At ten o'clock in the morning of the day following the events I have described, the trial of Dmitri Karamazov began in our district court.

I hasten to emphasize the fact that I am far from esteeming myself capable of reporting all that took place at the trial in full detail, or even in the actual order of events. I imagine that to mention everything with full explanation would fill a volume, even a very large one. And so I trust I may not be reproached for confining myself to what struck me. I may have selected as of most interest what was of secondary importance, and may have omitted the most prominent and essential details. But I see I shall do better not to apologise. I will do my best and the reader will see for himself that I have done all I can.

—The narrator of The Brothers Karamazov, upon beginning his account of the trial of Dmitri Karamazov

When I first began teaching courses in the history of Israel or in biblical archaeology, I would devote considerable time to reconstructing the Israelite settlement in Canaan. Each time, students would ask, "Why do we need to reconstruct the history of the Israelite settlement? Doesn't the Bible give us an exact historical report as to how the Israelites came into Canaan?" Each semester, as I sought to begin teaching on the Israelite settlement, someone would inevitably raise their hand and ask these questions. It did not make sense to these students why we needed to make a full-blown historical and archaeological reconstruction of the "conquest" when we have accounts of the process in the books of Joshua and Judges. Over time, I added an entirely new component to these classes, preceding any discussion of the "conquest" itself, in which the question of why one must reconstruct the Israelite settlement was addressed. The answer has to do with the intent of the biblical writers. Were they trying to write a full, comprehensive history? Or were they doing something else? And if so, what was it? In this chapter, we will explore these questions first by reviewing the history of biblical archaeology and the "conquest," followed by an examination of history and historiography, and then by looking at the book of Joshua itself.

BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE "CONQUEST"

A crisis in Israelite historiography has been percolating in recent years. That the crisis may have reached a boiling point may be indicated by the recent publication of a volume of essays by European scholars who seek to address the question of whether it is even possible to write a history of Israel. Many of the contributors to this volume say no. The current skepticism seems to be a swinging of the pendulum away from the Biblical Theology Movement of the 1940s through the 1960s, which was made up of North American and European Protestants who, while they acknowledged the legitimacy of historical criticism, held strongly to the concept of divine revelation in history. In line with its conscious orientation to reading the Bible for the church, those associated with the Biblical Theology Movement sought to recover the Bible as a theological book, emphasize its unity, make central God's revelation of God's self in history, and stress the distinctiveness of the biblical perspective. G. Ernest Wright established himself as one of the major representatives of the Biblical Theology Movement with his monograph God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital, in which he argued, "In Biblical faith everything depends upon whether the central events actually occurred," and, "To participate in Biblical faith means that we must indeed take history seriously as the primary data of the faith." Wright believed "the Bible, unlike the other religious literature of the world, is not centered in a series of moral, spiritual and liturgical teachings, but in the story of a people who lived at a certain time and place." If those events did not happen, then the biblical faith is erroneous. It was his understanding of the importance of the historicity of biblical events that led Wright to place such an emphasis on archaeology. He explained, "The intensive study of the biblical archaeologist is thus the fruit of the vital concern for history which the Bible has instilled in us.... Biblical theology and biblical archaeology must go hand in hand, if we are to comprehend the Bible's meaning." Another of Albright's disciples, J. Bright, went as far as to argue that the locus of authority for the interpretation of Scripture had shifted from theological approaches to the "one admissible method for arriving at the meaning of the biblical text: the grammatico-historical method," which Z. Zevit has correctly understood to have "included control of data from excavations."

This approach led to what some have perceived as a parochial and reactionary character in archaeology that became preoccupied with the idea that "archaeology confirms biblical history," and nowhere was this application of biblical archaeology seen to be more apropos than with regard to the "conquest." In the middle of the twentieth century, English language scholarship on ancient Israel was dominated by W. F. Albright, who promoted what came to be known as the "Conquest Model," which will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that this is the theory that the Israelites gained their homeland in Canaan solely as the result of war. In 1935, Albright synthesized the archaeological evidence available at the time and made the case that enough evidence was available to reconstruct a chronological outline of the Israelite conquest. By 1937, he concluded that the archaeological evidence clearly demonstrated that the Israelites had carried out a wholesale conquest of the land of Canaan at the end of the thirteenth century B.C.E. This view was adopted by Albright's disciples, especially G. E. Wright. Both Albright and Wright later acknowledged a somewhat more flexible interpretation of the book of Joshua and the conquest, but they continued to defend the Conquest Model with the trowel, and it reigned while they were alive. The Conquest Model has often been accepted by noncritical biblical students and by many biblical scholars as the "biblical view" of how Israel emerged in Canaan, and it has continued to garner some support among evangelical scholars even today.

In about the mid-twentieth century, however, cracks began to show in the Conquest Model as discrepancies began to emerge between the account of the conquest in the book of Joshua (as perceived by...