JERICHO

Jericho is one of the oldest towns in the world. Years ago archaeologists found the base of a tower dating back to the stone age around 9000 BC! The tower was 26-7 feet in diameter and 20 feet high. The wall remains are very thick, allowing space for houses or shops to be built into or on top of the walls. The tower was remarkable in that it was built with stone tools. Now Joshua showed up over 7500 years later!

People always try to deal with the walls coming down bit by explaining it, often by the old lock-step thing such as the military discovered on bridges. But these were not flimsy brick walls. Besides, the whole point of the story is that God did it. God let His people to conquer the land. The Biblical writer meant to communicate the Lord did a miracle. The same with Jonah. People keep trying to find a big enough fish or whale that it could swallow a man. But that’s not the point! The point is that Jonah was a miracle. Even if you don’t believe in miracles, it’s  pointless to try to prove something happened naturally, because the writer believed in miracles and that’s what he wrote about.

The book begins with the command and preparations to cross the Jordan. Then, as the Red Sea rolled back for Moses, the Jordan River rolled back as far as a place called “Adam” so Israel could cross on dry ground. The Ark of the Covenant went first, followed by the Tabernacle and the 12 tribes. Joshua had directed leaders of each tribe to take an appropriate stone from the river bed to set up on the opposite band as a memorial. In later generations, children and others would ask, “What mean these stones?” (aka What are these rocks doing here?), and their elders can relate the story of Israel passing on dry land and all that it entailed.

Before attacking the town, Josh sent out some spies to get the lay of the land. Apparently, during the day they could just wander in and look around. But someone tipped off the king, and he sent out a search party. The guys looked for a place to hide, and visited a house of prostitution, run by a woman named Rahab. She recognized who they were and reported the entire town was terrified of them. She hid them in exchange for their promise to save her and her family when Israel attacked. She succeeded and when it was safe, let them down by rope from her windows. She and her family were indeed saved.

A few miles across the river stood Jericho, strategically situated at the bottom of a long pass rising to the hill country where later Jerusalem would stand. That town was their first target, even with huge walls thick enough to support houses, perhaps built into the walls as well as on top. A formidable approach. A major point in the Bible is that Israel wins wars by the power of the Lord and only by His power. One way God demonstrates this is by off-the-wall tactics (pun intended).

You likely know the story. Israel marches around Jericho once a day for six days. On the seventh day, they march around seven times, the priests blow their ram horns (shophars), and the people shout. The walls fall flat. As I said above, the book says God did it. You will find no other answer within the pages. That’s exactly what the author intended.    

With no walls to stop them, the army of Israel rushed straight into the town, captured it, and wiped out its inhabitants. This was the first victory in Canaan itself, and the first piece of the promised land of the covenant that they owned.

One issue increasingly discussed today, which especially mature Christians need to look at is the Lord’s explicit command to kill everyone, men, women, and children. Critics today often point to places such as this and compare it to genocide or ethnic cleansing. How do you deal with that. Look at some facts first. If there are no survivors, there is no one left to take revenge. More important from the Biblical viewpoint, if there are no survivors, there is no one left to tempt Israel into idol worship. This temptation and frequent fall led the nation, along with other things such as injustice, to chase after other gods. Over-riding this from the author’s viewpoint is the fact that the land belongs to the Lord, not the Canaanites, nor indeed anyone. Later one could say that land belonged to Israel, but it was always provisional, so long as they obeyed. When they no longer obeyed, God took away their land.

When I was but a youth, there was a popular theological argument I heard rather a good deal. They called the argument “progressive revelation.” The basic idea was that God revealed Himself to the people as they were able to understand it. Most everyone follows that as far as Christ is concerned. Indeed the NT clearly teaches that Jesus’s revelation was what the prophets had looked forward to and had indeed prophesied. In the case of Jericho and other cities of Canaan, the principle went like this: God as we know Him today would not ask us to do that, but that was the way they understood Him in their culture. There are problems with this viewpoint, but it helps many people to deal with a difficult problem.