01x18 - Joshua

[bunniefuu]

[music]

I'm going on an adventure.

There's only one way to figure it all out.

Unzip the archeology. Make it naked.

[music]

[SIMCHA SINGING] Joshua fought the battle of Jericho..

[SIMCHA] And it starts, with Moses.

[FEMALE VOICE] Moses!

[SIMCHA] The Bible says...

...Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt.

They wandered in the desert for years.

Moses d*ed, Joshua took over.

[SIMCHA] In a series of great battles,

he conquers Canaan, the land God promised the Israelites.

Now, what does it mean to you?

Well without Joshua there'd be no conquest...

...and no conquest means no Israel.

no Israel, no Judaism, no Jesus, no Christianity.

You get the picture. So who was this guy?

General, Saint, Villain, Myth?

We've got three clues to find our man.

One, archaeology. Two, literary sources.

Three, believe it or not, the miracle.

First thing's first.

If you want to know Joshua, forget Jericho.

The real story, the real battle and the real archaeology...

...is somewhere else.

We're going to one of the most amazing archaeological sites...

...in the Holy Land to start our search for Joshua.

[SIMCHA] We're going to Hazor-

That's H, A, Z, O, R or H, A, T, Z, O, R,

mentioned in the Bible as one of the main Canaanite cities...

...that was destroyed by Joshua when he conquered Canaan,

when he conquered this land. Now there's a big debate.

[MALE VOICE]The Biblical city of Hazor..

... emerges from the dust of antiquity...

...as archaeologists uncover silent remains of its glory.

I got it. Look at it. It's very old.

[MALE VOICE]Workers carefully chip away at crosses of time,

some of these ruins belong to the th century before Christ.

It was Joshua who conquered Hazor,

capital of Canaanite kingdoms.

Canaanite inscriptions still remain on some of the stones.

Hazor was lost won and lost again by the Israelites...

...who left remains of their everyday life...

...intact after many centuries.

Solomon rebuilt the town, and today...

...the Biblical City of Hazor is making history again.

[SIMCHA] The Bible says, Joshua, ::

Was Joshua real? Was he a mythical figure?

Did he really conquer this land?

A lot of people say he's totally a mythical figure.

Hazor wasn't destroyed by Joshua.

How do you figure it out? Well, you dig in Hazor.

Look at this place. Just look at it.

[SIMCHA] Professor Amnon Ben-Tor is our guide.

What do we do?

I tell you, I'm already arguing with Professor Amnon Ben-Tor...

...and we haven't even started the interview.

And you've been here, this is Hazor,

this is one of the Biblical sites that's been excavated.

No. -No?

Hazor is not mentioned in the Bible?

It is. -Oh.

You just said it is one of the Biblical sites, no.

So what do you mean?

It is "The" Biblical site.

It's "The" Biblical site, I'm sorry.

I stand corrected. It is "The". And you'll tell us, okay, what?

I'll tell you why. -Why?

No problem. -Yeah.

There's no other site if you want conquest, okay?

Conquest, yes Joshua, no Joshua, if you want to tackle conquest.

The conquest of Canaan by Joshua.

Of Canaan by the Israelites is Hazor.

This is the place.

Now, I don't say you have to agree about everything.

You don't have to agree about the conquest,

you don't have to agree.

But this is the place to have the argument.

That's why I'm having this argument with you here.

Okay. So.

[SIMCHA] Imagine Hazor...

...more than three thousand years ago:

A great palace, pagan altars, soldiers, priests,

families, children, a king.

Hazor, head of the Canaanite kingdom in the Galilee.

To conquer this land, Joshua needed to lop off that head.

As the Bible says, Joshua's army reached Hazor...

The Bible says Joshua burnt this Canaanite city,

but what's the evidence?

In ancient days there was a wooden floor here?

Yes, there was. I will show it to you.

Not this one.

I will show it to you!

Oh. -Are we going?

Yeah, we're going!

You want to see wood, come I show you.

[AMNON] You see the base.

[SIMCHA] This stuff? What did it-

The hall, all the walls are lined by basalt slabs.

Wow!-Okay?

Look at this basalt.

