Horrible things in the bible

[Minimalist]

Ai, in the friggin bible.

8 Then the Lord said to Joshua, “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Take the whole army with you, and go up and attack Ai. For I have delivered into your hands the king of Ai, his people, his city and his land. 2 You shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king, except that you may carry off their plunder and livestock for yourselves. Set an ambush behind the city.”

Josh. 8

Ai, in archaeology:

Between 1933 and 1935, Judith Marquet-Krause carried out a large-scale excavation at el-Tell and found extensive remains of a huge Early Bronze Age city, dated over a millennium before the collapse of Late Bronze Age Canaan. She brought to light a massively fortified Early Bronze Age city-state, with monumental temples and palaces, all destroyed sometime around 2200 BCE. After scant reoccupation in the early second millennium BCE, Ai appears to have been entirely deserted from c.1500 BCE until some time in the early twelfth century BCE. Thus it would have been nothing more than ruins in the late thirteenth century BCE. Not a single pottery shard or any other indication of settlement there in the Late Bronze Age was ever recovered. Marquee-Krause concluded that the conquest account in Joshua 7-8 was more legend than history.”[1] Renewed excavation at the site in the 1960s produced the same conclusion. Like Jericho, there was no settlement at the time of its supposed conquest by the children of Israel. Between 1965 and 1972, Joseph Callaway, an American archaeologist who had studied with Kathleen Kenyon, reopened the investigation. He confirmed Marquet-Krause’s results. To his credit, he acknowledged the excavation of Ai as “a major blow to the conquest theory.”

http://lifeintheband.wordpress.com/2013/...ronze-age/