1And Jericho was shut tight before the Israelites—no one came out and no one went in. 2And the LORD said to Joshua, “See, I have given into your hand Jericho and its king and the mighty warriors. 3And you shall go round the town, all the men of war, encircling the town once. Thus you shall do six days. 4And seven priests shall bear seven ram’s horns before the Ark, and on the seventh day you shall go round the town seven times and the priests shall blow the ram’s horns. 5And so, when the horn of the ram sounds a long blast, when you hear the sound of the ram’s horn, all the people shall let out a great shout, and the wall of the town shall fall where it stands, and the people shall go up, every man straight before him.” 6And Joshua son of Nun called to the priests and said to them, “Bear the Ark of the Covenant, and seven priests shall bear seven ram’s horns before the Ark of the Covenant.” 7And he said to the people, “Cross over and go round the town, and the vanguard will cross over before the Ark of the LORD.” 8And it happened as Joshua spoke to the people that the seven priests bearing the seven ram’s horns before the LORD crossed over and blew on the ram’s horns, with the Ark of the LORD’s Covenant going after them. 9And the vanguard was going before the priests who were blowing the ram’s horns, and the rear guard was going behind the Ark as they went and blew the ram’s horns. 10And Joshua had charged the people, saying, “You shall not shout and you shall not let your voice be heard, and no word shall come out of your mouths until the moment I say to you, ‘Shout,’ and then you shall shout.” 11And the Ark of the LORD went round the town encircling it once, and they came to the camp and spent the night in the camp. 12And Joshua rose early in the morning, and the priests bore the Ark of the LORD. 13And the seven priests bearing seven ram’s horns before the Ark of the LORD went along blowing the ram’s horns, with the vanguard going before them and the rear guard going behind the Ark of the LORD, along they went blowing the ram’s horns. 14And they went round the town once on the second day, and they returned to camp—so did they do six days. 15And it happened on the seventh day that they rose early as dawn broke and went round the town in this fashion seven times. Only on that day did they go round the city seven times. 16And it happened when the priests blew the ram’s horns for the seventh time that Joshua said to the people “Shout! For the LORD has given the town to you. 17And the town and all that is within it shall be under the ban to the LORD, except that Rahab the whore shall live and whoever is with her in the house, for she hid the messengers whom we sent. 18Only you, you must keep from the ban, lest you covet and take of the ban and put the camp of Israel under the ban and stir up trouble for it. 19And all the silver and gold and vessels of bronze and iron shall be holy to the LORD, they shall enter into the LORD’s treasury.” 20And the people shouted and blew the ram’s horns, and it happened when the people had heard the sound of the ram’s horn, the people let out a great shout, and the wall fell where it stood, and the people went up into the town, every man straight before him, and they took the town. 21And they put under the ban everything that was in the town, from man to woman, from lad to elder, and to ox and sheep and donkey, by the edge of the sword. 22And to the two men who had spied out the land Joshua had said, “Go into the house of the whore-woman, and bring the woman out from there and all that is hers, as you vowed to her.” 23And the young spies came and brought out Rahab and her father and her mother and her brothers and all that was hers, and all her clan they brought out, and they put them outside the camp of Israel. 24And the town they burned in fire and everything in it. Only the silver and the gold and the vessels of bronze and iron they placed in the treasury of the LORD’s house. 25And Rahab the whore and her father’s house and all that was hers Joshua kept alive, and she has dwelled in the midst of Israel to this day, for she hid the messengers that Joshua had sent to spy out Jericho. 26And Joshua imposed a vow at that time, saying, “Cursed be the man before the LORD who will arise and rebuild this town, Jericho.
With his firstborn shall he found it,
and with his youngest set up its portals.”
27And the LORD was with Joshua, and his fame was throughout the land.
CHAPTER 6 NOTES
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2. and the mighty warriors. The Masoretic Text lacks “and,” which has been added in the translation.
3. town. At most, Jericho would have had a scant few thousand inhabitants. So “city” would be an exaggeration.
4. seven priests . . . seven ram’s horns . . . on the seventh day . . . seven times. The rite devised to bring down the walls of the town involves a quadrupling of the sacred number seven. But the destruction of the town is also an anti-Creation story: six days they go round the wall, and on the climactic seventh day, it collapses and the town is reduced to rubble.
ram’s horns. These were primitive trumpets that produced a shrill and piercing sound. They were used to assemble troops in battle and at coronations.
5. the people. Given the military context, ʿam may have its secondary sense of “troops.”
9. blowing. The consonantal text seems to read “they blew,” but the Masoretic marginal correction properly has this as toqʿey, “blowing.”
10. until the moment. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “until the day,” but the word for “day,” yom, is often a fluid indicator of time.
