02/11/2026
There’s a spot in the hills north of Jerusalem where you can stand between two ancient towns and know, with reasonable confidence, that Abraham stood there too.
In the Torah portion of L**h L**ha (“Go Forth”), Abraham enters the land of Canaan. He passes through Shechem, then heads to the hill country and pitches his tent with Bet El (“House of God”) to the west and Ai to the east. He builds an altar there and calls out to God. Later, he returns to the exact same spot. His grandson Jacob comes back to it too, and dreams of a ladder stretching up to heaven. Centuries after that, Joshua fights his most famous battle after Jericho: the battle of Ai.
That makes this one of the rare places where you can check the Torah’s account against the ground itself. And for about a hundred years, archaeologists said the Torah failed the test. Ai wasn’t there. Nobody lived there in Abraham’s time, Jacob’s time or Joshua’s time. The man who excavated it called it an embarrassment to anyone who takes the Bible and archaeology seriously.
In recent decades, much of that has changed, though plenty remains hotly debated. So for the second episode of our series Fact Checking the Bible, I decided to go see for myself. Today’s two leading candidates for Ai are Khirbet el-Maqatir and et-Tell. As I often do, I wrote to an archaeologist who worked the sites: Dr. Scott Stripling, one of the leading figures in the region, who directed the digs at Khirbet el-Maqatir for years. I expected some advice on what to look for. Instead, he wrote back that he’d be there himself in October and offered to take me.
How did anyone figure out where these places were to begin with?
In 1838, an American professor named Edward Robinson rode through the hill country on horseback with an Arabic-speaking missionary, asking villagers the names of their villages. His idea was simple and brilliant: the Arabic names had preserved the Hebrew ones. Beit Lahm was Bet L**hem (Bethlehem, “House of Bread”). Anata was Anatot. And Beitin, a village twelve miles north of Jerusalem, sounded a lot like Bet El.
Ai was trickier. The name means “the ruin,” and the hill country is full of ruins. But about a mile east of Beitin sits a large mound the locals call et-Tell, Arabic for “the mound.” The Torah places Ai east of Bet El. In 1924, William Albright, the greatest biblical archaeologist of his day, declared it a match. He dug Beitin himself and found a Middle Bronze Age town, walls and all. Bet El checked out.
Then someone went to dig Ai. Judith Marquet-Krause was a young Jewish archaeologist, born in Palestine and trained in Paris, and Baron Rothschild funded her excavation. She was 27 when she began at et-Tell in 1933. In three seasons she uncovered a large city with a temple, a palace and a wall, all from the Early Bronze Age, roughly 3000 to 2400 BCE. Then came a burn layer. Then nothing. She died in 1936 at just 30, before she could publish. Her husband released her notes after her death.
Thirty years later, an American named Joseph Callaway returned to et-Tell and dug there from 1964 to 1972 to see if she’d missed anything. She hadn’t. The city was destroyed around 2400 BCE and then sat empty for 1,200 years. Around 1200 BCE, a small village of a few hundred people appeared, lasted about a century and vanished.
Now line that up against the Torah. Abraham arrives in the early second millennium BCE. Joshua doesn’t fit either, wherever you date him. No walled city to burn, no king of Ai, no gate. Just a mound with a name that means “ruin.”
Stripling told me how the problem looked from the inside. Callaway, a Christian, concluded there was simply nobody there when the Bible says the conquest happened. “He said this is an embarrassment, nothing’s here.” The timing made it worse. In the 1950s, Kathleen Kenyon had published her excavations at Jericho, which also seemed to contradict the biblical date. Then in the sixties came the same story at Ai.
“If you lose Ai,” I said, “you’ve lost the conquest.”
“You’ve lost the conquest,” he agreed. “You don’t have a historical narrative.”
Amihai Mazar, one of Israel’s most careful archaeologists, wrote that there was no second-millennium Canaanite city at et-Tell “or at any other site in the region.”
Critics seized on this. The German scholar Martin Noth argued the story was invented backward: the Israelites came across a huge ruin named “the ruin” and made up a battle to explain how it got that way. Albright, the man who had put Ai at et-Tell in the first place, suggested the battle was real but probably happened at Bet El, and the story drifted to Ai through later editors. The modern version, found in books like The Bible Unearthed, is the simplest of all: whoever wrote the account had never seen a Bronze Age Ai, because there wasn’t one. We’ll come back to that.
In 1970, a man named David Livingston published a paper that turned the question on its head. Livingston wasn’t an archaeologist. He ran a small Christian research group, the Associates for Biblical Research, which he’d founded in the 1960s largely because the problem of Ai bothered him so much. His paper argued that everyone had been wrong about where Bet El was, and therefore wrong about Ai.
The professionals laughed. He was an amateur, after all. But his argument was interesting. Around the year 300, the bishop Eusebius compiled a guide to biblical places with distances. He put Bet El at the twelfth milestone from Jerusalem on the road to Shechem. Measure it today and Beitin sits at the fourteenth. The town at the twelfth is el-Bireh, a large modern town on the ridge. Robinson, Livingston said, got the name right and the distance wrong. Bet El was el-Bireh, which would put Ai at a ruin east of it called Khirbet Nisya.
Standing on the ridge, Stripling pointed it out for me. Beitin, which has been excavated, was in one direction. El-Bireh was in the other, and within it sits Ras et-Tahuna, the town’s high point, which has never been excavated. “If you wanted to settle that, you’d excavate there,” he said. “Not an easy dig, though.”
