The Fall of Jericho

EA Baker
Dec 18, 2025
12 min read

Wars of the Bible

In the previous post, we examined one of the final episodes of Israel’s wilderness journey with the defeat of the five kings of Midian at God’s command. Under Moses’ leadership, twelve thousand Israelite warriors—one thousand from each tribe—marched against the Midianites in response to their role in leading Israel into sin and idolatry at Peor.

In a decisive encounter, the Israelites killed every male combatant, including the Midianite rulers Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba, and even Balaam son of Beor, who had counseled Midian to corrupt Israel spiritually. Cities and encampments were burned, captives and spoils brought back, and Israel’s enemies were thoroughly routed as part of fulfilling God’s judgment and preserving the covenant community on the plains of Moab near Jericho.

This campaign marked a transitional moment: with the threat of Midian subdued, Israel stood poised on the edge of the Promised Land. Next in their narrative comes perhaps the most iconic confrontation of the conquest period—the Fall of Jericho, where the people of Israel, under Joshua’s command and by God’s miraculous strategy, saw the walls of the great fortified city collapse in obedience to divine instruction.

The Fall of Jericho

6 Now Jericho was shut up inside and outside because of the people of Israel. None went out, and none came in. 2 And the Lord said to Joshua, “See, ^gI have given Jericho into your hand, with its king and mighty men of valor. 3 You shall march around the city, all the men of war going around the city once. Thus shall you do for six days. 4 Seven priests shall bear seven ^htrumpets of ⁱrams’ horns before the ark. On the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and ^jthe priests shall blow the trumpets. 5 And when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, when you hear the sound of the trumpet, then all the people shall shout with a great shout, and the wall of the city will fall down flat,¹ and the people shall go up, everyone straight before him.” 6 So Joshua the son of Nun called the priests and said to them, “Take up the ark of the covenant and let seven priests bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark of the Lord.” 7 And he said to the people, “Go forward. March around the city and let ^kthe armed men pass on before the ark of the Lord.”

8 And just as Joshua had commanded the people, the seven priests bearing the seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the Lord went forward, blowing the trumpets, with the ark of the covenant of the Lord following them. 9 The armed men were walking before the priests who were blowing the trumpets, and the ^lrear guard was walking after the ark, while the trumpets blew continually. 10 But Joshua commanded the people, “You shall not shout or make your voice heard, neither shall any word go out of your mouth, until the day I tell you to shout. Then you shall shout.” 11 So he caused the ark of the Lord to circle the city, going about it once. And they came into the camp and spent the night in the camp.

12 Then Joshua rose early in the morning, and ^mthe priests took up the ark of the Lord. 13 And the seven priests bearing the seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark of the Lord walked on, and they blew the trumpets continually. And the armed men were walking before them, and the rear guard was walking after the ark of the Lord, while the trumpets blew continually. 14 And the second day they marched around the city once, and returned into the camp. So they did for six days.

15 On the seventh day they rose early, at the dawn of day, and marched around the city in the same manner seven times. It was only on that day that they marched around the city seven times. 16 And at the seventh time, when the priests had blown the trumpets, Joshua said to the people, “Shout, for the Lord has given you the city. 17 And the city and all that is within it shall be ⁿdevoted to the Lord for destruction.² Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall live, because she ^ohid the messengers whom we sent. 18 But you, keep yourselves from the things devoted to destruction, lest when you have devoted them you take any of the devoted things and make the camp of Israel ^pa thing for destruction and ^qbring trouble upon it. 19 But all silver and gold, and every vessel of bronze and iron, are holy to the Lord; they shall go into the treasury of the Lord.” 20 So the people shouted, and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpet, the people shouted a great shout, and ^rthe wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they captured the city. 21 Then they ^sdevoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword.

22 But to the two men who had spied out the land, Joshua said, “Go into the prostitute’s house and bring out from there the woman and all who belong to her, ^tas you swore to her.” 23 So the young men who had been spies went in and brought out Rahab and ^uher father and mother and brothers and all who belonged to her. And they brought all her relatives and put them outside the camp of Israel.

