The Entry into the Land under Joshua and the Fall of Jericho

After thirty days of mourning, Joshua son of Nun received the charge: Moses My servant is dead; now arise, cross this Jordan. He sent two scouts to Jericho, where Rahab, who kept a house in the city wall, hid them and was promised that she and her family would be spared, the sign being a scarlet cord in her window. On the tenth of Nisan, 2488, at the height of the flood, the priests carrying the Ark stepped into the Jordan, the water stood in a heap, and the whole nation crossed on dry ground. Twelve stones were taken from the riverbed and set up at Gilgal. There the wilderness era closed: the generation born on the road was circumcised, and after the first Passover in the Land, on the sixteenth of Nisan, they first ate of the produce of the country—and then the manna stopped. Then came Jericho, shut up tight. For six days the army circled it once daily behind seven priests with rams' horns; on the seventh day they circled seven times, the horns sounded, the people shouted, and the wall fell where it stood.

Jericho carries a caveat of its own. Kathleen Kenyon's excavations in the 1950s showed that the fortified city on the site was destroyed about 1550 BCE, and that by the thirteenth century there were no walls there that could have fallen. Some scholars dispute Kenyon's conclusions, some refer the account to the earlier destruction, some read it as a tradition about ruins already lying there. The date given is the time of Israel's arrival in the Land by the Merneptah stele, not a date for the fall of the walls: for the fall of the walls there simply is no academic figure.