Joshua 6: The Fall of Jericho: The Devoted City, and the Saved One

The most famous battle in the Bible is, strangely, barely a battle at all. The LORD's instructions to Joshua are not a war plan but something closer to a liturgy: for six days the army is to march once around the sealed city in silence, with seven priests blowing rams' horns before the ark of the covenant; on the seventh day they circle seven times, the priests sound a long blast, the people give a great shout — and the walls fall. No siege engines, no scaling of walls, no fighting until the very end; the city is given, not taken. And then the hard thing: Jericho is placed under the herem, devoted to destruction; at the edge of the sword they devote everything in the city to destruction — man and woman, young and old, and the animals — and burn it, sparing only Rahab and her household, who are brought out and given a home among Israel, while the silver and gold are put into the treasury of the LORD's house. Joshua pronounces a curse on anyone who would ever rebuild it. The Meaning will not look away from any of this.

Here it is — the chapter the whole book has been moving toward, and the one that has troubled the conscience of every honest reader of the Bible. We will not soften it, and we will not skip the reckoning, because to do either would betray the promise this project made on its first page. So let us hold several things together, none of them a tidy resolution.

First, the horror, named plainly. The text says Israel "devoted to destruction everything in the city—man and woman, young and old." Children. Infants. The animals. There is no reading through the rule of love on which the slaughter of children is anything but evil, and I will not perform the contortions by which it has sometimes been justified. The God revealed in Jesus — who took children in his arms and said the kingdom belongs to them, who warned that it would be better to be drowned than to harm one of them — does not command the killing of infants. Whatever Joshua 6 is, it cannot be a straight portrait of the heart of God, because we have seen that heart, and it is on a cross, not behind a sword raised over a child.

Second, the misuse, named and barred. This chapter, more than almost any other, has been the template for religious conquest. "God gave Israel the land and told them to destroy the inhabitants" became the script for the Crusades, for the European seizure of the Americas (where settlers cast themselves as Israel and Native peoples as Canaanites to be cleared), for apartheid, for every colonization that wanted a divine warrant. The walls of Jericho have been pointed to by men with swords, then guns, and Bibles for centuries. Every such use is a blasphemy, and the book's own governing rule — that any reading which does not build up the love of God and neighbor "has not yet been understood" — condemns it utterly. Jericho is not a license. It has never been a license.

Third, the history — and here Jericho is the single most famous case in all of biblical archaeology. The site has been excavated extensively, and the findings are sobering for anyone who reads the chapter as a battlefield report: at the time the conquest is usually dated, Jericho appears to have been a small, largely unwalled place, perhaps barely occupied at all — there is no destruction layer of the right era (the great burned city most archaeologists date some three centuries earlier, about 1550 BC, though a minority dispute the date), no fallen walls matching this account. Whatever lies behind the story, the sweeping military conquest the book describes does not appear to be a historical event in the way it is narrated. This fits everything we have already said: that these accounts were written down centuries later, in the total-war rhetoric every ancient nation used, as a people's theological origin-story rather than a war diary. And notice how the chapter itself signals that it is doing something other than reporting a massacre. The "battle" is told as a liturgy: seven priests, seven trumpets, seven days, seven circuits on the seventh day, the ark carried in procession, a sacred shout. Israel does no fighting at all until the very end; there is no siege, no assault — the walls simply fall, by God, while the people walk and worship. It reads far more like a worship service than a war. The point the writer is making is not "look how we slaughtered them" but "the land was God's gift, not our military achievement" — which is exactly why the human army is given almost nothing to do.

Fourth, and decisively, the grace written into the very same chapter. In the middle of the total destruction, one household is saved — and it is a Canaanite household, Rahab and her family, the people the herem supposedly required them to kill. The narrative will not let the destruction be total. It carves out, right at the center of the devoted city, an island of mercy for the outsider who believed, and then tells us she "has lived among the Israelites to this day." The book is at war with its own ideology. The same story that commands total destruction cannot stop itself from saving the one who turned to God — and, as we have seen, running her bloodline straight into the family of the Messiah. When the letter to the Hebrews later looks back on Jericho, this is what it chooses to remember: "By faith the walls of Jericho fell... By faith the prostitute Rahab... did not perish with those who were disobedient." The thing the New Testament finds worth celebrating in this chapter is not the killing. It is the faith, and the Canaanite who was spared.

So how do we read it? As the floor, not the ceiling. As the honest, unsoftened record of where a people's understanding began — an ancient nation telling its origin story in the brutal idiom of its age, certain that the land was God's doing and not their own. We do not pretend the violence is holy. We let the God revealed in Jesus stand in judgment over it, and we notice that the text, even here, is straining toward something better than itself: a war that is really a worship service, a conquest in which God does the work and the people mostly walk, and a "devoted city" out of which the one who trusted God walks free. The walls the New Testament finally cares about are not the ones that crushed the people of Jericho but the ones that come down between enemies — "For he himself is our peace," Paul writes, "who has made the two one and has torn down the dividing wall of hostility." That is the wall the gospel exists to topple. Read all the way to its end, the story of Jericho becomes the story of how every wall comes down: not by our shout, and not over anyone's body, but by the God who would rather die for his enemies than destroy them.