17. the ban. This total prescription of destruction, ḥerem, of the conquered city, which means annihilating its population and its animals and, at least in this instance, dedicating all objects of value to the LORD’s treasury, is the grimmest aspect of this triumphalist story. The enactment of the ḥerem is in keeping with the reiterated injunction in Deuteronomy to exterminate the native population of Canaan. That project is what Moshe Weinfeld has called a “utopian” plan because it is highly unlikely that it was ever acted upon. For the Deuteronomist, it is a brutal way of expressing the absolute separation from the pagan population—a separation that never really occurred—called for in his program of uncompromising monotheism, and the hallmark of the Deuteronomist is often detectable in Joshua. The ḥerem was not an Israelite invention, as there is archaeological evidence that it was sometimes practiced by various Canaanite peoples.
except that Rahab the whore shall live and whoever is with her in the house. There is, of course, a contradiction here with the story of the collapse of the wall. If the wall around the town collapsed, how could Rahab, whose house was in the wall, have been saved, and what good would the scarlet cord, which implied protection against conscious human destroyers, have done? The medieval Hebrew commentator David Kimchi tried to save the consistency of the text by proposing that only one part of the wall fell, through which breach the Israelites entered the town, though all the encircling with ram’s horns certainly leads one to imagine that the entire wall came down. One suspects that the story of the two spies and the story of the ram’s horns reflect two different traditions about the conquest of Jericho. Indeed, if the plan was to bring down the walls miraculously, there would scarcely have been any need to reconnoiter the town and the surrounding terrain, and the tale of the spies appears to assume a scenario in which the Israelite warriors will break into the city using conventional means of warfare.
18. lest you covet. The received text reads, “lest you put under the ban,” pen taḥarimu, which doesn’t make much sense. The translation follows the Septuagint, which appears to have used a Hebrew text that showed pen taḥmedu (a reversal of consonants and a dalet for the similar-looking resh), “lest you covet.”
20. the people let out a great shout, and the wall fell where it stood. Attempts have been made to recover a historical kernel for this fabulous event by proposing that it records the memory of an earthquake that leveled Jericho. (In fact, Jericho was built on a seismic fault and has been subject to earthquakes over the ages.) But nothing in the telling of the tale remotely suggests an earthquake. The ground is not said to move, and the destruction occurs through the deployment of sevens and the ram’s horns’ blasts and the shouting. One can also dismiss the idea of shock waves of sound splitting the walls as a scientific non-starter. The whole point of the story is its miraculous character. Almost everywhere in biblical narrative, Israel triumphs not through any martial powers, which get scant representation, but because God battles for Israel (compare the Song of the Sea, the Song of Deborah, and Moses’ upraised arms in the defeat of the Amalekites). This story, then, is framed to vividly illustrate how the Israelite conquest of the first principal Canaanite town in the Jordan Valley is entirely due to the spectacular intervention of the LORD, Who gives Joshua the detailed instructions for the procedures of circumambulating the town with the Ark and the ram’s horns. It should also be noted that the extensive archaeological exploration of Jericho indicates that its conquest by Joshua could not have taken place. There was a very old town on this site, but it was destroyed by the Middle Bronze Age, and at the putative time of Joshua’s conquest in the Late Bronze Age, toward the end of the thirteenth century B.C.E., there had been no walled town on this site at least for a couple of centuries. The writer no doubt had in mind Jericho’s antiquity—it is one of the oldest cities in the world—and its role as eastern gateway to Canaan, but historically it could not have been an object of Joshua’s conquest.
23. the young spies. Only here are they identified as ne‘arim, “lads” or young men, although it is possible that the term has its secondary sense of “elite soldiers.”
24. the LORD’s house. This phrase is an anachronism—in general, it refers to the Temple—because at the time of the conquest there would have been only a portable sanctuary, not referred to as a “house.”
25. she has dwelled in the midst of Israel to this day. This clause must mean that Rahab’s descendants have dwelled in the midst of Israel to this day. It is thus an etiological note, explaining how a particular Canaanite clan came to be naturalized Israelites.
26. Cursed be the man . . . who will . . . rebuild this town. The reason for the implacability toward Jericho is not entirely clear since there is no indication that its inhabitants perpetrated war crimes, as did the Amalekites in Exodus. Perhaps this should be understood in the context of the miraculous destruction of the walls: that event is a token for the laying low of the inhabitants of the land before the invading Israelites (something that never happened historically), and so as a sign and symbol of the whole conquest, the town razed through divine intervention should never be rebuilt.
With his firstborn shall he found it, / and with his youngest set up its portals. The solemnity of the vow is reinforced by casting this dire prediction in a line of poetry. Rashi nicely catches the narrative progression from the first verset to the second: “At the beginning of the foundation when he rebuilds it, his firstborn son will die, whom he will bury and go on until the youngest dies at the completion of the work, which is setting up the portals.” In 1 Kings 16:34, it is recorded that at the time of Ahab, “Hiel the Bethelite built up Jericho. At the cost of Abiram his firstborn he laid its foundation and at the cost of Segib his youngest he put up its gates, according to the word of the LORD that He spoke through Joshua son of Nun.” Joshua’s curse may have been formulated to explain a calamitous event that occurred three and a half centuries later.