Crossing the Jordan and the Fall of Jericho
c. 1406 or c. 1220 BC, traditional dateTraditional date
The book of Joshua tells how Israel crosses the Jordan on dry ground, camps at Gilgal and keeps its first Passover in Canaan. Jericho’s wall falls after a seven-day procession around the city, and Rahab, who had sheltered Joshua’s spies, is spared.
After the death of Moses, the book of Joshua says, the Lord told Joshua to lead the people across the Jordan and promised to be with him as he had been with Moses (Joshua 1:1–9). From the camp at Shittim Joshua sent two men to look at Jericho. They lodged in the house of Rahab, a prostitute, who hid them under stalks of flax on her roof when the king’s men came for them. She told them that the city had heard what the Lord had done at the Red Sea and was afraid. In return for her help she asked for the lives of her family. The spies swore to it and told her to tie a scarlet cord in her window, and she let them down by a rope from her house on the city wall (Joshua 2:1–21).
The Jordan was in flood at harvest time. When the priests carrying the ark stepped into it, the book says, the water coming down from upstream stood in a heap far off at the town of Adam, and the people crossed opposite Jericho on dry ground (Joshua 3:14–17). They camped at Gilgal on the tenth day of the first month and set up twelve stones taken from the riverbed (Joshua 4:19–24). There the men born in the wilderness were circumcised and the Passover was kept. The day after they first ate the produce of the land, the manna ceased (Joshua 5:2–12).
Jericho was shut against them. For six days the armed men, seven priests blowing rams’ horns and the ark went around the city once a day, and on the seventh day seven times. At the last trumpet blast the people shouted, “the wall fell down flat”, and they took the city (Joshua 6:1–20). Everything living in it was put to the sword, and the city was burned; its silver, gold, bronze and iron went into the treasury of the Lord. Rahab and her family were brought out alive, and she lived in Israel from then on (Joshua 6:21–25). Joshua laid a curse on anyone who should rebuild Jericho (Joshua 6:26).
The New Testament remembers both the city and the woman. Hebrews counts the fall of Jericho’s walls and Rahab’s welcome of the spies among the acts of faith (Hebrews 11:30–31), James cites her as one “justified by works” (James 2:25), and Matthew names a Rahab among the ancestors of Jesus (Matthew 1:5).
How this is dated
Traditional date. From later tradition or from internal biblical chronology, with no outside anchor.
The book of Joshua dates the crossing to the tenth day of the first month (Joshua 4:19) at the end of the forty years in the wilderness (Joshua 5:6). The calendar year is therefore forty years after the Exodus from Egypt: about 1406 BC if the exodus is put at about 1446 BC from (1 Kings 6:1) (Bryant G. Wood, “The Rise and Fall of the 13th-Century Exodus-Conquest Theory”, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48, 2005), or about 1220 BC if it is put about 1260 BC under Ramesses II (Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, 2003). No Egyptian record of the exodus is known, and no source from the time outside the Bible mentions the entry into Canaan. Many scholars doubt that an exodus or a conquest on the scale the Bible describes took place; the note on the Exodus from Egypt sets out the question.
The mound of ancient Jericho, Tell es-Sultan, has been excavated several times, and the date of the destruction of its last walled Bronze Age city is disputed. John Garstang, who dug there in 1930–1936, put it in the Late Bronze Age and connected it with Joshua (John Garstang and J. B. E. Garstang, The Story of Jericho, 1940). Kathleen Kenyon, who excavated there in 1952–1958, assigned it to the end of the Middle Bronze Age, in the sixteenth century BC (Digging Up Jericho, 1957). Bryant G. Wood has argued again for about 1400 BC (“Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho? A New Look at the Archaeological Evidence”, Biblical Archaeology Review 16:2, 1990). Radiocarbon dating of charred grain from the destruction layer gave the late seventeenth or the sixteenth century BC, and its authors concluded that the city was not destroyed about 1400 BC (H. J. Bruins and J. van der Plicht, Radiocarbon 37, 1995, pp. 213–220). No town of the late thirteenth century BC has been found on the mound, as Wood notes against the later date (p. 476 of his 2005 article cited above). The timeline places the event at the earlier date and shows both.
Primary sources
In context
Grows out of
- c. 1406 or c. 1220 BC, traditional date
Leads to
- c. 1380 or c. 1195 BC, traditional date