24 And they burned the city with fire, and everything in it. ^vOnly the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord. 25 But Rahab the prostitute and her father’s household and all who belonged to her, Joshua saved alive. And ^wshe has lived in Israel to this day, because she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.

26 Joshua laid an oath on them at that time, saying, ^x“Cursed before the Lord be the man who rises up and rebuilds this city, Jericho.

“At the cost of his firstborn shall he

lay its foundation,

and at the cost of his youngest son

shall he set up its gates.”

27 So the Lord was with Joshua, and ^zhis fame was in all the land.

Joshua 6:1-27

Ancient battle scene with soldiers clashing on horses, surrounded by ruins. Intense actions, detailed armor, and a dramatic mood. Latin text below. — Plate 10 — *The Fall of Jericho*, depicting Israel’s conquest of the city, from *The Battles of the Old Testament* (The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

The Archaeology and History of Jericho

Ancient Jericho, the mound archaeologists call Tell es-Sultan, a few kilometres north of the modern Palestinian city of Jericho in the Jordan Valley, is one of the most intensely studied sites in the Near East. It’s also one of the oldest permanently settled places on Earth: excavation has revealed repeated occupation layers reaching back to the Epipalaeolithic and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (c. 10,000–7,000 BCE), a massive stone tower and a substantial stone-and-mudbrick wall in the earliest levels, and many later Bronze- and Iron-Age towns built and destroyed on the same spot. Those long sequences make Jericho archaeologically significant for both the origins of urban life and later Bronze-Age politics in Canaan.

The Location and Its Significance

Jericho lies in a small oasis fed by the perennial spring Ein es-Sultan on the northwest edge of the Dead Sea depression. That spring produced a reliable water source in an otherwise dry landscape, which explains continuous settlement there for millennia and the site’s repeated importance as a local economic and strategic hub on routes connecting the Transjordan, the Jordan Valley, and the hill country west of the river. Its long occupation, fertile palm groves, and position along north–south and east–west tracks made Jericho an obvious focal point for any people aiming to control movement and resources in the southern Levant.

Map showing Canaan area with locations: Bethel, Jericho, Jerusalem, Qumran. Jordan River flows into Dead Sea. Labels in black, blue. — Map of Jericho, Wilderness of Judea, and Qumran.

Here’s what archaeologists have found:

Neolithic monumentalism: in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) layers, archaeologists uncovered an impressive stone tower (often called the “Tower of Jericho”) and a substantial wall and ditch cut into bedrock, features sometimes interpreted as flood protection but frequently argued to be evidence of communal fortification or symbolic boundary-making around 8,000–7,500 BCE. These remain among the earliest examples of massive stone construction anywhere.
Multiple Bronze-Age cities: above the Neolithic levels are a succession of Chalcolithic and Bronze-Age towns. There are clear destruction horizons and rebuilding phases through the Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Ages; the Early Bronze occupation shows urban planning, while the Middle and Late Bronze layers show a fortified Canaanite city with towers and ramparts.
Destruction evidence: for many layers, archaeologists have recorded burned material, collapsed mudbrick walls, and other signs of violent or catastrophic abandonment. Exactly which destruction horizons match which historical events—if any—has been the core of scholarly debate.

Excavation History and the Shifting Scholarly Picture

Jericho’s modern archaeological history is long and complicated. Early investigators like Charles Warren (19th century) and the German team of Sellin and Watzinger (1907–1911) explored parts of the tell; John Garstang led larger excavations in the 1930s and argued he had found a Late Bronze/Iron-Age destruction consistent with a conquest around c. 1400 BCE, which he associated with the biblical account of Joshua.

