A Tribute to the Scholarship of Bryant Wood
by Rodger C. Young
This appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of Bible and Spade (Vol. 32:1, p. 15).
The issue was a Festschrift for Dr. Wood.
I first met Bryant Wood at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2005.
This was my first attendance at the ETS annual meeting and I only knew two of the more than
2,000 attendees. Perhaps because he was interested in my talk on the inerrancy of Scripture,
Bryant went out of his way to engage in friendly conversation with me and my wife, who was
also attending. In the several years since then I have benefitted from his friendliness, his
scholarship, and his faithfulness to God’s Word.
Bryant has patiently, over the years, brought forth archaeological evidences that
demonstrated the truth of God’s Word. That evidence fits into a category called, in the popular
vernacular, “stubborn facts.” As readers of Bible and Spade will know, his name is most closely
associated with the sites of Jericho and Khirbet-el-Maqatir, the second of which, due to the
efforts of Bryant and the others who have spent many seasons there, is increasingly being
recognized as Joshua’s “Ai.”
One of the stubborn facts that Bryant has emphasized was the presence of Egyptian
scarabs of Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Amenhotep II, and Amenhotep III in the necropolis of
Jericho. None of the scarabs are later than Amenhotep III, thus dating the fall of Jericho City IV
to about 1400 BC. Other data in the “stubborn facts” grab-bag are the circumstances related to
the destruction of Jericho City IV: 1) The city was captured at some time in the early spring, as
evidenced by full storage jars of grain (compare Josh. 4:19). 2) The full storage jars show that
the city, though strongly fortified, did not endure a long siege (Josh. 6:15-20). 3) The conquerors
did not plunder the food supplies of the city, contrary to universal practice in ancient warfare
(Josh. 6:18-20). 4) The city was burnt apparently immediately after an earthquake, a strange
coincidence that even Kenyon noticed (Josh. 6:20, 24). Egyptologist David Rohl recognized that
these facts so strongly verify the biblical account that he accepted ca. 1400 BC for the fall of
Jericho, even though the city’s Late Bronze (LB I) pottery is in conflict with his revisionist
Egyptian chronology. It is regrettable that those who accept a 13th-century Exodus conquest, or
who say that the biblical account is entirely fictional, do not have the insight that Rohl does
regarding this agreement of archaeological and biblical evidence, even though it might
contradict their other presuppositions.
Bryant’s present project is to document and publish the pottery finds from Khirbet-el-
Maqatir, showing that the destruction of this city, just as the destruction of Jericho City IV,
occurred in LB I. This is painstaking but necessary work, and it requires a fair amount of
expense. The LB I dating has received much opposition from skeptical archaeologists, who
insist on dating the pottery at Jericho City IV to Middle Bronze, about 120 years earlier, and who
also appeal to radiocarbon dating that is consistent with that estimate. Bryant’s present work is
therefore significant in refuting that viewpoint. Support for Bryant’s LB I date comes from the
finds at Avaris in Egypt’s Delta, where LB I pottery from the 15th century BC is similar to that
found at Jericho City IV. Further, radiocarbon dating for this same area and time of Egypt is
about 120 to 170 years too high, the same amount of offset for radiocarbon results from Jericho.
These too-early radiocarbon dates for Egypt and other areas of the Mediterranean in the period
1400 BC and earlier have led to a conflict between “science” and what had been accepted as
firmly established archaeological dates. Critics of the radiocarbon dates have argued that they
are too early, not because of wrong measurements of the 14C/12C ratios, but because of the very
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