The city of Hazor lay almost nine miles north of the Sea of Galilee. During Joshua’s time, it was a Canaanite stronghold in northern Palestine. In conquering Canaan, as Joshua marched his army northward, he was confronted by a coalition of forces under the leadership of Jabin, king of Hazor. The Israelites defeated this confederation and burned Hazor to the ground (Joshua 11:1-14).
In excavations at Hazor (1955-1958, 1968), Yigael Yadin discovered evidence that this city had been destroyed in the 13th century B.C. He identified it with Joshua’s conquest. The problem was this did not harmonize with scriptural chronology regarding the time of the exodus from Egypt. First Kings 6:1 indicates the exodus occurred some 480 years prior to the fourth year of Solomon’s reign (c. 966 B.C.), thus in the mid-15th century B.C. Critics simply dismissed 1 Kings 6:1 as an addition of some later time, and therefore chronologically worthless. It is interesting to note, however, that “the name of the month which appears in that text is the archaic form of the name and not the late one” (Davis, 1971).
The fact of the matter is, Professor Yadin’s discoveries revealed that there were two destructions of Hazor — one in the 13th century B.C. and another in the 15th century B.C. (Avi-Yonah, 1976, 2:481-482). Actually, this is precisely the picture presented in the Old Testament. In addition to the conquest of Hazor during the time of Joshua in the mid-15th century B.C., two centuries later, in the period of Israel’s judges, the Israelites again engaged the king of Hazor in battle. Under the leadership of Deborah and Barak (c. 1258 B.C.), the armies of Hazor, under Sisera, were decisively defeated (Judges 4:22ff) and as Professor Siegfried H. Horn has observed, “undoubtedly Hazor was destroyed” (1963). Once more, the precise accuracy of the biblical record has been vindicated and the charges of liberal critics have been shown to be baseless.
