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Trinity Episcopal Church Hattiesburg, Mississippi Bible Stories: An Adult Education Class, October 2006 - January 2007 Go To Trinity's Home Page

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SESSION 11:
Joshua and His Trumpets
January 28, 2006
By The Rev. Bill Stroop, Ph.D.
Trinity Episcopal Church
Hattiesburg, Mississippi
(This page updated 13 January 2006)

The following is from an on line article entitled, " Biblical Archaeology: Deconstructing The Walls Of Jericho " written by Ze'ev Herzog.

According to the Bible the history of Israel began when Abraham was called by Yahweh to leave his family and his home and settle in Canaan. His son Isaac, and his grandson, Jacob, lived there until Jacob was forced by famine to flee to Egypt with his remaining sons, where one of them, Joseph, already held a position of prominence. The descendants of Jacob were enslaved in Egypt. Yahweh charged Moses with the deliverance of his people from bondage. This he did with the aid of Yahweh, who dried up the ' Sea of Reeds' so that the Israelites could cross in safety, while the pursuing Egyptian army drowned. Moses and his people continued to Mount Sinai, where a convenant was concluded establishing Yahweh as the God of his chosen people, Israel. The conditions of the convenant were laid down in a law including the Ten Commandments. However, because of the people's disobedience their march toward the Promised Land turned into forty years of wanderings in the wilderness. Finally, after the death of Moses, the people of Israel entered Canaan from the east, crossing the River Jordan. Under the leadership of Joshua they sacked Jericho, after the city walls came tumbling down rather miraculously, and then went on to conquer the rest of Canaan. None of the details of this account can be verified by other sources as the distinguished Israeli archaeologist Ze'ev Herzog argues in his article 'Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho: Biblical Myth and Archaeological Reality.'

Herzog argues that 'the formative stages of the People of Israel were utterly different from those the Bible articulates. Nonetheless, such views have not percolated into the awareness of the public at large.' He believes that most 'Israelis (as well as Jews in the Diaspora) would still be shocked to read such conclusions as these: that the People of Israel did not sojourn in Egypt, did not wander in the wilderness, did not conquer the land of Canaan in a military campaign, and did not pass it on as inheritance to the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

The portion of the Levant known as Palestine has had many different names including Canaan and Eretz Israel or Land of Israel. After 132 CE the Romans renamed the region Palestine because the Jews had rebelled against Roman authority not once, but twice. Aware of Jewish history the Romans renamed the land after Israel's most bitter enemy, the Philistines, to humiliate the Jews. The Romans sought to make a point that this region was no longer Eretz Israel, but Roman land. The word comes from the Latin Palestina ( Philistine Land).

This introduction to accompany Professor Herzog's article provides the reader with an outline of the beginnings of archaeological research in Palestine and Jericho.


Digging up the Bible

One of the unique topographical features of the Near East landscape is the large number of mounds, or tells, that populate it. They were long believed to be naturally occurring hillocks until archaeologists, at the end of the 19th century, demonstrated that in fact these tells were man-made ('tell' is the transliteration of the Arabic, while 'tel' is from the Hebrew). The first serious, biblically oriented topographical study of the region was carried out in 1838 by the American scholars Edward Robinson and Eli Smith, who identified scores of historic sites in Palestine on the basis of modern Arabic place names. But the mystery of the tells remained until 1890, when Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie laid the foundations for modern archaeological science.

A distinguished Egyptologist, Petrie proved conclusively, after conducting field work at Tell el-Hesi, that tells were in fact the mounded-up, layered remains of ancient cities, towns and fortifications. These trapezoidal mounds are to be found in the Near East because settled urban populations have existed there for millennia, with generation after generation rebuilding upon earlier rubble; the debris thereby becoming compactified. The height of a tell can be considerable. The depth of debris at Jericho is about 18m (60ft) and at Megiddo about 21m (70ft).

Petrie established two key elements of archaeological study that have endured to the present day - the principle of stratigraphy, or the decipherment of the various layers of ruins; and ceramic typology, the technique of dating layers by means of the pottery or potsherds discovered in the strata. Problems, however, remained because every archaeologist that worked in Palestine followed Petrie in labelling their excavated strata with vague names like 'Amorite' and 'Semitic' leading to much confusion in biblical archaeology.

