Besieged: An Encyclopedia of Great Sieges From Ancient Times to the Present by Paul K. Davis

Author:Paul K. Davis [Davis, Paul K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: E&R
ISBN: 9781576071953
Amazon: 1576071952
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2001-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Siege

Jericho around 1400 b.c. was already a well-established town built around the spring of Ain es-Sultan. It was in the Plain of Jericho, a lush agricultural area in the midst of surrounding

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barren land. As a stopping place for travelers and merchants it had to have been wealthy, and possession of it would give the Hebrews a fertile base from which to operate as well as a key access point for trade. Twentieth-century excavations have shown that the level of Jericho at the end of the fifteenth century had a retaining wall 12 to 15 feet high topped by a mud-brick wall an additional 20 to 26 feet in height and 6 feet thick. Outside the retaining wall was a second wall of mud bricks. Rahab lived between the walls in what has been regarded as the poorer quarters of the city, which numbered perhaps 1,200 within the 6 acres enclosed by the interior walls. An earlier level of excavation shows the city had been destroyed by Egyptians perhaps 150 years earlier, and it is probable the walls of Joshua’s time were built using the earlier walls as a foundation. The spring gave the city a ready water supply and food was plentiful. Supplies were not a problem, but the condition of the walls might have been.

Joshua’s orders to his soldiers were to do nothing more than walk to the city, then around the walls, then back to the river. This was to be done for six days, with no sound to come from the marchers. By marching and not attacking, or even threatening the city, this probably lulled the defenders. “For six days the entire Israelite host solemnly filed around the walls of Jericho in full array. And for six days the good burghers of Jericho sprang to their weapons and manned the ramparts, at first in uneasy expectancy, afraid both of the marching columns and the possible magic involved in this procession headed by the priests and the Ark of the Covenant. But after the first terror and anxiety had subsided, the people of Jericho grew accustomed to the strange performance and relaxed” (Herzog and Gichon, Battles of the Bible, p. 48).

A change in pattern on the seventh day, however, should have alerted the defenders. The silent marchers appeared as before, but this time marched around the city seven times. This completed, they turned toward the walls and the priests leading the column each blew a ram’s horn and the multitude shouted. At this, the walls fell (another well-timed earthquake?). According to the King James Version of the Bible, the “walls fell flat.” In his 1990 work on Jericho, Bryant Wood remarked that the better translation from the Hebrew would be “fell beneath itself,” in other words, collapsed. Such an occurrence would have given an easy slope up the earthen embankment between the inner and outer city walls, allowing the Hebrews to proceed “up into the city, every man straight before him” (Joshua 6:20).

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