However, the most influential work of the mid-20th century was Kathleen Kenyon’s excavation campaign (1952–58). Kenyon brought refined stratigraphic methods and radiocarbon-aware chronologies to the site. He concluded that the Late Bronze I occupation that Garstang thought he’d seen did not exist in the way previously imagined. She dated the final major Bronze Age destruction of the fortress (which she called City IV) to the end of the Middle Bronze Age (roughly c. 1550 BCE). She found little or no evidence for a fortified Late Bronze Age city that could have been destroyed around 1400 BCE, a conclusion that undermined a simple archaeological match for the Joshua story as traditionally dated. Kenyon’s publications reshaped the field and remain a core reference.

People and rubble cascade from a crumbling wall. In the background, a line of solemn people carry an ornate object. The sky is dark. — Gustave Doré, *The Walls of Jericho Fall Down* (1866).

Wood engraving from Doré’s English Bible, illustrating Joshua 5:16 and 6:1–10, 13–19, depicting the moment Israel’s shouts and trumpet blasts bring down the walls of Jericho under divine command.

The Ongoing Debate

Kenyon’s chronology did not end the argument. In later decades, some scholars—most prominently Bryant G. Wood—revisited pottery, radiocarbon data, and stratigraphy and argued for a later (c. 1400 BCE) destruction of the Jericho city-level that could align with a conventional biblical date for Joshua. That re-reading has been vigorously challenged by many other specialists, who find Kenyon’s Middle Bronze dating more convincing and emphasize that there is no uncontested Late Bronze fortified city at Jericho that neatly corresponds to the conquest narrative.

Recent syntheses of archaeology and biblical studies (for example, Finkelstein & Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed and other modern surveys) tend to treat the Book of Joshua as a later ideological account rather than a strictly historical record set in the Late Bronze Age; they point out mismatches between settlement evidence and the rapid military conquest described in the text.

The Newest Work in the Field

A sketch of ancient city walls with inner, outer, and retaining sections labeled. People walk outside. The scene is neutral in tone. — Illustration labeled by Galyn Wiemers, depicting the collapse of Jericho’s walls following Israel’s obedience to God’s command in the Book of Joshua.

Excavations and scientific analyses have continued into the 21st century, and teams working since 2019 have published interim reports and ceramic studies that revisit Bronze- and Iron-Age sequences with improved dating and new finds. UNESCO’s recent recognition of Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan as a World Heritage Site (2023) underscores the site’s exceptional prehistoric and Bronze Age value, independent of later interpretive debates about biblical history.

Modern scholarship therefore leans toward a picture in which Jericho was archaeologically significant across many millennia—an early, important, and repeatedly fortified settlement with several violent destructions—while the neat one-to-one match between a single Late Bronze destruction and the biblical Fall of Jericho remains highly contested. Recent field reports and specialist ceramic and radiocarbon work continue to refine the timing of the various destructions and how they should be read historically.

What to Make of the Evidence

Men in robes blow horns near a crumbling wall, holding a blue-covered ark. Background shows a crowd and grassy landscape, evoking drama. — The Providence Lithograph Company, *The Fall of Jericho* (1901).

Bible card illustration depicting Joshua 6:8–20, showing Israel marching around Jericho as priests sound the trumpets and the city’s walls collapse in obedience to God’s command.

When we read the biblical account of the walls of Jericho falling, we are working at the intersection of text, memory, and material culture. The archaeology gives us three firm takeaways to bring into a historical reading: (1) Jericho was real and regionally important; (2) it experienced multiple, well-documented destructions and rebuildings; and (3) the chronological and archaeological record does not offer a simple, unambiguous archaeological confirmation of the Joshua narrative as a single Late Bronze event. That leaves room for interpretive approaches that treat the biblical story as memory shaped around real places and destructions, even if the archaeological sequence is more complex and spread across centuries than a literal reading suggests.

Understanding God’s Judgment of Jericho

We have another difficult episode to process coming from our modern world. With the Fall of Jerusalem, we see a seemingly terrible scene as “[the Israelites] devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword. This naturally might raise many questions about God’s character and why such a thing was done.