In 1922, however, archaeologists agreed upon the use of a single system of classification invented by a Danish museum curator in the 19th century: the Stone, the Bronze and the Iron ages (see box on Archaeological Periods and Chronology). In the 1920s the precise dates of the three ages in Palestine were still unclear, but the categories were clearly discernible in all excavations. It was now possible for archaeologists to begin to trace the conquest of the land of Canaan by Joshua and the Israelites.


The Fall of Jericho

Yahweh gave Joshua precise instructions on how to capture Jericho. For six days the people marched silently round the city, preceded by the priests carrying the ark of the covenant and blowing trumpets. On the seventh day they marched around the city seven times. On the seventh circuit, just before the priests were about to blow their trumpets, Joshua told the people to shout. The priests blew their trumpets, the people shouted, and the walls of the city collapsed. The Israelites marched in and killed the inhabitants of Jericho.

Situated in the Jordan Valley, nearly 300m below sea level and approximately 13km to the north-east of the Dead Sea is Jericho, 'city of palms' of the Old Testament. Bounded by Mount Nebo to the east, the Central mountains to the west and the Dead sea to the south, Jericho lies in the centre. It is the world's oldest know inhabited city. The mound that is the remains of that ancient city is now known as Tell es-Sultan and is located besides a spring called Elisha's fountain. New Testament Jericho is a separate site to the south of Tell es-Sultan.

Although the remains of several excavations scar Tell es-Sultan, it was not until the pioneering work of Dame Kathleen Kenyon of the Institute of Archaeology, London in the 1950s that the city's ancient past was revealed. The earliest human habitation at Jericho dates from about 8000 BCE, when there was a permanent settlement of about two thousand. Its irrigation system, large stone tower and massive defensive wall built a thousand years later. Archaeological investigations of the tell provided detailed records of successive settlements on the site, but the level corresponding with the city destroyed by Joshua was not among them.

The first work on the site was done by Captain Charles Warren of the British Royal Engineers who were surveying Palestine in 1867. He sank a shaft into the tell but failed to find to discover anything of archaeological significance and abandoned any further work. It was not until 1930 that the first a major expedition, lasting six years, was undertaken by Liverpool University under the direction of Professor John Garstang, one of the most distinguished archaeologists of the day. Garstang created headlines around the world when he claimed to have unearthed the fabled tumbling walls of Joshua.

It was twenty years later that Kenyon, between 1952 and 1956, disproved Garstang's claim. Under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and supported by the Department of Antiquities of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan she undertook a major excavation and re-evaluation of the site using new techniques of soil removal and classification. Among her many findings were that the walls that Garstang had identified as Late Bronze Age and dated to 1600-1400 BCE were in fact much earlier and belonged to the Early Bronze Age which she dated as ending in 2100 BCE. Thus the evidence was at least 500 years too early for it to have been destroyed by Joshua.

Biblical scholars and archaeologists believed that the period between the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age (1550-1000 BCE) was of special importance for both ancient history and biblical archaeology. This period had been an era of destruction and invasion. Though the Old Testament offers no date for the conquest of the Promised Land, later ancient texts and archaeological evidence suggested that this was the only possible period in which Joshua and the Israelites could have arrived in Canaan. Joshua's Jericho lay buried in the tell close to the point where the Late Bronze Age strata ended and the Iron Age strata began. Wedged between these two strata should have been a black band, the ash and the tumbled bricks of the city's fallen walls. Kenyon found evidence that during the Early Iron Age, the period which was the only possible time for the first Israelite settlements in Canaan, Jericho had been largely deserted, having been in a state of ruin ever since the destruction of the last Bronze Age city 300 years earlier.


The Bible

The word 'Bible' is derived from the Greek word 'biblia' meaning 'books'. As the collection of Jewish and Christian texts came to be increasingly regarded as a single entity, 'The Books' became 'The Book'. By the end of the second century BCE the adjective 'holy' had been added.

With the exception of a few passages in Aramaic, the Old Testament was written entirely in Hebrew. As Aramaic became the common language among Jews following the Exile (6th century BCE), however, translations for the use of the faithful were made into that tongue. Greek was the next language to predominate in much of the ancient world as a consequence of the conquests of Alexander the Great.