Wait.

Can I take a piece?

Come here. You see the line of little stones?

Yes.

Above it, do you see the black line?

I see the black line.

This is the burnt wood.

Wow. -You see it?

I see it clearly.

That's it. That's the burnt floor.

We're talking about a big fire.

A lot of wood, a lot of olive oil,

because they have at least twenty huge pithoi.

Pithoi meaning jars.

Huge jars, each one of them more than liters...

...which were all burning because we have the lines...

...of burn oil still seen on the outer face of the jars,

and we have what we don't have now,

fortunately, very strong winds.

The combination of strong winds, oil and wood,

which create temperature that are...

...double the temperature of a normal fire.

A normal fire is six, seven hundred degrees centigrade.

We had a fire here that was at least degrees centigrade.

Wow, it would kinda melt everything, right?

If you'll come and look at the mud-brick...

...you'll see that the mud-brick melted,

it looks like lava. Look at it.

Here? -Yeah.

To be able to melt them like this?

You need more than degrees centigrade.

. So this is just soot.

This is an unbelievable fire in which this palace perished.

Okay, but, things don't get destroyed-

By accident -By accident.

No, somebody torched it.

Somebody torched it.

Yeah. -Okay.

[SIMCHA] Does this bit of melted mud brick...

...authenticate the Biblical story?

Our first piece of evidence in the search for Joshua?

[swords clashing]

[moaning in pain]

You're holding in your hands...

...evidence to the destruction of the palace of Hazor...

...in the middle of the th century.

[SIMCHA] Does this bit of melted mud brick...

...prove Joshua burnt Hazor over three thousand years ago?

You dig at Hazor and you find the ash...

...where and when the Bible says it should be.

But, did Joshua do it? Not everyone thinks so.

I'm on my way to meet Carl Ehrlich,

Professor of Religious Studies at York University.

We're trying to find Joshua, the man behind the myth.

But Ehrlich thinks we might be looking for the wrong man.

He wonders, is Joshua actually the same guy as Moses?

A sort of literary clone.

[CARL] There is a character named Joshua...

...who we encounter in the Hebrew Bible.

A character who, arguably, is modeled on Moses literally.

Although some people perhaps would argue...

...that the character of Moses in the Moses traditions...

...are modeled on Joshua.

It's one of these chicken or egg questions.

And part of the suspicion you have...

...is that their tales are too similar?

Moses leads the Israelites...

...across the Reed Sea where the waters part.

Joshua leads the Israelites across the Jordan River, waters part.

Moses encounters God or an angel of God...

...at the burning bush and is told to take off his sandals...

...because the ground upon which he is standing is holy.

Joshua encounters an angel of God outside Jericho...

...and is told to take off his sandals...

...because the ground upon which he is standing is holy.

Now, I can see, I'm a hockey fan.

I'm a hockey fan and I can see that in the future,

People who get their PhDs will study this.

They'll see that there were two legendary hockey figures,

one named Bobby Orr and another named Wayne Gretzky.

and they couldn't possibly be real people...

...because they both grew up skating on ice rinks in Canada.

They both had hockey sticks, they both are clearly...

...the same figment of somebody's imagination

Maybe there was some Wayne Gretzky-

-And the insulting-

Maybe there was some Bobby Orr.

But they couldn't both be hockey players who were the greatest.

Somebody made them up...

...and since we have no archaeology, the actual skates,

they probably didn't exist.

Somebody's going to have a PhD in Gretzcology.

[SIMCHA] Moses and Joshua the same person?

It's a literary theory. Here's the logic:

Joshua needs authority, so borrow some from Moses.

And you do this by making their stories mirror each other.

Archaeology can't prove it one way, or the other.

Oddly enough, we're on more solid ground,

we find more archaeology,

when we turn our attention from men to gods.

The Bible says:

Joshua smote his enemies with the edge of the sword.

And what have we got here?

We've got Canaanite Gods.

One of them a God or a worshipper of Gods...

...with his head lopped off.

This guy's head was taken right off...

...by somebody with a very big sword.

Who did that?

Well, they say they don't know if there was a Joshua or not.