The answer can be found in Leviticus:

22 “You shall therefore keep all my statutes and all my rules and do them, that the land where I am bringing you to live may not vomit you out. 23 And you shall not walk in the customs of the nation that I am driving out before you, for they did all these things, and therefore I detested them. 24 But I have said to you, ‘You shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess, a land flowing with milk and honey.’ I am the Lord your God, who has separated you from the peoples. 25 You shall therefore separate the clean beast from the unclean, and the unclean bird from the clean. You shall not make yourselves detestable by beast or by bird or by anything with which the ground crawls, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean. 26 You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.

Leviticus 22-26

It’s clear that as the Israelites were driving out the corrupt people of the land of Canaan, they were instructed not to take on their ways. The people of Jericho were the most depraved, taking part in a variety of sexual sins from bestiality to the abuse of children. And thus, God judged the city and destroyed it so that the Israelites would not be corrupted, as we saw with the Fall of the Five Kings of Midian.

My Spiritual Takeaways

The Fall of Jericho stands apart from the other events we’ve covered in this series so far because it was not an actual pitched battle. This was less about God granting the Israelites military victory and more about a culmination of multiple spiritual aspects leading to an Israelite win.

When God Speaks, We Should Listen

God directly speaks to Joshua and tells him what to do. There are countless moments across the Bible when people don’t listen to God, and it ends in disaster. When He speaks, we should take heed, for his plans are always intentional and will work out to be the best thing for us, even if we don’t have the vision or the subdued ego to see it.

God’s Plans Are Never On Our Timeline

We are an impatient people. We forget, because of our limited time here on Earth, that God is eternal and doesn’t align with our schedule or timing. I have personally experienced this in my own life. It’s one of the hardest things to give up to God: that the things we pray for or want might not be exactly what he has in mind, and that they might not be for right now. Viewing your situation through that lens helps you reframe it and let go of the anxiety and frustration that will inevitably seep into areas of your life where they don't belong. So, trust in God’s plan, and be patient.

The Lord Redeems the Faithful

God will use anyone and any situation for his grand plan. We’ll see that in the future when Nebuchadnezzar comes and conquers the Kingdom of Judah (which included Jerusalem), and the Assyrian conquest of Sumeria before. Such a seemingly terrible event, God used for his grand plan. We see a version of this on a smaller scale in this episode.

A prostitute, who shows faith in God by hiding Joshua’s spies, is spared from the destruction. It not only reveals God’s character of redemption and forgiveness, as well as his rewarding those who are faithful, but, in my mind, it also foreshadows what his son will do for all. That everyone can repent and accept Jesus as their savior, no matter how ugly their past might have been.

In the next blog, we’ll look once again at the unfaithfulness of the Israelites as they attempt to overcome the men of Ai.

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Sources

Biblia. (n.d.). Joshua 5:13–6:27 (English Standard Version). Retrieved December 16, 2025, from https://biblia.com/bible/esv/joshua-5-13--6-27
Bible Gateway. (n.d.). Leviticus 20–23 (English Standard Version). Retrieved December 16, 2025, from https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2020-23&version=ESV
Bible Study Tools. (2024, February 12). 7 powerful lessons from the fall of the walls of Jericho by Pamela Palmer. Retrieved December 16, 2025, from https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/powerful-lessons-from-the-fall-of-the-walls-of-jericho.html
Kennedy, T. (2023). The Bronze Age Destruction of Jericho, Archaeology, and the Book of Joshua. Religions, 14(6), Article 796. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14060796 MDPI
UNESCO World Heritage Centre. (2025). Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1687/ UNESCO World Heritage Centre
HolyLandSite.com. (n.d.). Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) overview: Joshua, walls fall down. https://www.holylandsite.com/jericho-tell-es-sultan holylandsite
Wood, B. G. (n.d.). Bryant G. Wood [Biographical entry]. Wikipedia. Retrieved [date accessed], from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryant_G._Wood en.wikipedia.org