Joshua, the son of Nun and the successor to Moses the lawgiver, slept the night at a place named Gilgal within sight of the ancient city of Jericho. His great army, made up of 40,000 able men from each of the 12 tribes of Israel, was encamped ten furlongs distance from its fortified walls, the strongest in Canaan.¹ Having crossed the River Jordan into the Promised Land, only the might of the king of Jericho, and the command of his army, stood between them and the fulfilment of God’s word to his chosen people.

The leader of Israel awoke suddenly to find a ‘man’ standing before him with a sword drawn in his hand. ‘Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?’ Joshua enquired promptly.²

‘Nay; but as captain of the host of the Lord am I now come,’ the ‘man’ responded.³

Instantly, Joshua fell on his face and gave worship to this messenger of God, asking: ‘What saith my Lord unto his servant?’⁴

‘Put off thy shoe from off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy,’ he was told, and so Joshua did as was asked of him.⁵

The ‘captain of the host of the Lord’, speaking as the voice of God, then informed the leader of Israel on how exactly he should take the besieged city. If he carried out these instructions, then ‘the king thereof, and the mighty men of valour’ would be given unto him.⁶

This is what he was told: ‘And ye shall compass the city, all the men of war, going about the city once. Thus shall thou do six days. And seven priests shall bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark: and the seventh day ye shall compass the city seven times, and the priests shall blow with the trumpets. And it shall be, that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat . . .’⁷

So it was that Joshua spoke to his priests and the army of Israel concerning these words of the Lord, and, as had been commanded of them, for the first six days the seven priests walked around the city walls, holding aloft their trumpets of rams’ horns. At a safe distance in front of them went half of the army, while behind them the Ark of the Covenant was carried on the shoulders of its bearers, behind which came the rest of the army.

All was done in silence, for as Joshua had instructed: ‘Ye shall not shout, nor let your voice be heard, neither shall any word proceed out of your mouth, until the day I bid you shout; then shall ye shout.’⁸

The dawning of the seventh day came, and the army and the priests who bore the seven trumpets, along with the carriers of the Ark and the army of men, circumnavigated the city walls as before, but then, on the seventh circuit, as the trumpets blew, all let out an almighty shout and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down.⁹

Once they had seen this great miracle, the army of Israel went up to the city and took it, killing every man, woman and child save for the household of Rahab, the harlot who had sheltered the spies of Israel; only she and her family were saved from the wrath of God.

This is the extraordinary account of how Jericho fell to the might of Israel as told in the book of Joshua. Jews and Christians alike accept the Old Testament as the unquestionable word of God, but is there any reason at all to assume that this story is a true relation of historical events? Did the walls of Jericho really fall down in the manner described? What we do know is that when the Israelites are supposed to have crossed over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, Jericho had already been a fortified town for at least 7000 years. Its strategic significance lay in the fact that it stood in the path of any invader who entered the country beyond the northern limits of the Dead Sea.¹⁰

Attempting to prove Joshua’s triumphant entry into Canaan with an army of 40,000 Israelites has been the goal of biblical archaeologists for the last 150 years. In the 1930s a British expedition, led by Professor John Garstang, conducted excavations on the site of ancient Jericho and finally uncovered a section in the town wall that appeared to have collapsed outwards, exactly as tradition asserted it had succumbed to the force of the trumpet blows in the well-known biblical story.¹¹ Against this section of the wall, Garstang also found evidence of a fierce conflagration, suggesting some kind of battle in which the town had been razed to the ground.¹²

Garstang was naturally jubilant, and went on to promote his discoveries as perfect evidence of the way in which archaeology could be used to confirm the historical validity of the Bible. Unfortunately, his celebrations were short-lived, for in the 1950s noted British archaeologist Dame Kathleen Kenyon was back in Jericho excavating a further section of the same stone wall. This time a more methodical catalogue of adjoining strata was made, and it soon became clear that Garstang had got it completely wrong. The collapsed wall did not date to the thirteenth century BC, as he had come to believe, but to around 2350 BC, over 1100 years before the supposed entry into Canaan of the Israelites.

Little evidence of any later violent destruction was uncovered at Jericho by Kathleen Kenyon. She found that the entire top of the mound on which the city was built had eroded away, meaning that all later occupational levels simply did not exist any more. She did eventually uncover evidence of a township destroyed by fire in the first half of the sixteenth century BC,¹³ as well as meagre evidence of a single wall and a small clay oven belonging to a building dating to the late fourteenth century BC.¹⁴ In biblical terms this was 2L more important discovery, and after taking into account the dating of various funerary objects found in association with burials uncovered by Garstang in nearby rock-cut tombs, she concluded that there must have been a ‘settlement on the tell (or occupational mound) from about 1400 to 1325 BC, or even for a generation or so longer’.¹⁵ After this time, there had been nothing here right through to the eleventh century BC, the era in which King David established the kingdom of Israel.