Anson Rainey, who knew the geography of this land better than anyone alive, wrote a reply that was, let’s say, less than gentle. Beitin preserves the name, he argued, and Roman milestones weren’t that precise.
Livingston believed the site of Ai, and its name, might have migrated to a nearby hill. He went to Khirbet Nisya, which we passed on the drive in, and as far as Stripling knows, he went to his grave believing it might be Ai. But the idea never caught on with other scholars. There was no fortification, and even a ruined wall leaves stones lying around.
Still, Livingston had accomplished something. He got people looking at the ridge again. And on that ridge was a mound nobody had dug.
Khirbet el-Maqatir (khirbet is Arabic for “ruin”) lies about a kilometer west of et-Tell, on the road up from Jericho, at the head of a valley. In 1995, Bryant Wood, an American archaeologist who had already built a career arguing against the consensus, began digging there. Stripling later took over and dug until 2016.
Wood and his colleague Gary Byers had worked with Livingston at Khirbet Nisya and concluded it couldn’t be Ai without fortifications, so they went looking elsewhere. Early explorers had left a clue. Locals told Ernst Sellin, famous for his work at Jericho, and other excavators in the early 1900s that Khirbet el-Maqatir was Ai. It was the local tradition.
“I thought it was et-Tell,” I said.
“No, they never pointed to that hill,” Stripling said. Locals sometimes mentioned a nearby site called Khirbet Haiyan, later dismissed because it only dated to the Second Temple period. But others pointed here. Following up on Sellin’s lead, Wood found Bronze Age pottery on the surface. And the site was small, which is exactly what you want for Ai. The biblical text says it was smaller than Gibeon and smaller than Jericho. That was the beginning. A license followed, and in 1995 the excavation began.
“So what makes you think this is Ai?” I asked.
To keep things objective, a researcher named Peter Briggs drew up a screen of fifteen criteria at the start of the excavation. If the Bible is giving us straight information, the site has to pass archaeologically and topographically.
Some criteria were geographic. The site had to be in the hill country of Benjamin, west of Jericho and east of Bet El, and within sight of Bet El. The landscape had to match the battle scene in the Book of Joshua: a hill to the north, and a large valley to the west where an army could hide, invisible from both Ai and Bet El. The city itself had to be fortified, occupied in the Late Bronze Age, with a gate facing north. It had to be smaller than Gibeon. Other criteria were possible indicators: signs that women lived there, since the biblical text clearly suggests they did, even though many fortresses and citadels had none. And broken idols, which would point to the arrival of a people commanded to destroy them.
Before the digging started, the team already knew a few things. The site roughly matched the geography, and it was smaller than Gibeon. That was a few boxes ticked. There were many more to go.
Stripling had me sit down in a stone chamber on the north side of the site.
“This is where the investigation really picked up,” he said, “because the gate was on the north.” That matters, because Joshua 8:11 places the gate of Ai on the north. Had it been on any other side, the expedition wouldn’t have lasted long. They would have tested the hypothesis, watched it fail and moved on.
In 1995, Byers and Wood found the first socket stone, still in place, right beside what looked like a gate complex.
“Explain what a socket stone is,” I said.
A gate’s heavy doors pivot on posts, he explained, and each post sits in an upper and a lower socket stone. This gate had four chambers with a road running between them, and doorways with sockets. An attacker breaks through the first door, then faces another, and another. Altogether the team found eight socket stones in this area. “Why would you have eight socket stones in this spot if it’s not a gate?”
The chamber we were sitting in, he said, is the only one of the Late Bronze Age gate that survives. Why did later builders leave it when they scavenged the rest? Because they turned it into a w**e press. The bedrock floor is tiled with tesserae, small mosaic tiles. Workers filled it with grapes, trod on them, and the juice drained into a vat. Every village had olive presses and w**e presses, so why build one from scratch when a perfectly good chamber was sitting right there? The chamber was used into the Late Bronze Age and repurposed as a w**e press in the Second Temple period.
I was getting very excited at this point, and here’s why. There’s a long-running debate over this site. Supporters point to this gate as key evidence. Critics say it was a w**e press. That was exactly what I’d come to ask him about, and he’d just brought it up himself.
I’d seen a video by Joel Kramer, who once dug here with Stripling. Kramer explains that he believed for years this was the Late Bronze Age gate of Ai, until he brought three experts to the site, a geologist and two archaeologists. Each of them, independently, immediately identified it as a Byzantine w**e press. Two plastered vats for collecting grape juice were later found in front of it, and the excavation report itself calls the structure a w**e press. For Kramer and his colleague Titus Kennedy, that was reason to reject the gate theory.
“I saw that too, and I pushed back,” Stripling said. “I understand it’s a w**e press. I published it in 2023, in the final volume on Maqatir, as a w**e press from the late Second Temple period. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t also a Late Bronze Age gate chamber. Why else do we have a socket stone right there? You don’t have socket stones in w**e presses.” Kramer and Kennedy’s explanation, he said, is an oversimplification. “It’s not either/or. It’s both.”
“So it’s a w**e press repurposed from a gate?”
“That’s right.”
Continue reading: https://aish.com/fact-checking-the-bible-the-lost-city-of-ai/
