- Joshua 6 BSB ↗
Most of us are taught that big results come from big effort: more planning, more force, more pressure. Joshua 6 tells the story of a siege in which none of that is used. No ladders, no battering rams, no tunnels — just a procession of priests with trumpets and an ark, and thousands of people walking in silence around a city, day after day. It looks absurd from the wall. Then on the seventh day the shout goes up and the wall falls. It is one of the best-known stories in the Bible, and also one of the hardest, because of what happens next.
Where it sits in the story: Jericho is the first city in the land, and the story treats it as a first-fruits offering: the whole city is 'devoted' to God. The conquest of Act 3 is presented as God's act, not Israel's military genius. But the chapter also carries the Rahab thread through to its end — a Canaanite family saved inside a city under judgment, living in Israel 'to this day'.
What this chapter is doing: To show the land given by God rather than won by strength, to introduce the practice of devoting a city to destruction (herem), and to fulfil the spies' oath to Rahab.
- 6:1–5 — Jericho is shut tight. God tells Joshua the plan: march around the city once a day for six days, with seven priests carrying ram's-horn trumpets before the ark; on the seventh day march seven times, sound a long blast, and have the people shout — the wall will fall.
- 6:6–14 — Joshua passes on the orders. For six days the procession circles the city — armed men, priests blowing trumpets, the ark, the rearguard — while the people keep total silence until the day they are told to shout.
- 6:15–21 — On the seventh day they circle seven times. Joshua declares the city devoted to the Lord: everything is to be destroyed except Rahab's household, and silver, gold, bronze and iron go to the Lord's treasury. The people shout, the wall falls, and they destroy everyone in the city, including women, children and animals.
- 6:22–25 — The two spies bring Rahab out with her father, mother, brothers and all her relatives, and settle them outside the camp. The city is burned. Rahab, the text says, has lived in Israel ever since, because she hid the messengers.
- 6:26–27 — Joshua pronounces a curse on anyone who rebuilds Jericho: it will cost him his firstborn and youngest son (fulfilled in 1 Kings 16:34). The Lord is with Joshua, and his fame spreads.
- John Garstang (1930s) identified collapsed walls and a destroyed city that he dated to c. 1400 BC, supporting an early conquest.
- Kathleen Kenyon (1950s) redated that destruction to c. 1550 BC, probably linked with Egyptian campaigns, and found little occupation in the Late Bronze Age — so no substantial walled city for Joshua on either the early or the late date.
- Bryant Wood (1990) re-examined the pottery and argued the destruction fits c. 1400 BC after all; most archaeologists have not accepted his redating, but the debate continues.
Key verse: Joshua 6:20 · So what: The story says two things at once that readers must hold together: victory comes by trust rather than by force, and the result is total destruction of a city, including children. Honest readers should not skip past that. The same chapter, though, ends with an enemy family safe inside Israel, which suggests the line of judgment was never simply ethnic.