Uh-Oh, Jericho

The walls of Jericho came tumbling down a number of times long before any historical Joshua could have existed. And that was because of battering rams and siege ramps and torches, and not because of the Ark of the Covenant, the blast of a ram’s horn and everybody yelling really loud. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

I’m doing better than you are.

That is not difficult to do, but, yes, you are doing better than me. I am trying to get over something—wasn’t COVID, but might have been the flu or something like that. I’ve been hammering…

We postponed this recording as long as we could to give you as much time to recover as possible. And you’re still—you’re still not there yet, not 100%.

So if this show goes a little short or whatever, hopefully our kind listeners and viewers will cut us some slack.

Yeah. If once we edit out all the coughing fits, right, it’s down to 14 minutes or so. Give us a break.

What happened? It said it was 60 minutes. What are we doing here? All right. We got a fun show. I’m excited about what we’re going to be talking about. Look, we’ve mentioned him on the show before. Some of our listeners may know that there was a guy named Noah in the Bible.

This is King Noah from

I know a guy.

the Book of Mormon, right? Who we’re talking about? Yes, exactly.

We’re going to talk about the flood narrative. We’re going to talk about the Noah stories.

And I say “stories” not because it’s multiple stories sort of sequentially, but because there’s multiple stories at the same time happening. And I think that’s going to be fun. We’ll call that one a Bible versus Bible segment.

And then at the end of the show or our second segment, we’re going to do a Chapter and Verse and we’re going to talk about those famous

fabled walls of Jericho which went tumbling down.

Yes, indeed.

From… yeah, as quote, the great poet

Meredith Willson was where I was going.

Oh, man. Okay.

Well, that, in the sense, that’s from The Music Man. The first musical I was ever in, I played

Oh, yeah.

In The Music Man.

You played who?

Winthrop.

Little kid.

I was—I was the kid.

In The Music Man. Yeah.

Okay, so you didn’t get to sing Shipoopi.

No, I didn’t. That’s—it’s the most fun number in the show.

If no other reason than you get to repeat the word “poopy” all the time.

Yeah, it’s just a nonsense word. I really enjoy “Ya Got Trouble.” That was my—that was the one that I really enjoyed.

Well, that was what I was quoting. “Just remember, my friends, that a handful of trumpet players…” But what a—what a handful of trumpet players did to those famous fabled walls of Jericho. Those billiard parlor walls come a-tumbling down.

All right, can we sing that or those? That’s not public domain, is it?

I don’t know. Come at me, Meredith Willson. We’ll see.

For—so for whatever reason, I was thinking “Swing Low, Walls of Jericho,” but… and then I’m thinking Blazing Saddles, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” So that’s—yeah, a little…

There you go.

The nightmare that is my head.

Jericho apparently is frequently referenced in popular culture.

Yes. My brother was once in a band called Housefly Army, and they gave an album of theirs to somebody who went to serve in one of the armed forces and ended up in Serbia. And somehow their album ended up on the radio and there was a week where they were number one in Serbia, and so they made t-shirts that said “Housefly Army Number One in Serbia.” Serbia or Bosnia? Bosnia and Herzegovina, I believe is as it’s known today.

Number one in Serbia slash Bosnia slash Bosnia Herzegovina. All right, good, let’s. But we’ve got a whole show to do, so let’s dive into Bible versus Bible. All right. This week, Bible versus Bible. It—we’re not real, we’re not looking at like, a very specific contradiction. No, but like a series of, of like things that don’t add up or don’t line up.

Yes, right. Yes. A suite of contradictions. You might, you might say we’re going to look at a narrative that when you look at the details, it’s like there are a lot of different things going on here. It seems like a bunch of narratives have been interstitched, have been woven together, and we’re going to try to tease some of these apart.

I, I, yeah, I think because I remember reading the story and being—and like there are multiple moments where it’s like—it kind of jolts you because you thought you understood that it was one thing, and then suddenly it’s another thing, and it gets it—it just keeps sort of contradicting itself as it goes through.

Yeah. And it’s—there’s some—some repetitions, some couplets, some contradictions, and some things that have led scholars over the years to—to scratch their heads furiously and to come up with conclusions that basically what we have are a bunch of originally independent traditions, some of which ran parallel to each other, some of which were entirely different, and they were brought together and—and kind of woven together to create what we have now as the story of Noah and the flood. Okay, but I actually want to go back before the flood and start in Genesis 4 .

Oh, okay.

Because we’ve talked about the primeval history. We had David Carr on a while ago, wonderful scholar who just published his own commentary on Genesis 1 through 11, talked about what’s going on in the primeval history, how a lot of these are—lot of these stories are aetiologies, stories of origins, where things came from, why they are the way they are. So think—you—you really got to think of Aesop’s fables and—and these stories about, you know, why elephants have trunks and all that kind of stuff. And—and here it’s like. Or like.