One thing that they do know,

is that the bible says that when Joshua came through Hazor,

he b*rned it. He destroyed it.

He went after the Canaanite Gods.

This is exactly the kind of stuff...

...that Joshua and the incoming Israelites did not like.

They cut these things down.

They toppled them to the ground and then, guess what?

That's exactly how the archaeologists found them,

toppled to the ground in a destruction layer.

That was different than other cultures...

...because polytheistic culture, the pagan culture,

was accepting of many Gods.

But here you had a revolution according to the Bible.

A revolution, one God, a God...

...that didn't tolerate the worshipping of stones,

of standing stones and of Gods and Goddesses.

[SIMCHA] So we have plenty of evidence of gods,

but our man, Joshua, is a shadowy figure.

The Bible's full of his stories...

...but most of his exploits wouldn't leave any evidence.

Here's Joshua's problem:

He's famous because he won battles,

and that means destroying things.

He didn't build things for us to find,

he knocked them over, or burnt them,

or put them to the sword.

Joshua :.

[FEMALE VOICE] And he utterly destroyed...

[SIMCHA] Other stories give us better clues...

...as to whether or not our man existed.

The Bible says Joshua conquered cities...

...including Hazor, Jericho, Jerusalem, Lakish and Megiddo.

Many of these places can still be found today.

Professor Finkelstein studied a number of them.

He says there's no way Joshua conquered all cities...

...because years ago...

...some of these cities didn't exist.

When you come to Joshua, we see :

that many of the sites mentioned...

...in the book of Joshua,

regarding the conquest of Canaan...

...in the supposedly in the th century BC,

had not at all existed at that time.

-It didn't exist at the time of Joshua.

I mean, there is no Ai at the site of Ai.

There is no Arad at the site of Arad.

I'm speaking about th century.

If you take the list of conquered cities in Joshua ,

or in the stories themselves and you compare the list...

...to what we know today from archaeology,

you get two completely different stories. Completely.

The archaeology says one thing-

I mean, most of the-

-and the Bible says-

-most of the places had not been inhabited...

...in the late Bronze Age.

[SIMCHA] But is Professor Finkelstein...

...looking in the right time?

Consider this: future archaeologists...

...search for evidence of World w*r II in , no problem.

But what if they get the date wrong and look in ?

Misjudged twenty years, World w*r II disappears.

If we want to find Joshua, we need to know where-

Yeah, where? Where?

[SIMCHA] -and when, to look.

Difficult questions. But here's an easy one:

how does a broken pot and a mini skirt...

...help us to date Joshua?

[SIMCHA] We're looking for Joshua...

...but how do we decide which year to find him in?

Well we use a broken pot and a mini skirt.

One of the most important means to assign a date...

...is pottery archaeology.

Pottery changes all the time,

pottery changes rather quickly...

...because it breaks, because it's cheap to make.

So once it breaks you make a new one, and fashion-

It's like future archaeologists will be able to tell by-

By models of cars. -By cars.

By cars, by dresses.

One year all the women go with short dresses,

another year they go with long dresses

But then they go to short dresses again?

That confuses future archaeologist.

But then you put it together with something else.

Shorter dress, the long dress with this type of car-

You have to match it all up.

-and once you get a starting point you go with it, okay?

[SIMCHA] Both Prof. Ben-Tor and Prof.Finkelstein...

...try to solve parts of Joshua's puzzle...

...with bits of broken pottery.

But reconstructing the past is a Humpty Dumpty task.

All the king's horses and all the king's men ...

...don't always agree on what goes when.

We're trying to tell a story, a tale of heroes, villains,

battles and conquests,

but our clues are bits of smashed pottery.

Three thousand-year-old smashed pottery.

And if that sounds tough, how can we tackle Joshua's miracles?

The book of Joshua says walls fall when a trumpet sounds,

the sun stands still, the river Jordan parts.

But consider this question:

do some of the things we call miracles...

...have natural explanations?

We've got these stories that include...

...aspects of the miraculous,

of the superhuman, that the archaeological record...

...cannot comment on, one way or the other.

[horns sounding]

[stones rumbling]

Do you think he actually conquered Jericho?