The earliest translation of the Pentateuch, or the first five books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, which in Hebrew are called the Torah or Law) was the Septuagint. According to legend this translation was accomplished under the direction of 70 (or 72) Jewish scholars living in Alexandria. These scholars had completed the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek by about 250 BCE, and over the course of the next two centuries the remainder of the Old Testament was also rendered into Greek.

The spread of Christianity inspired additional Greek and Latin translations of the Bible. Augustine complained of the 'infinite variety of Latin translations'. To remedy the problem, in the year 382 CE Pope Damascus commissioned the leading biblical scholar Jerome to prepare a standard Bible in Latin. For some two decades Jerome worked on the project, using in particular Old Testament Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts rather than the Septuagint. For the New Testament Jerome followed in the footsteps of his predecessors by using existing Latin and Greek manuscripts. His work, completed in 405 CE, gradually gained wide-spread acceptance among Latin speaking Christians - it was thus referred to as the versio vulgata, 'the common version'.

Listen to this hymn about and the walls of Jericho.

The Biblical Story (Joshua 5:6 - 6:27)

5:6 For the Israelites traveled forty years in the wilderness, until all the nation, the warriors who came out of Egypt, perished, not having listened to the voice of the LORD. To them the LORD swore that he would not let them see the land that he had sworn to their ancestors to give us, a land flowing with milk and honey.
7 So it was their children, whom he raised up in their place, that Joshua circumcised; for they were uncircumcised, because they had not been circumcised on the way.
8 When the circumcising of all the nation was done, they remained in their places in the camp until they were healed.
9 The LORD said to Joshua, "Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt." And so that place is called Gilgal to this day.
10 While the Israelites were camped in Gilgal they kept the passover in the evening on the fourteenth day of the month in the plains of Jericho.
11 On the day after the passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain.
12 The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.
13 Once when Joshua was by Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing before him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went to him and said to him, "Are you one of us, or one of our adversaries?"
14 He replied, "Neither; but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come." And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped, and he said to him, "What do you command your servant, my lord?"
15 The commander of the army of the LORD said to Joshua, "Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy." And Joshua did so.

NRS Joshua 6:1 Now Jericho was shut up inside and out because of the Israelites; no one came out and no one went in.
2 The LORD said to Joshua, "See, I have handed Jericho over to you, along with its king and soldiers.
3 You shall march around the city, all the warriors circling the city once. Thus you shall do for six days,
4 with seven priests bearing seven trumpets of rams' horns before the ark. On the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, the priests blowing the trumpets.
5 When they make a long blast with the ram's horn, as soon as 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, and all the people shall charge straight ahead."
6 So Joshua son of Nun summoned the priests and said to them, "Take up the ark of the covenant, and have seven priests carry seven trumpets of rams' horns in front of the ark of the LORD."
7 To the people he said, "Go forward and march around the city; have the armed men pass on before the ark of the LORD."
8 As Joshua had commanded the people, the seven priests carrying 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 And the armed men went before the priests who blew the trumpets; the rear guard came after the ark, while the trumpets blew continually.
10 To the people Joshua gave this command: "You shall not shout or let your voice be heard, nor shall you utter a word, until the day I tell you to shout. Then you shall shout."
11 So the ark of the LORD went around the city, circling it once; and they came into the camp, and spent the night in the camp.
12 Then Joshua rose early in the morning, and the priests took up the ark of the LORD.
13 The seven priests carrying the seven trumpets of rams' horns before the ark of the LORD passed on, blowing the trumpets continually. The armed men went before them, and the rear guard came after the ark of the LORD, while the trumpets blew continually.
14 On the second day they marched around the city once and then returned to the camp. They did this for six days.
15 On the seventh day they rose early, at dawn, 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 The city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction. Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall live because she hid the messengers we sent.
18 As for you, keep away from the things devoted to destruction, so as not to covet and take any of the devoted things and make the camp of Israel an object for destruction, bringing trouble upon it.
19 But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred 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 trumpets, they raised a great shout, and the wall fell down flat; so the people charged straight ahead into the city and captured it.
21 Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.
22 Joshua said to the two men who had spied out the land, "Go into the prostitute's house, and bring the woman out of it and all who belong to her, as you swore to her."
23 So the young men who had been spies went in and brought Rahab out, along with her father, her mother, her brothers, and all who belonged to her-- they brought all her kindred out-- and set them outside the camp of Israel.
24 They burned down the city, and everything in it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.
25 But Rahab the prostitute, with her family and all who belonged to her, Joshua spared. Her family has lived in Israel ever since. For she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.
26 Joshua then pronounced this oath, saying, "Cursed before the LORD be anyone who tries to build this city-- this Jericho! At the cost of his firstborn he shall lay its foundation, and at the cost of his youngest he shall set up its gates!"
27 So the LORD was with Joshua; and his fame was in all the land.

