JOSHUA AND THE WALLS OF JERICHO
INTRODUCTION
We’re moving from our series on prayer to a new series called ‘Bible Stories for Grown-Ups.’ There are some famous stories in the Old Testament which we may have heard as children, perhaps at home or at Sunday School. In this series the idea is to take a fresh look at them as grown-ups. We don’t want to lose the excitement that the stories gave us as children, but we want to ask some questions we have as adults.
Today we’re looking at the story of Joshua and the walls of Jericho. This is one of the most famous stories in the book of Joshua. The Israelites had left Egypt. Moses handed over to Joshua and Joshua sent spies into Canaan. The spies visited Jericho and were helped by Rahab. The Israelites then crossed the Jordan and the men were circumcised (the children’s version leaves that out!). That brings us to chapter 6. The Israelites arrive at Jericho.
The site of the Biblical city of Jericho is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The UNESCO website tells us why Jericho is important. One reason is that it’s the oldest town in the world. Jericho was ‘a big fortified town surrounded by a stone wall’ 6,000 years before the Israelites arrived! It was probably the largest city in Canaan at that time. It lay at the south of Canaan and it blocked the way to Canaan.
If we come back to this story as adults, what questions come to mind? I guess we’ll all have different questions, but here are a few that come to mind for me:
• Is the story true?
• How could it be right for the Israelites to destroy the city and its inhabitants?
• Is it a true picture of faith?
We could no doubt ask more questions. For example, the way the Israelites accepted Rahab is certainly interesting. But these three questions will be quite enough to look at. They are all hard questions.
IS THE STORY TRUE?
This is a really important question to ask. Scripture in general has been under relentless attack since about the middle of the 19th century. Loss of confidence in scripture is a major stumbling block to faith. In particular, many Christians today doubt the Old Testament.
If the accounts of how God acted in the Old Testament are true then they have a lot to teach us. But if they are not true, if God didn’t in fact act in the way the Bible tells us he did, then these passages can’t teach us anything about how God acts!
When we come to this specific story, we find many scholars saying that it isn’t true. The key issue for them is the matter of date. They accept that Jericho was destroyed and burned, as the Bible says. But they think it all happened long before Joshua appeared on the scene. By the time he arrived, Jericho was a pile of rubble. We have to answer these people. We need to deal with things that destroy faith.
So, what do we know? I’m going to use some secular sources.
Let’s start with the date of the Exodus. Wikipedia tells us:
‘Most proposals for a historical Exodus of any sort place it in the sixteenth, fifteenth, or thirteenth centuries BCE.’ Go to an academic source and you find that the date range is a bit narrower. The ‘traditional’ date for the Exodus is about 1450 BC and the ‘consensus’ date is about 1250 BC. Make a mental note: 1450 or 1250 BC.
Now let’s look at the date of the destruction of Jericho. The UNESCO website tells us:
'…the site was rebuilt again at the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age, and surrounded by a mud brick wall that lasted until 1580 BC, when it was violently destroyed by fire.'
Wikipedia tells us almost the same thing:
'Bronze Age Jericho fell in the 16th century at the end of the Middle Bronze Age … carbon dating c. 1573 BCE confirmed the accuracy of the stratigraphical dating c. 1550 by Kenyon.'
Again, a similar date. The ‘Kenyon’ who is mentioned is Kathleen Kenyon. She was a British archaeologist who excavated the site between 1952 and 1958. And the carbon dating is of charcoal and grain seeds found at the city. However, there are questions about the accuracy of the original carbon-dating. Some tests done in 2000 showed a wider range of possible dates.
Wikipedia suggests quite a wide range of possible dates, as far back as the sixteenth century, i.e. until 1600 BC. But the archaeologists think that even 1550 BC is too early for the destruction to have been carried out by Joshua and the Israelites.
So where does that leave us? The Bible scholars are not in complete agreement about when the Israelites entered Canaan and the archaeologists cannot be totally precise about when Jericho was destroyed and burned. Within the range of possible dates, there is overlap. Both events could have been around the fifteen century BC. So, it seems that the Israelites could have been responsible for the destruction of this city. The dates are not obviously impossible, and there are a number of points of correspondence between the archaeological evidence and the Biblical account, for example, that the city was destroyed at this time, and burned, and that it remained largely unoccupied for about five centuries.
There are many general reasons to believe the Bible is true, although we can’t go into them now. There is no obvious reason to believe this account is not true and there a number of reasons to believe that it is. Therefore, we aren't being stupid if we accept this account of the fall of Jericho as true and take lessons from it about how God acts.
HOW COULD IT BE RIGHT FOR THE ISRAELITES TO DESTROY THE CITY AND ITS INHABITANTS?
God instructed the Israelites to utterly destroy the city. The Hebrew word for this is ‘herem.’ It means utterly devoting something to God.
The children’s version of the story skips this. It’s hard to swallow that God could command such a thing. But it’s important that we face up to it. To many people, God’s instruction seems indistinguishable from genocide and it’s a major stumbling block to faith. We want to remove stumbling blocks to faith so we need to tackle the question. It’s impossible to do justice to such a big question in just a few minutes but there may be time to give some pointers towards an answer.
I’m going to paraphrase part of the answer that an American commentator called David Howard gives in his commentary on Joshua, and add a few comments myself.
