What happened at Jericho in the Bible?

Jericho sits in the Jordan Valley about 250 meters below sea level, one of the lowest towns on earth. What made life possible there was a strong, steady spring, still flowing today, which turned a hot, dry plain into a green oasis. The Bible calls it the city of palm trees (Deuteronomy 34:3), and from Mount Nebo Moses could see it across the river before he died.

For anyone coming from the east, Jericho was the gate into the hill country of Canaan. It guarded the fords of the Jordan and the roads climbing west toward Jerusalem and Bethel. That is why it stands at the opening of Israel's story in the land, and why, centuries later, pilgrims heading up to Jerusalem for the feasts passed through it.

Before Israel crossed the Jordan, Joshua sent two spies into Jericho. They were hidden by Rahab, a woman living in the city wall, who had heard what the Lord had done and confessed that he is God in heaven and on earth (Joshua 2:11). She asked for her family's lives, and the spies told her to hang a scarlet cord from her window.

The conquest of Jericho was not won by siege engines. For six days the people marched once around the city behind the ark, with priests blowing rams' horns; on the seventh day they marched seven times, shouted, and the wall fell.

Rahab and her household were spared and lived among Israel (Joshua 6:25), and Matthew names her in the family line of Jesus (Matthew 1:5). Joshua laid a curse on anyone who rebuilt the city, which the writer of Kings records coming true generations later (1 Kings 16:34).

Jericho returns in the stories of the prophets. A company of prophets lived there; Elijah passed through on his last journey with Elisha (2 Kings 2:4), and afterward Elisha threw salt into the city's spring and its bad water was made wholesome (2 Kings 2:19).

In the Gospels, Jesus passes through Jericho on his final road to Jerusalem. A blind beggar named Bartimaeus shouts for mercy, refuses to be silenced and receives his sight (Mark 10:46). In the same city a rich chief tax collector, Zacchaeus, climbs a sycamore tree to see him, and Jesus invites himself to his house; Zacchaeus gives half his goods to the poor and repays fourfold anyone he cheated (Luke 19:1).

Tell es-Sultan is one of the most studied mounds in the Near East, and one of the oldest towns known anywhere: Kathleen Kenyon found a stone tower and wall there dating to around 8000 BC. The hard question is the city of Joshua's day, and on that the evidence is genuinely debated.

In the 1930s John Garstang excavated collapsed mud-brick walls and burned debris and dated that destruction to around 1400 BC, which fit an early date for the exodus. In the 1950s Kenyon, with more careful stratigraphic methods, redated that destruction to around 1550 BC and concluded that little or nothing of the town survived in the late 1400s and 1300s, so that no walled city stood for Joshua to conquer. Her view became the majority position, and radiocarbon dates published in 1995 also pointed to the sixteenth century BC.

In 1990 Bryant Wood re-examined the pottery from both digs and argued that the destruction belongs near 1400 BC after all, pointing also to a burn layer and jars still full of grain, which he read as a short siege soon after harvest. Other specialists rejected his pottery analysis, and the debate continues. Erosion of the mound over three thousand years makes the late levels hard to read. Honest summary: archaeology confirms a fortified city whose walls collapsed and burned, while its dating, and how it relates to Joshua's account and to the date of the exodus, is still contested among scholars.

New Testament Jericho stood a little south of the old mound, around the winter palaces built by the Hasmoneans and Herod the Great, which have been excavated at Tulul Abu el-Alayiq.

Jericho begins with a victory that Israel could not take credit for. Marching, waiting, trusting and shouting at the word of God are not military tactics; they are obedience. The city teaches that God's people move forward by his strength rather than their own cleverness.

It also shows how wide the door of mercy is. The first person saved inside the land was a Canaanite woman with a bad reputation, and the last people we meet in Jericho are a blind beggar the crowd wanted silenced and a tax collector the crowd despised. In each case the outsider is the one who recognizes who God is. Jesus said of Zacchaeus that he came to seek and to save the lost, and Jericho is a good place to remember that this includes us.