The DVD: Joshua and The Walls of Jericho

The following is reprinted from BBC Television who made the DVD we will watch in today's class.

Joshua and the walls of Jericho is one of the most violent stories of the Bible. An army of nomads emerges from the desert and destroys a heavily fortified city... not by force, but by faith. The story of how Joshua destroyed Jericho using only trumpets is one of the Bible's most memorable, and most dramatic.

The story is set in the Middle East, some 3000 years ago. An area that, even then, was plagued by war. Successor to the famous leader, Moses, Joshua is the Bible's most famous warrior. The story begins with Joshua and his army preparing an attack in the mountains to the north-east of the Dead Sea.

From the mountains, Joshua looked West, across the river Jordan toward his destination. According to the Bible, this was the territory God once pledged to Abraham and his descendants. At Joshua's command were some 40,000 Israelite men, descendants of the Hebrew slaves who fled Egypt. There is one problem: the country is already inhabited by Canaanites.

Like any good military commander, Joshua's first requirement is to gather military intelligence. He sends out two spies across the Jordan River ahead of time. They go immediately to an inn that's run by a prostitute. In the ancient world, brothels and taverns were obvious places to gather information. The spies meet a prostitute called Rahab. But things soon go wrong. No sooner have they come to her house, the King of Jericho sends his men, because he knows that the spies have arrived. Rahab takes charge of the whole situation. She hides the spies in the stocks of grain on her roof.

When the King's guards come, Rahab says to them: "Some men came, you're right, but they left a long time ago, when the city gate closed, so if you rush ahead, if you work really hard and you move quickly and go down to the Jordan, I think you'll find them there," so she sends the pursuers of the spies away and goes up to the roof and tells the spies that she knows that they, that Israel will conquer the land. She knows that God has promised the land to them.

The Bible tells how the army walked around the walled city of Jericho once a day for six days. Each time they walked priests blew trumpets. On the seventh day they circled seven times and the walls of the city came crashing down. Joshua and his army conquered the city, massacring every person they found. Only Rahab and her family were saved. The once mighty city of Jericho had been set alight. Joshua and his people then continued to destroy other towns and cities and Joshua succeeded in conquering Canaan.

Many archaeologists have struggled to find evidence of a historical battle at Jericho at the time the story takes place in the Bible. Through their quests they have uncovered many intriguing facts about the Canaanites and Israelites which challenge many assumptions.

Archaeologists have discovered that a series of earthquakes swept through the Eastern Mediterranean, including where Jericho stood, in around 1250 BC, and certainly brought walls crumbling down. However, the dates don't match with the time Joshua was supposedly conquering the land. Maybe the memory of the destruction of the towns inspired scribes to write about a great warrior who conquered cities with God's will. Or perhaps the catastrophic collapse of the old world through the earthquakes gave way to opportunism and Israelite groups took advantage of the destruction of the existing Canaanite cities and began to settle in Israel.

New DNA research shows that the Canaanites and Israelites were not just similar in their cultures, they were genetically identical. Perhaps the Israelites did not conquer the land at all - they were there all along. Is then, the story of Joshua and the walls of Jericho complete fiction? Well, perhaps not. Joshua's military tactics are plausible and it is possible that some Israelites did travel across from Egypt. Authors could have embellished stories of their ancestors. The story is most probably a culmination of separate oral traditions. Maybe there as a historical figure called Joshua who travelled with his people to a new land.

Whatever is the truth behind the bloody story of Joshua and the tumbling walls, it is fair to say that the issues behind the conflict still resonate today. One man's liberation is another man's oppression.

The excerpts we will watch in todays class are as follows:

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