Bryant G. Wood

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Bryant G. Wood is an evangelical biblical archaeologist and Creationist Director of the Associates for Biblical Research. He is known for his 1990 redating of the destruction of Jericho to accord with the biblical chronology of c. 1400 BC - the proposal was later (1995) shown to be unsustainable, and Kathleen Kenyon's dating of c. 1550 BC remains the accepted chronology for the site.

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[edit] Biography

Wood attended Syracuse University, graduating with a B.S. in mechanical engineering, later earning a M.S. in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy NY. He later pursued Biblical and archaeological studies and received an M.A. in Biblical History from the University of Michigan in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Syro-Palestinian archaeology from the University of Toronto in 1985. Wood is a specialist in Canaanite pottery of the Late Bronze Age. He is author of The Sociology of Pottery in Ancient Palestine: The Ceramic Industry and the Diffusion of Ceramic Style in the Bronze and Iron Ages (1990), as well as numerous articles on archaeological subjects. In addition, Wood serves as editor of the quarterly publication Bible and Spade.

Wood received international attention for his proposed redating of ancient Jericho, arguing unsuccessfully for the historicity of the Biblical account of the capture of the city by the Israelites. He has also written on entry of the Philistines into Canaan and on historicity of the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

[edit] Jericho

According to the well-known story in the biblical book of Joshua, Jericho was the first Canaanite city to fall to the Israelites as they began their conquest of the Promised Land - an event which the bible's internal chronology places at around 1407 BC. In the early 1930s John Garstang found a destruction layer at Jericho corresponding to the termination of City IV which he identified with the biblical story of Joshua and accordingly dated to c. 1400 BC. It was therefore a shock when Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s, using more scientific methods than had been available to Garstang, redated Jericho City IV to 1550 BC and found no signs of any habitation at all for the period around 1400 BC. Wood's 1990 reversion of City IV to Garstang's original 1400 BC therefore caused a considerable stir. But Wood's arguments, based on on a reanalyis of pottery shards (a method which can provide highly accurate dates in the context of the ancient Near East), stratigraphic considerations, scarab evidence, and a single radiocarbon date, failed to convince archaeologists, one of whom wrote in a subsequent issue of Biblical Archaeology Review:

"Wood has attempted to redate the destruction of Jericho City IV from the end of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 1550 B.C.) to the end of the Late Bronze I (c. 1400 BC). He has put forward four lines of argument to support his conclusion. Not a single one of these arguments can stand up to scrutiny. On the contrary, there is strong evidence to confirm Kathleen Kenyon's dating of City IV to the Middle Bronze Age. Wood's attempt to equate the destruction of City IV with the Israelite conquest of Jericho must therefore be rejected."

Wood responded that he had produced evidence to back his conclusions, and that any counter-claims should also be backed by fresh evidence. The issue remained unsettled until 1995, when fresh evidence did become available, in the form of charred cereal grains from the City IV destruction layer. The analysis of these samples was not made specifically to test the controversy surrounding Wood's dating, but to establish an independent radiocarbon chronology for Near Eastern archaeology (the existing chronology, established by William F. Albright in the 1930s, was based on changes in pottery types); nevertheless, the results were devastating for Wood, demonstrating that "the fortified Bronze Age city at Tell es-Sultan (Jericho City IV) was not destroyed by ca.1400 BC, as Wood (1990) suggested", but in c. 1550 BC, as Kenyon had found.[1]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ www.biblicalchronologist.org

[edit] References

[edit] References and external links

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