For those who held true to biblical chronology which implies that the Israelites crossed into Canaan some time around c. 1200 BC, Kathleen Kenyon’s findings were a staggering blow. Yet as we shall see, revolutionary new findings concerning the dating of the Exodus now suggest that Jericho must have fallen to the Israelites slightly earlier than has always been believed, plausibly around c. 1270 BC, bringing the date much more in line with the available archaeological evidence (see Chapter Nine).

THE FATE OF JERICHO

With only the flimsiest of evidence for the destruction of Jericho during the time-frame under review, what, then, are we to make of the story, found in Chapter 6 of the book of Joshua, concerning how the Israelites used just seven trumpets of rams’ horns to shatter its city walls? No similar stories exist in the Bible, implying that it is neither a usual expression of God’s power over his nation’s enemies nor a common means by which the walls of major cities were breached in Old Testament times.

Anyone will tell you that you cannot simply sound trumpets and expect fortified walls to come tumbling down. On the other hand we do know that if a human voice reaches a sufficient volume and matches the resonant frequency of, say, a wineglass, then the glass will shatter. The pyramid builders and the monastic communities of Tibet, as well as the nineteenth-century inventor John Ernst Worrell Keely, would all appear to have utilised this principle to disintegrate rock.

Sound as a weapon is not impossible, and yet at a time when the Old Testament was taking its final form in the seventh century BC, such a concept should simply have not existed. Are we therefore to conclude that the earliest Israelites really did have the knowledge and capability to use sound, produced by trumpets, to destroy the walls of Jericho?

Let us examine the facts of the story. For the first six days the seven priests were to circumnavigate the city walls, holding before them the trumpets made of rams’ horns. The so-called Ark of the Covenant was to follow in their wake, with half the Israelite army at a safe distance in front of it and the other half keeping a similar distance behind. On these occasions, there was to be complete silence. Then, on the seventh and final day the entire procession was to perambulate the city walls not once but seven times, and when the last, long blow had been sounded by the trumpets the entire army of 40,000 men were to let out an almighty shout.

Is there any reason to suggest that defensive walls could be breached by following this exact procedure? Is there any scientific basis behind such a notion? Looking at the story on a theoretical level, it might well be feasible to breach defensive walls using the power of sound. It might also be possible to create a sustained note that, when combined with a euphoric roar of the sort described in the story, could rupture stonework to the point of collapse. It is possible, but not proven. To date, there is no corroborative evidence whatsoever to suggest that this is how the walls of Jericho were destroyed. Of course, it does not mean that the event did not take place, only that currently it is impossible to prove beyond the circumstantial evidence presented in the Old Testament. On the other hand the sheer fact that the Jews of the first millennium BC managed to preserve such a curious story implies that there is at least some basis to the legend. As they say, there is rarely any smoke without fire. In other words, an incident of this nature may well have taken place during the formative years of the Israelite nation, although its exact details are now lost.

If such speculations should prove to be correct, then the destruction of the walls of Jericho could have been achieved only through a precise knowledge of sonic technology, and not simply through chance, or the miraculous intervention of God. The key would seem to lie in the fact that the instructions on how exactly Israel should take Jericho came not from Joshua or from the priests or the military advisers but from a mysterious sword-wielding figure known as the ‘captain of the host of the Lord’.

What was the identity of this ‘man’ who possessed intimate knowledge of a destructive, forbidden technology so far beyond the normal capabilities of a Middle Eastern nation in the second millennium BC? Theologians would argue that this divine individual was in fact a messenger dispatched by the Lord to deliver to Joshua the means by which he could defeat his enemies and enter the Promised Land. He was therefore an angel in the form of a ‘man’, who adopted a corporeal body so that he might communicate with Joshua on a one-to-one basis.

Although the terms ‘captain’ and ‘captains’ are found on several occasions in the Old Testament, our mysterious ‘captain of the host of the Lord’ puts in no further appearances, not under this guise at least. In spite of this fact, I became convinced that this ‘man’ represented a source of forbidden technology made available to the Israelites, primarily through their leader Moses, who led them out of Egypt. If this was so, then how else might this elusive source of arcane wisdom have influenced the destiny of God’s chosen people during their formative years?

I could take the matter no further by examining the Old Testament stories concerning the beginnings of the Israelite nation. If Moses, and later Joshua, really had conspired with others at the time of the Exodus, and afterwards during the many years of wandering in the wilderness, then the only way in which I was going to be able to identify these enigmatic individuals was to look more closely at the life and times of Israel’s great prophet and lawgiver, and, as might be expected, all roads seemed to lead back to Egypt.