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Transcript

NARRATOR: Following the Exodus, the Bible says God finally delivers the Israelites to the Promised Land, Canaan. Archaeology and sources outside the Bible reveal that Canaan consisted of well-fortified city-states, each with its own king, who in turn served Egypt and its pharaoh.

The Canaanites, a thriving Near Eastern culture for thousands of years, worshipped many gods in the form of idols.

The Bible describes how a new leader, Joshua, takes the Israelites into Canaan in a blitzkrieg military campaign.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," Joshua 6:20): So the people shouted, and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpets, they raised a great shout, and the wall fell down flat.

NARRATOR: But what does archaeology say? In the 1930s, British archaeologist John Garstang excavated at Jericho, the first Canaanite city in Joshua's campaign. Garstang uncovered dramatic evidence of destruction and declared he had found the very walls that Joshua had brought tumbling down.

And at what the Bible describes as the greatest of all Canaanite cities, Hazor, there is more evidence of destruction.

Today, Hazor is being excavated by one of the leading Israeli archaeologists, Amnon Ben-Tor, and his protˇgˇ and co-director, Sharon Zuckerman.

AMNON BEN-TOR: I'm walking through a passage between two of the rooms of the Canaanite palace of the kings of Hazor. Signs of the destruction you can still see almost everywhere. You can see the dark stones here and, most important, you can see how they cracked into a million pieces. It takes tremendous heat to cause such damage. The fire here was, how should I say, the mother of all fires.

NARRATOR: Among the ashes, Ben-Tor discovered a desecrated statue, most likely the king or patron god of Hazor. Its head and hands are cut off, apparently by the city's conquerors.

This marked the end of Canaanite Hazor.

AMNON BEN-TOR: Question number one: Who did it? Who was around, who is a possible candidate?

So, number one: the Egyptians. They don't mention having done anything at Hazor. In any of the inscriptions at the time, we don't see Hazor.

Another Canaanite city-state could have done it, maybe. But who was strong enough to do it?

Who are we left with? The Israelites. The only ones about whom there is a tradition that they did it. So, let's say they should be considered guilty of destruction of Hazor until proven innocent.

NARRATOR: And there's another Canaanite city-state that Joshua and his army of Israelites are credited with laying waste. It's called Ai, and has been discovered in what is now the Palestinian territory of the West Bank.

Here, archaeologist Hani Nur el-Din and his team are finding evidence of a rich Canaanite culture.

HANI NUR EL-DIN (Al-Quds University): The village first appears and developed into a city, and then there was a kind of fortification surrounding this settlement.

NARRATOR: These heaps of stones were once a magnificent palace and temples, which were eventually destroyed. But when archaeologists date the destruction, they discover it occurred about 2200 B.C. They date the destruction of Jericho to 1500 B.C., and Hazor's to about 1250 B.C. Clearly, these city-states were not destroyed at the same time; they range over nearly a thousand years. In fact, of the 31 sites the Bible says that Joshua conquered, few showed any signs of war.

WILLIAM DEVER: There was no evidence of armed conflict in most of these sites. At the same time, it was discovered that most of the large Canaanite towns that were supposed to have been destroyed by these Israelites were either not destroyed at all or destroyed by others.

NARRATOR: A single sweeping military invasion led by Joshua cannot account for how the Israelites arrived in Canaan. But the destruction of Hazor does coincide with the time that the Merneptah Stele locates the Israelites in Canaan.

So who destroyed Hazor?

Amnon Ben-Tor still believes it was the Israelites who destroyed the city. But his co-director, Sharon Zuckerman, has a different idea.

SHARON ZUCKERMAN (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): The final destruction itself consisted of the mutilation of statues of kings and gods. It did not consist of signs of war or of any kind of fighting. We don't see weapons in the street like we see in other sites that were destroyed by foreigners.

NARRATOR: So if there was no invasion, what happened? Excavations reveal that Hazor had a lower city of commoners, serfs and slaves, and an upper city with a king and wealthy elites.

Zuckerman finds, within the grand palaces of elite Hazor, areas of disrepair and abandonment, to archaeologists, signs of a culture in decline and rebellion from within.

SHARON ZUCKERMAN: I would not rule out the possibility of an internal revolt of Canaanites living at Hazor and revolting against the elites that ruled the city.

NARRATOR: In fact, the entire Canaanite city-state system, including Hazor and Jericho, breaks down. Archaeology and ancient texts clearly show that it is the result of a long period of decline and upheaval that sweeps through Mesopotamia, the Aegean region and the Egyptian empire around 1200 B.C.

PETER MACHINIST: And when the dust, as it were, settles, when we can begin to see what takes the place of these...of this great states system, we find a number of new peoples suddenly coming into focus in a kind of void that is created with the dissolution of the great state system.

NARRATOR: Can archaeologists find the Israelites among these new people?