The walls of Jericho
Israel crossed the Jordan and marched around Jericho for seven days. On the seventh, the priests blew the trumpets, the people shouted, and the wall fell down flat.
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The whole story
Before the walls fell, Joshua sent two spies into Jericho, and Rahab, whose house was on the wall, hid them under stalks of flax on her roof and let them down by a cord through her window. They told her to bind a line of scarlet thread in the window, and when the city fell, she and all her family were spared.
The Jordan was in flood, but when the priests carrying the ark set their feet in it, the waters stood up in a heap far upstream, and the people crossed over on dry ground. Then a captain of the host of the LORD appeared to Joshua with a drawn sword and told him to loose his shoe, for the place where he stood was holy.
Jericho is among the oldest towns on earth, with a stone tower built some ten thousand years ago, long before Joshua’s day. When its walls fell, and whether in Joshua’s time, archaeologists still argue: John Garstang dated a collapse to about Joshua’s era, Kathleen Kenyon dated it centuries earlier, and the debate goes on.
the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat
Joshua 6:20, KJV
Where it happened
Jericho, Tell es-Sultan, Jericho.
Tell es-Sultan, the mound of old Jericho, by the spring at the edge of the modern town.
Every story stands at its place on the Worldwide Watch map: the Bible’s world, on the map.
More from the Exodus
Exodus to Joshua
Sources and editorial method
Research and editorial references used for this page include:
- The King James Bible, as published by bible-api.com
- The Book of Enoch, translated by R. H. Charles (1917), Project Gutenberg
Every story is told from the King James Bible, and from the Book of Enoch in R. H. Charles’s translation (1917) where a story names it. Every quotation was checked word for word against those texts. Where a place is not known, the page says so. The paintings and the narration were made for the house.
