Ai (Canaan) - Wikipedia
excerpt:
Up through the 1920s a "positivist" reading of the archeology to date was prevalent — a belief that archeology would prove, and was proving, the historicity of the
Exodus and Conquest narratives that dated the Exodus in 1440 BC and Joshua's conquest of Canaan around 1400 BC.
[3]:117 And accordingly, on the basis of excavations in the 1920s the American scholar
William Foxwell Albright believed that Et-Tell was Ai.
[3]:86
However, excavations at Et-Tell in the 1930s found that there was a fortified city there during the Early Bronze Age, between 3100 and 2400 BCE, after which it was destroyed and abandoned;
[5] the excavations found no evidence of settlement in the Middle or Late Bronze Ages.
[3]:117 These findings, along with excavations at
Bethel, posed problems for the dating that Albright and others had proposed, and some scholars including
Martin Noth began proposing that the Conquest had never happened but instead was an
etiological myth; the name meant "the ruin" and the Conquest story simply explained the already-ancient destruction of the Early Bronze city.
[3]:117
[6][7] Archeologists also found that the later
Iron Age I village appeared with no evidence of initial conquest, and the Iron I settlers seem to have peacefully built their village on the forsaken mound, without meeting resistance.
[8]:331–32
There are five main hypotheses about how to explain the biblical story surrounding Ai in light of archaeological evidence. The first is that the story was created later on; Israelites related it to Joshua because of the fame of his great conquest. The second is that there were people of Bethel inhabiting Ai during the time of the biblical story and they were the ones who were invaded. In a third, Albright combined these two theories to present a hypothesis that the story of the Conquest of Bethel, which was only a mile and a half away from Ai, was later transferred to Ai in order to explain the city and why it was in ruins. Support for this can be found in the Bible, the assumption being that the Bible does not mention the actual capture of Bethel, but might speak of it in memory in Judges 1:22–26.
[9]:80-82 Fourth,
Callaway has proposed that the city somehow angered the Egyptians (perhaps by rebelling, and attempting to gain independence), and so they destroyed it as punishment.
[10] The fifth is that Joshua's Ai is not to be found at et-Tell, but a different location entirely.
Most archaeologists support the identification of Ai with et-Tell.
Koert van Bekkum writes that "Et-Tell, identified by most scholars with the city of Ai, was not settled between the Early Bronze and Iron Age
