The Fall of Jericho #17

The fall of Jericho, recounted in Joshua 6, was the first city Israel conquered after crossing the Jordan into Canaan. Rather than a conventional siege, the city was taken through a week-long ritual procession that ended in a shout, and the narrative frames the victory as proof that success in the land depended on obedience to God’s instructions rather than on Israel’s own military strength.

Biblical Account

Before the march began, Joshua saw a man near Jericho standing with a drawn sword and asked whether he was for Israel or for its adversaries. The figure answered, “Nay; but as captain of the host of the LORD am I now come,” and Joshua fell on his face and worshiped; he was told to remove his sandal, “for the place whereon thou standest is holy” (Joshua 5:13-15) — language echoing God’s word to Moses at the burning bush. With the city “straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in,” God gave Joshua the plan: armed men, seven priests bearing rams’-horn trumpets, and the ark of the covenant would march around the city once daily for six days, then seven times on the seventh day, after which the people would shout at Joshua’s command and the wall would fall (Joshua 6:1-5).

Israel circled the city once daily for six days in silence but for the trumpets. On the seventh day the procession circled seven times, and when the priests sounded the long blast, the people shouted, and the wall “fell down flat,” so the army went up and took the city, each man going in “straight before him.” The city and everything in it was devoted to the LORD; silver, gold, and vessels of bronze and iron went to the treasury of the LORD’s house, and the rest was destroyed (Joshua 6:12-21). Only Rahab and her household were spared, as the spies had sworn. The city was burned, and Joshua cursed anyone who rebuilt it, warning that its foundation and its gates would cost the builder his sons (Joshua 6:22-27). Centuries later, Kings records that Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho under Ahab and lost a son at the foundation and another at the gates, “according to the word of the LORD, which he spake by Joshua the son of Nun” (1 Kings 16:34).

Theological Significance

The New Testament book of Hebrews cites Jericho as a model of faith: “By faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they were compassed about seven days,” paired immediately with Rahab, who “perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace” (Hebrews 11:30-31). The pairing is pointed — a Canaanite woman with no claim on Israel’s covenant is preserved through faith while the fortified city around her falls, and later New Testament genealogies count her among the ancestors of David. For the book of Joshua as a whole, Jericho sets the pattern that recurs through the conquest narratives: that victory in the land comes through trust in God’s word rather than through siege-craft or numbers.

Historical and Archaeological Notes

Jericho’s destruction and its relationship to the conquest narrative are genuinely disputed among archaeologists. Excavations at Tell es-Sultan, the site identified with ancient Jericho, show Bronze Age fortifications and destruction layers, but how these relate to a traditional conquest date — placed by different readings of the biblical chronology in either the fifteenth or the thirteenth century BC — remains contested. Kathleen Kenyon’s mid-twentieth-century excavations concluded the site was largely unoccupied during the period many scholars associate with the conquest, a conclusion some later archaeologists have challenged on methodological grounds. No consensus has been reached, and any specific correlation between a destruction layer and the biblical account should be read as one interpretation among several, not a settled fact.