Probably not, but you'll never know.

If he conquered Jericho...

...it certainly wasn't the way it's depicted...

...in the Hebrew Bible and there's a certain logic-

Why not, why not? We just experienced-

We just experienced this tsunami...

...that k*lled a quarter of a million people, okay?

Walls of water came on people.

Now it could be that if we didn't have, you know,

all these news and photographs and everything,

that people later would say, walls of water,

a quarter of a million people, impossible.

It must be mythological.

Why do you assume that it didn't happen?

Jericho was in an earthquake zone,

they marched around, they tooted their horns,

an earthquake came, you can argue about why did it come,

was it just a coincidence? Why couldn't it happen?

But you see, don't you see what you're doing?

In your attempt to preserve the literal text of the Bible...

...you have just added something that is not mentioned...

...in the Hebrew Bible and doesn't appear.

Doesn't what?

An earthquake. There is no mention-

There are all kinds of weird things happened...

...around Joshua's time according to the Bible.

The sun stood still. The Jordan River got blocked up.

That happens constantly. It's been documented scientifically.

That the sun stood still?

No that the river, the Jordan River gets blocked for days on end,

because of earthquake activity...

...and because of rocks falling into the thing.

So in other words you're a Velikovskian,

you have a catastrophic-

Oh, for those who don't know, that's a big insult.

[laughs]

[SIMCHA] Immanuel Velikovsky.

A s academic who said...

...comets caused the Biblical plagues.

Scientists called him a crackpot.

Since then scientists have come to accept...

...that comets have caused catastrophes,

like wiping out the dinosaurs.

So, could other natural disasters...

...be a plague in Joshua's tale?

[SIMCHA] Is there any way we can explain...

...some of Joshua's miracles based on natural phenomena?

Dr Charles Pellegrino is a scientist...

...with a taste for disaster:

Sodom and Gomorrah, Pompeii, Atlantis.

The Bible says when Joshua conquered Israel,

Canaan, the Jordan River stopped flowing...

...and he crossed over, they came to Jericho,

they blew the ram horns and the walls came tumbling down.

Skeptics come and say this is mythology,

I don't even have to investigate it.

You come and say, sorry, it's geology.

-Yeah, we know it's a tremendous earthquake zone.

Couple of times a century there's a quake,

which also affects Jericho even today.

And you get these landslides...

...and for up to a day or two the river no longer flows...

...because there's an artificial dam along the Jordan valley...

...and here you have an association...

...with the tumbling of Jericho's walls,

that the river stops flowing.

[SIMCHA] Let's sum up for a moment.

We've looked for Joshua in miracles,

in literary theory, in archaeology.

It's time to return to where we started, Hazor.

Does Professor Ben-Tor think Joshua is the culprit?

The one who burnt Hazor? Why can't it be that simple?

Because you may have all kinds of alternative explanations.

Such as?

Such as, X destroyed Hazor.

Mr. X?

X. Give me whoever you want.

The Egyptians, the Syrians-

And the Israelites years later say "you see, we did it."

It was my granddad!

Because in order to be sure of what you're saying,

we need to find a sign here saying:

I, Joshua conquered Hazor...

...just like it says in the Bible.

Since I believe this is never going to happen,

it will be from now on a matter of common sense.

You said, it will always be a matter of common sense.

What does your common sense tell you?

The Egyptians never claimed that they destroyed Hazor.

The Philistines never claimed and they don't claim anything.

But the Philistines>were never here.

It was too inland and we never find any, even one,

Philistine pot shard here.

The Canaanites.

Which Canaanite city was capable of destroying Hazor?

So who is left? But, a conglomerate of people,

Bedouins of various kinds, who destroyed Hazor.

And many years later, they were called Israelites.

It is an option, logical, but I cannot prove it.

[SIMCHA] Did Joshua lead those Israelites?

Most evidence speaks to Joshua's role...

...as conquering general, a righteous destroyer.

But evidence of his creation surrounds us:

from Joshua came Israel, from Israel, Judaism,

Christianity, Islam.

And so much of our world's culture.

You can argue myth or man,

but there's no denying Joshua's legacy.