Ai

Every biblical reference fixes Ai relative to Bethel. Genesis 12:8 puts Abram between the two towns. Joshua 7:2 puts Ai near Beth-aven, east of Bethel. Joshua 12:9 names the king of Ai, which is near Bethel. The two identifications stand or fall together, because whatever settles Bethel settles Ai. The traditional identification places Bethel at Beitin and Ai at et-Tell, a large mound beside the village of Deir Dibwan a short distance to the southeast. That pairing came out of nineteenth century survey work, long before anyone dug. Edward Robinson identified Beitin with biblical Bethel in 1838, on the ground of the site and the philological link between the two names, and published the identification in Biblical Researches in Palestine (1841); the Bethel end of the pairing has stood since. Commentary written while it was forming records it in its own voice. Albert Barnes wrote that modern travelers place Ai at Khan Haiy in the neighborhood of Deir Diwan, meaning the travelers of the 1840s and 1850s. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown reported, at second hand from the surveyor van de Velde, that the tell they identified with Ai carried a name meaning the heap of stones. Adam Clarke in 1832 put the town east of Bethel and north of Jericho, on a hill, and judged it a strong place. The map pin on this page is the OpenBible coordinate for et-Tell, and it follows that tradition. The mound has been dug three times. John Garstang made a small sounding in 1928, the first modern excavation on the site. Judith Marquet-Krause carried out the first substantial dig from 1933 to 1935 and uncovered a large fortified city of the Early Bronze Age that was destroyed and left empty at the end of that age. Joseph A. Callaway ran the long American campaign from 1964 to 1972 and settled the stratigraphy. He confirmed the Early Bronze city, and above it, after a gap of roughly a thousand years in which nobody lived on the mound, a small unwalled village of the early Iron Age that was itself later abandoned. Between the two there is nothing. The problem, stated plainly, is that there is no Late Bronze Age occupation at et-Tell. Not a small one, not a disputed one, none. The early date for the Exodus puts the conquest at the start of Late Bronze I and the late date puts it near the transition from Late Bronze to Iron I, so on the traditional identification there was no city at Ai for Joshua to take on either reading. This is sharper than the argument over Jericho, where the dispute is about the date of a destruction everyone agrees happened. Here the dispute is about whether there was anything there at all. Callaway, who dug it, published that result without softening it. The two Exodus dates themselves are set out on the Joshua study, and this page does not settle them. The first reading takes the mound at face value and reads the story as an explanation of it. W. F. Albright proposed in 1939, in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, that the narrative in Joshua 8 originally described the capture of Bethel and was later attached to the conspicuous empty mound next door in order to account for its name. Martin Noth argued along the same lines. On this reading Joshua 8 answers the question why the great ruin is called the Ruin. It is the standard reading in the critical literature, and what it costs is part of the reading, because it treats the chapter as explanation rather than as report. Readers who hold Scripture’s historical claims do not accept it. The second reading moves Bethel, and Ai with it. David Livingston argued in the Westminster Theological Journal in 1970, and again in a rejoinder, that Beitin is not Bethel and that Bethel belongs at el-Bireh further south, on the evidence of the distances Eusebius gives and of the road system. Since Ai is only ever fixed relative to Bethel, moving one moves the other. Anson Rainey replied in the same journal defending Beitin, and Livingston answered him. Livingston then excavated Khirbet Nisya as his own candidate for Ai, and it produced occupation debris from a long span of periods and no walled Late Bronze town. He held the identification. Most of the field did not follow him on Bethel. The third reading changes the period the conquest is being compared to. John J. Bimson argued in Redating the Exodus and Conquest, published in 1978, that the conquest should be matched to the destruction horizon at the end of the Middle Bronze Age rather than to the Late Bronze. His case bears most directly on Jericho and Hazor, and it reframes Ai by moving the target period. Critics answer that it requires a shift in Egyptian chronology the wider field does not accept. The fourth reading looks for a different site nearby. Bryant G. Wood and the Associates for Biblical Research excavated Khirbet el-Maqatir, a small site a short distance west of et-Tell, in seasons from 1995 to 2000 and again from 2009 to 2016. They report a small fortified site occupied in Late Bronze I, a gate on the north side, and a destruction by fire, and they propose it as Joshua’s Ai. Their case is that the biblical description fits a small place, since the spies thought two or three thousand men would be enough and the men of Ai came out against an Israelite camp lying north of the city with a valley between. The counter-arguments are that the site is small even for a small town, that some of the Late Bronze pottery identification is contested, and that Associates for Biblical Research is a confessional excavating body rather than a neutral one. This page says that last point plainly, as it does about the same body on the Jericho page. What is not disputed is short. et-Tell holds a very large Early Bronze Age city that was destroyed and left empty long before Israel, with a small unwalled early Iron Age village on the ruins. Bethel and Ai are always named together in Scripture. And the town’s name in Hebrew is the ordinary word for a ruin, carrying the definite article, so it reads as the Ruin. That last fact cuts both ways. Readers who hold the traditional identification say the name fits the great mound exactly. Readers who dispute it say the name is the reason the wrong mound was chosen, since any large abandoned heap is what a countryside calls a ruin. No candidate yet carries an uncontested Late Bronze town matching the account. This page prints the positions, the people and the works, and stops there. No photograph or plan of et-Tell, Khirbet el-Maqatir or Khirbet Nisya is held on this site, so this section carries no image rather than borrowing one.