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Rahab had faith in God and informed the Israelites of Jericho's fear saying "I know that the Lord has given you this land and that a great fear of you has fallen on us so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you. Plus Toggle navigation. Password Assistance. Email address. Battle of Jericho - Bible Story. Bible Articles Videos Audio. Rahab demanded the spies affirm an oath as she swore not to give their plans away, and congruently, they vowed to spare Rahab and her family when the battle of Jericho occurred.

She was to fasten a scarlet rope in her window as the symbol of their protection. God instructed Joshua with an unusual strategy for the battle of Jericho. He told Joshua to have his army march around the city once a day for six straight days. While marching, the soldiers played their trumpets as the priests carried the Ark of the Covenant around the city of Jericho. On the seventh day, the Israelites marched around the walls of Jericho seven times.

Joshua assured them that by God's order, everyone in the city must be slain, except Rahab and her family. All items of silver, gold, bronze, and iron were to go into the Lord's depository. At Joshua's order, the men produced a powerful roar, and Jericho's walls miraculously fell down. The Israelite army raced in quickly conquering the city and, as promised, only Rahab and her family were spared. Read the full scripture of the Battle of Jericho Bible story and find related articles and podcasts below!

Share Tweet Save. Joshua 2. Go after them quickly. You may catch up with them. Give me a sure sign 13 that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them—and that you will save us from death.

Hide yourselves there three days until they return, and then go on your way. As for those who are in the house with you, their blood will be on our head if a hand is laid on them. And she tied the scarlet cord in the window. They went down out of the hills, forded the river and came to Joshua son of Nun and told him everything that had happened to them. Commentaries for Joshua 2. Joshua 6.

No one went out and no one came in. They certainly wore jewelry, and decorated the bodies of their dead. In Natufian cemeteries across the Levant, archaeologists have found necklaces and belts, earrings and bracelets made from bones and shell and animal teeth. At the village of Ain Mallaha, just north of Lake Tiberius, a woman was buried with her hand on the body of a puppy. The first settled families had no knowledge of farming, but they found stands of wild wheat and barley so dense and extensive that they began to harvest and store grain against the lean months of winter.

They carried sickles of bone or wood, with flint blades set into the handle, and ground the seed to flour in stone mortars.

In all probability, they made bread and baked it directly in the hot sand and ash of the fire. But if they were not yet cultivating grain, they were certainly on the cusp of that breakthrough. Around 11, years ago the climate of the eastern Mediterranean began to change.

For an interval of around years drought came often to the valley, testing the resilience of the families who lived here. Some of them moved on, reverting to the old ways and following the animals north. Others, searching for ways to wrest the calories they needed from the earth around them, began to scatter seeds of wild wheat and barley onto the fertile soil of the plain.

In retrospect, we can see that farming was the most significant advance ever made by humans — the first link in the chain of social and technological changes that brought our own civilization into being. But there was no sudden break with the past, and no single generation that stepped over the threshold that separates hunter-gatherers from settled agriculturalists. The first men and women to plant cereal still foraged for edible plants and roots, and still hunted gazelle and ibex as their ancestors had always done.

Slowly, though, over a period of several hundred years, they came to depend more on the food that they had grown and less on the food that they had killed or gathered in the wild. They learned which seeds would yield a harvest, and where best to plant them. At some stage they began to water the seedlings, helping their crops through the dry months of summer. Without knowing it, these people were causing genetic modifications to the cereals they farmed.

As they gathered wild barley or emmer wheat, they naturally looked for the plants with the fattest, heaviest grains. As they grasped and hacked at the stalks with flint sickles, the more brittle plants scattered the seed, leaving only the grains that were more firmly attached to the plants to be gathered up and sown again the following spring. The process of farming quickened the pace of evolution by selecting for those mutations — bigger, denser, stronger seeds — that were dominant in the seeds sown by Neolithic people.

As the techniques of farming improved and the modified seeds began to yield a more dependable harvest, and as the rains returned to the hills after centuries of drought, the villages of the Jordan River Valley were able to feed a growing population. Before long, they were able to store a surplus and, for the first time in human history, to feed people who were not farmers or hunters at all.

It was not the only farming community in the world at that date. The earliest domestication of wild cereal probably took place to the north of here, in the Karacadag mountains of Turkey, or in the Euphrates valley around the Syrian site of Tell Abu Hureyra.

And there were surely other early farming villages, still unknown to archaeologists, scattered across the Levant. And then, around 10, years ago, the Neolithic farmers of Jericho did something absolutely unprecedented: they raised a massive stone wall around the town. Built from stones hauled from the banks of the Jordan River more than a mile away, this wall was 4 — 5 meters high and surrounded by a deep ditch. It included a tower almost 9m tall, with an internal staircase of 22 stone steps.

Within the wall, the people of Jericho lived in circular houses made from mud brick and plaster. Inside their homes there were fire pits for cooking, and stone querns for grinding flour. If they were making bread, they may also have been fermenting grain and drinking beer. There was no pottery, but they kept seeds and pulses in baskets and skins, or in silos made from mud and straw.

They stored tools here, too; spears and nets for fishing in the river, flint-tipped arrows, and sickles for reaping the fields.

From the loom weights we know there were weavers among them, though the textiles made in Neolithic Jericho have all perished. Along with the tools of everyday life, some kept more precious objects in their homes: blades made from obsidian, a glassy volcanic rock from the Anatolian mountains, and cowrie shells from the Red Sea, and pieces of turquoise from the Sinai. They must have bartered for these things with the salt and bitumen that were so abundant in their own territory, along trade routes that followed the north-south contour of the Rift Valley.

It may have been to protect of this slow accumulation of wealth that the wall was built. Kathleen Kenyon, the British archaeologist who excavated here in the s, certainly thought so. Whatever its purpose, the scale and sophistication of this project displays a degree of confidence and collaboration had never been seen before. At this date, the world was still a wilderness populated mainly by tribes of hunting and foraging nomads.

As they looked down on the walled city in the plain, they must have stared in wonder. We may never know exactly why the wall was built, but we can be sure that it was made possible by the humble mud and straw granaries that stood in the homes of Neolithic Jericho. In a pattern established here and repeated all over the world, the agricultural revolution was followed quickly by the growth of professional classes — artisans and merchants, engineers and priests — and by the emergence of ruling elites.

In the wall itself we see the beginnings of social hierarchy and organized government — someone must have designed this structure, and someone must have mobilized the hundreds of laborers who hauled and stacked the stone. After around BCE, when Jericho was rebuilt after a period of abandonment, the pace of change quickens.