(1) The first thing relates to God’s RIGHT to demand anyone’s life. We have all sinned, and the wages of sin is death, so God is not unjust in taking anyone’s life. David Howard comments:
'Thus, on this level, the Canaanites only received what all peoples – then and now – deserve, and any peoples who have been spared are so spared only by God's grace.'
This is a consistent argument of Bible scholars. Life belongs to God. It is his to give and his to withdraw if it becomes necessary. Two Bible scholars, Tremper Longman and Peter Craigie make this point:
Tremper Longman wrote,
'The instruction to execute judgment against a whole nation, annihilating women, children, and nursing babies, evokes our revulsion and taxes our comprehension of the dimensions of human sin and guilt. Yet we must be reminded that the earthly life is God’s to give and to take.'
Peter Craigie wrote,
'God, the Giver of all life, has certainly the right to withdraw life or to command that it be withdrawn.'
Since God has this right, he isn’t unethical when he uses it.
(2) The second thing relates to God’s REASON to demand the Canaanites’ lives. One reason the Bible gives for God to act in this way is because the Canaanites would be a corrupting influence on the Israelites. A second reason is that God acts in this way in response to extreme sin. The Bible indicates that the Canaanites had fallen into extreme sin. David Howard also notes that there is evidence outside the Bible which supports the Biblical picture. Child sacrifice was particularly common among the Canaanites and their descendants, and ritual prostitution was also common.
I think this understanding that God acts in response to extreme sin fits with what we see in other passages. For example, God brought the flood on the ancient world. Why did he do that? Genesis 6:5 tells us that ‘The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that EVERY intention of the thoughts of his heart was ONLY evil CONTINUALLY.’ ‘Every intention … only evil … continually.’
You can’t get much blacker than that. The same thing applies to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and then later, after Jesus’ crucifixion, by the Romans. There was extreme sin which God could not ignore.
There is a lot more that David Howard says. Among other things he says that 'herem' was for then and not for now. Tremper Longman and Peter Craigie say the same thing. Of course, I’m not going to poke my head above the parapet and disagree with them. But I’m not clear why it could be ethical for the Israelites to support God in his purposes in this way then but could never be ethical today.
A TRUE PICTURE OF FAITH?
The story of God delivering Jericho to the Israelites is a great picture of God enabling his people to break through a seemingly-insurmountable obstacle BY FAITH!
There’s a famous African-American spiritual ‘Joshua fit the battle of Jericho.’ Probably not surprisingly, the song came to mind at the time Martin Luther King was campaigning for the end to racial inequality. That might have seemed an insurmountable obstacle.
[N.B. you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfaYGvsU3F4]
It’s a great song. But one verse is a bit dodgy! ‘Go blow them horns’, cried Joshua. ‘The battle is in my hands.’ The battle is in JOSHUA’S hands!? Really? Let me ask a multiple-choice question:
(A) Did JOSHUA AND THE ISRAELITES fight the battle of Jericho?
(B) Did GOD fight the battle of Jericho?
(C) Did JOSHUA, THE ISRAELITES AND GOD all fight the battle of Jericho?
Which did you choose? Let’s see what the passage tells us. Look at verse 2. ‘And the Lord said to Joshua, “See, I have GIVEN Jericho into your hand.”’ GOD gave. GOD fought the battle of Jericho. But what about Joshua and the Israelites? Didn’t they have to do anything?
They certainly did! They had to walk around the city once every day for seven days, and then seven times on the seventh day. Then the priests had to blow their trumpets. So, they had to do something, and the doing demonstrated obedience and faith. Finally, when the walls came down, they entered the city and captured it. The answer is therefore (C). Did you get it right?
Our question is, is this a true picture of faith? Absolutely! Man (or woman) has to get involved in God’s purposes. We have to play our part. When God gave, it didn’t mean that the Israelites didn’t also have to take.
There’s a good example of this in Joshua 18:3.
'So Joshua said to the people of Israel, “How long will you put off going in to TAKE possession of the land, which the Lord, the God of your fathers, has GIVEN you?”'
Joshua is saying, God has given – but you’re not taking! God had a part to play and man had a part to play.
Over and over again the Bible tells us that God is on our side. He strengthens us and sustains us. He fights for us. He does the heavy lifting. However, we still have to work. A comment Paul makes about evangelism illustrates this really well. He wrote:
'I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth' (1 Cor 3:6).
God did the really significant work in softening people’s hearts, in bringing about spiritual growth. But Paul and Apollos still had to do something. They had to plant and water, trusting that God would give growth.
So, the account of the fall of Jericho is a true picture of the life of faith. We have to listen, trust and obey, just as Joshua and the Israelites did. As we do, we can be the Joshuas and the Martin Luther Kings of our generation, overcoming seemingly-insurmountable obstacles.
CONCLUSION
We’ve come to this story with some very grown-up questions. Some people will not like such a bloody story. But stories like this are in the Bible, and actually, they reflect the world we live in. There are enemies, there is evil, it needs to be fought.
What have we learned?
First, we learned that there is no reason to believe that this account is untrue.
Second, we learned that God takes action against evil – and he has the right to do so, including taking life.
Third, we learned that God calls his people to join him in his action. We have to listen to what he is telling us, and respond with faith and obedience. We might not wish to do what God is calling us to do. It might not be very ‘nice’. But we need to remember that God is with us, that he does the hard work, and have the faith and courage to walk around our Jerichos.
Rosebery Park Baptist Church, Bournemouth, UK, 18/7/2020
