Joshua and Jericho
Israel marches round a locked city for seven days, shouts once, and the wall falls. What happened at Jericho, and an honest look at the part people skip.
The story
Jericho was locked down. Nobody in, nobody out, because everyone inside knew Israel was camped nearby. Before anything happens, God tells Joshua the city is already his. Then he gives the plan, and the plan is odd. No siege. No ladders. Walk round it.
Once a day, for six days. Armed men in front, seven priests with seven ram's horn trumpets, then the ark of the covenant, then the rear guard. The trumpets blow the whole way round. Nobody says a word. Joshua's orders are that not a single shout, not a single sound, comes out of anyone's mouth until he gives the signal. Then back to camp. Then do it again tomorrow.
Picture the seventh lap on the seventh day. It's dawn. They've done this circuit thirteen times now. Everyone on the wall has watched them do it, and the silence must have been the strangest part. Then the long blast, and Joshua tells them: shout, because the LORD has given you the city.
They shout. The wall falls down flat. The text says every man went straight in ahead of him, which means there was no gate to fight through, just open ground where a wall had been.
Then the part that gets left out of the children's version. The city was ‘devoted’, which meant everything in it was destroyed: people, animals, all of it, by the sword, and then the city burned. Only the silver, gold, bronze and iron went to the LORD's treasury. And only one household walked out alive.
That household was Rahab's. A prostitute who had hidden Israel's two spies earlier, and been promised her family's lives in return. The spies go in, bring out Rahab, her parents, her siblings, everyone she has, and the text says she lived among Israel from then on. Joshua ends the chapter with a curse on anyone who rebuilds Jericho, and his name spreads across the land.
The verse to keep
But Rahab the prostitute, her father’s household, and all that she had, Joshua saved alive. She lives in the middle of Israel to this day, because she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.
But Rahab the prostitute, her family and everything she owned, Joshua kept alive. She's lived among Israel ever since, because she hid the men Joshua sent to scout out Jericho.
Out of a whole city, the one person the story rescues is the outsider with the worst reputation, because she trusted God before Israel's army ever showed up.
What it actually means
The point the text keeps pressing is that Israel did nothing that takes a city. They walked, they blew horns, they kept quiet, they shouted. The wall fell because God said it would. For the first readers, that was the lesson: the land was a gift, not a conquest they could take credit for. The book of Joshua says so out loud more than once.
Then there's the killing. There's no honest way to read Joshua 6 without noticing that a whole city died, and no honest way to make that painless. Christians have wrestled with it for two thousand years and haven't settled it. Some read it as a one-off judgment on a specific culture at a specific time, tied to the land promise and never repeated as a pattern. Some read the language of total destruction as the ancient war-rhetoric it resembles, meaning ‘we won decisively’ rather than a literal body count. Some just sit with it as a hard text. What nobody gets to do is use it as a model. Nothing in the New Testament points anyone toward it as one.
And Rahab. A foreign woman in the most despised job in the city is the one person in Jericho who lives, because she believed what she'd heard about Israel's God and acted on it. She turns up in Jesus's family tree in Matthew 1 and in the faith chapter of Hebrews 11. If you want to know what the story thinks matters, look at who it saves.
Worth arguing about
- 1Thirteen silent laps round a city that's watching you. What would that have felt like on day four?
- 2The story saves one family, and it's the family nobody would have picked. What does that tell you about who the Bible thinks is ‘in’?
- 3What do you do with the killing? Is ‘it was a different time’ enough, or is it not?
- 4Where in your life are you being asked to keep showing up before there's any visible result?
Read it yourself: Joshua 6
World English Bible. 27 verses.
Whole book: Joshua