Joshua 6

There was no Jericho when Joshua lived, most archaeologists say—with a few exceptions. Jericho was a 150-year-old ghost town when Israelites reportedly arrived. Nomads attracted to the many springs in this oasis town, settled there around 10,000 BC. Most archaeologists seem to agree that the city walls fell in about 1550 BC, a century or more before Joshua is thought to have arrived. Most archaeologists say the city wasn’t rebuilt until the time of Israel’s kings, several centuries later. Ruins of the walls suggest they fell outward. That would have provided ramps into the city, which attackers could use like a bumpy sidewalk. Dissenting scholars say other scholars are misdating some of the artifacts among the ruins. These minority scholars date some of the pottery to the 1400s BC, when Israelites reportedly invaded the region. Regardless of the debate about timing, the walls crumbled, the city had been torched, and springtime grain was found untouched. Most invaders would not have left food like that. But the Israelites had to leave it because everything in the city belonged to God. They gave it to him in the way they gave any other offering. They killed the offering and burned it. The smoke rose to God as a pleasing scent of devotion (Exodus 29:18). Today, all that remains of Old Testament Jericho is a speed bump on the Jericho plains. It’s a dirt-covered mound called Tell es-Sultan, Arabic for “Hill of the Sultan.” The mound is over three football fields long and one and a half wide: about 350 by 150 yards or 320 by 137 meters. Archaeologists have shoveled through enough layers to designate Jericho the world’s oldest known city.

Also known as the Ark of the Covenant, a gold-plated box that held the Ten Commandments. It represented the presence of God among the Israelites, traveling with them and, in this case, ahead of them, in a line of marching warriors preparing to take down the city of Jericho.

Some wonder if there’s a natural explanation for the Jericho’s walls falling. One theory is that aftershocks from the possible quake that temporarily dammed the Jordan River several weeks earlier (see notes for 3:13) eventually finished the job of dropping Jericho’s walls. So, if it had been a miracle, it was a miracle of timing. But some say a theory like this diminishes the work of God. Others say if God created the world, he could use the laws of nature to accomplish his goals. He doesn’t have to sidestep nature to prove it’s him. Ruins of Jericho reveal that the city had double walls. The city sat on a mound of dirt built up from previous cities constructed and then destroyed by invaders. A retaining wall held the mound of dirt in place. The city’s outside wall rested on top of that retaining wall. An interior wall doubled the protection, unless it was the inside wall that fell outward, taking the outside wall with it.

The law of Moses demanded Israelites to kill them all. “When the LORD your God gives them to you, you’ll need to finish them off. After you defeat them in battle, wipe them out by killing them all. Don’t make any peace treaty with them. Don’t show them mercy” (Deuteronomy 7:2). Also: “They promised the LORD, ‘If you will let us defeat those people, we will annihilate all Canaanites and decimate their cities” (Numbers 21:2). The Hebrew word for “annihilate” is herem. Scholars describe it as a “curse of war” or a “ban.” The “ban” means that when soldiers conquer a city, for example, they are banned from keeping anything for themselves—everything in the city is under the curse of war and must die. Joshua fought by those rules. Many Christians today struggle with this order, which they say sounds like genocide. Others say if God ordered the people killed, it’s not our place to question it. Yet many seem to doubt that God did. They say an order like this in no way resembles the God we see in Jesus of the New Testament.

More literally, the LORD’s house, a sacred tent sometimes known as the Tabernacle. Only Moses and priests were allowed inside.