two sentences of Callaway's that appear in nearly every popular treatment of Ai could not be traced to a page anyone had read, and so they are not printed here.

Scripture references

• Genesis 12:8 — Abram pitches his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east — the geography every candidate has to satisfy
• Joshua 7:2-5 — The first attack fails; Ai lies "beside Beth Aven, on the east side of Bethel"
• Joshua 8:1-2 — The ambush commanded; Ai to be treated as Jericho was
• Joshua 8:28 — "So Joshua burned Ai, and made it a heap forever, even a desolation, to this day"
• Ezra 2:28 — Men of Bethel and Ai among the returning exiles — the place is inhabited again by the Persian period

Sources

• Holding institutionJ. A. Callaway, "Excavating Ai (Et-Tell): 1964-1972" — Joseph A. Callaway, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, for the Joint Archaeological Expedition to Ai · The Biblical Archaeologist 39:1 (March 1976), 18-30. The excavator's own summary of the expedition he directed for ASOR and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His final report appeared in the ASOR Excavation Reports series in 1980. Paywalled · paywalledSupports: The et-Tell excavation, its auspices, and its stratigraphic result
• ScholarshipJ. A. Callaway, "New Evidence on the Conquest of Ai" — Joseph A. Callaway · Journal of Biblical Literature 87:3 (September 1968), 312-320. The position Callaway later abandoned — that Joshua 7-8 preserves the capture of the unfortified Iron Age village. Cited alongside his 1987 retraction so the change is visible rather than asserted · paywalledSupports: Callaway's 1968 proposal, which he subsequently withdrew
• ScholarshipJ. A. Callaway, "Ai (et-Tell): Problem Site for Biblical Archaeologists" — Joseph A. Callaway · In L. G. Perdue, L. E. Toombs and G. L. Johnson (eds.), Archaeology and Biblical Interpretation (Atlanta, 1987), 87-99. Where Callaway abandons his 1968 thesis and states the contradiction between the narrative and the finds. Print only; no URL is given because none was foundSupports: That the excavator himself withdrew his own harmonisation
• ScholarshipB. G. Wood, "The Search for Joshua's Ai" — Bryant G. Wood, Associates for Biblical Research · In R. S. Hess, G. A. Klingbeil and P. J. Ray Jr. (eds.), Critical Issues in Early Israelite History (Bulletin for Biblical Research Supplements 3; Eisenbrauns / Penn State University Press, 2008), 205-240. The Khirbet el-Maqatir case in a peer-reviewed volume, stated by its proponent. Paywalled · paywalledSupports: The case for Khirbet el-Maqatir as its author makes it
• ScholarshipA. M. Maeir, review of Critical Issues in Early Israelite History — Aren M. Maeir, Bar-Ilan University · Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 361 (February 2011), 99-101. A published critical assessment of the volume containing Wood's case. Paywalled, and nothing is quoted from it here: the fragment of this review that circulates online is cut mid-sentence and was not read at source for this article · paywalledSupports: That the Maqatir identification has drawn published criticism from specialists
• ScholarshipR. A. Mullins, "The Emergence of Israel in Retrospect" — Robert A. Mullins, Azusa Pacific University · In T. E. Levy, T. Schneider and W. H. C. Propp (eds.), Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective (Springer, 2015), 517-525. Assesses the Khirbet el-Maqatir proposal and does not accept it. Paywalled; characterised here rather than quoted, because the text could not be opened · paywalledSupports: The published non-acceptance of the Maqatir identification
• ScholarshipZ. Zevit, "Archaeological and Literary Stratigraphy in Joshua 7-8" — Ziony Zevit · Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 251 (July 1983), 23-35. The modern development of the literary reading first argued by M. Noth in Bethel und Ai, Palästinajahrbuch 31 (1935), 7-29. Paywalled · paywalledSupports: The aetiological reading of Joshua 7-8
• ScholarshipK. van Bekkum, From Conquest to Coexistence — Koert van Bekkum, Theological University Kampen · Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 45 (Brill, 2011), 41-42, where the stratigraphic position is stated plainly: "Et-Tell, identified by most scholars with the city of Ai, was not settled between the Early Bronze and Iron Age I." The book is paywalled and was not opened here, so the sentence and its page range are quoted at second hand — the same standard that keeps A. M. Maeir unquoted in this record · paywalledSupports: The current scholarly statement of the occupation gap
• ScholarshipS. Stripling, B. Brandl, B. Peterson and B. Seevers, "A Scarab of Psametik I from Kh. el-Maqatir" — Scott Stripling, Baruch Brandl, Brian Peterson and Boyd Seevers · Palestine Exploration Quarterly 149:3 (2017), 186-200. Cited because it is Associates for Biblical Research's Maqatir material appearing in a mainstream peer-reviewed journal — it concerns a seventh-century BC scarab, not the Late Bronze one that carries the Ai argument. Paywalled · paywalledSupports: That the Maqatir excavation has published in peer-reviewed venues
• ReferenceS. Stripling and M. Hassler, "The 'Problem' of Ai in Joshua 7-8" — Scott Stripling and Mark Hassler, Associates for Biblical Research · Freely readable in full, and the source of every figure given here for the Maqatir fortress, the gate, the two scarabs, the refired pottery and the site's size. It also carries W. F. Albright's 1970 letter to D. Livingston, quoted in this articleSupports: The Khirbet el-Maqatir evidence as its excavators report it
• ReferenceK. Koenen, "Ai", WiBiLex — Klaus Koenen, for the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft's academic Bible lexicon · October 2007, freely readable and academically edited with a full bibliography. The source used here for Callaway's change of position, for the elimination of Khirbet Haiyan and Khirbet el-Hudriya, and for the statement of the aetiological argumentSupports: The state of scholarship on the identification, and Callaway's withdrawal of his 1968 thesis
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Ai (Canaan)

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Ai (Canaan)
• Associates for Biblical Research — the Khirbet el-Maqatir excavation

Reflect

The man who dug this site for nine seasons published one answer and then, nineteen years later, published that he had been wrong. What would it cost you to do that about something you have already said out loud?