Or like Greek mythology. Where—where—it’s like, where—where does lightning come from? Well, it comes from Zeus on the hill or whatever.

Right. And—and in chapter four, you have—toward the end, you have a—you’ve got a genealogy here, and you’ve got Lamech took two wives. Adah was one, and the other was Zillah. And then Adah bore Jabal. And this is verse 20. He was the ancestor of those who live in tents and have livestock. Okay, so we’re talking about where certain groups of people that we know today—now, not we, we, not the—the dude wearing the X-Men T-shirt today.

Right.

But the we of whoever the audience of Genesis 4 is. Okay. Oh, those people over there who live in tents and have livestock. They descend from Jabal. His brother’s name was Jubal, and he was the ancestor of all those who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah bore Tubal-cain, who made all kinds of bronze and iron tools. And we saw him in the Noah movie, Aronofsky’s Noah movie. The sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah. But we’ve got these stories about where these groups of people came from, except they’re all supposed to have been killed in this flood that happened. And so there would be no connection between these people and the folks that dwell in tents today.

And I mean, it’s also obviously a very weird thing to say. Everyone who plays music from one person and everyone who lives in a tent came from another person. It just—I mean, that’s obviously just not how civilization works.

Well, I—I think—and ethnicities were—were divided according to features like this. I think anciently. I think a lot of identity markers were—were like that, where it was like the—the—you know, the—the nomadic peoples are—you know, they—they’re this ethnic group over here. And—and—and today, you know, you can have people who are—somebody may not know a lick of English, may have spent their entire life, you know, growing up in San Francisco speaking Hmong, may be 100% American. Like, ethnicity is a very different category today, but anciently.

Okay, so sorry. So the idea is that, like, oh, there’s that—that nomadic tribe is the tent and livestock nomadic tribe. And those guys over there, I don’t know what we call them, but they play the lyre and the pipe all the time.

Yeah, yeah, that.

That’s the idea. Okay.

I think these are the ways they characterize these ethnic groups, but they’re supposed to descend from these people who ostensibly all died in the flood. Right.

It would have been smarter to put that particular bit of text after the flood.

Yeah. So we have this indication that at least this part of this genealogy is not aware of a great worldwide flood. And another indication of this is the fact that this genealogy in Genesis 4 sounds an awful lot like the same genealogy in Genesis 5 that ends with Noah.

And so because you’ve got Cain, he conceived and bore Enoch. To Enoch was born Irad, to Irad was Mehujael. To Mehujael was Methushael. And then Lamech. Right. And then when you go to five, you’ve got Seth, Enosh, Kenan, not of Keenen Ivory Wayans fame, but Kenan, Mahalalel. Then Mahalalel went to Jared, and Irad and Jared are spelled the same way in Hebrew. And then after Jared, you’ve got Enoch. Wait a minute. We already had Enoch in the other one as well.

Right, right.

And then after that, you have Methuselah, which is an awful lot, very close to Methushael.

Right.

And so you’ve got. And then Methuselah became the father of Lamech, who’s also in the Genesis 4 genealogy. So we’ve got two genealogies that line up in a bunch of ways, but these are entirely different—supposed to be entirely different stories.

Right.

Which is indicative of two different traditions that have run parallel to each other to some degree and then they’re being put on the same scroll one after the other. So.

And also like a really good indication of how trustworthy. Like if we assume that these two genealogies were supposed to be the same set of genealogies that just sort of evolved on their own as they were passed down probably orally from one generation to the next in parallel. It shows us like how reliable that way of transmitting information actually was anciently and how like we maybe shouldn’t count on them to be factually useful.

Yeah, oral transmission was, you know, pretty ripe for exploitation, manipulation when it became necessary, when it wasn’t necessary. Yeah, it could be incredibly accurate. But if someone is incentivized to change it, there’s less stopping them when it comes to oral transmission than there is with textual transmission.

Well, and all it takes is one sloppy historian and you got something new.

Yeah. And so we’ve got these two genealogies. One of them leads to Noah and guess what’s going to happen with Noah. And the other is like, yeah, these are all the people who were the ancestors of all these weirdos that we live around today.

Right.

Totally unaware of what’s going on in Genesis 6 . And then we get to Genesis 6 and we’ve got those scamps, the Bene Elohim, the children of God who develop a bit of a fancy for the daughters of humanity. And so they descend and take some of them as wives and have children that may or may not be identified as the Nephilim, the warriors, the heroes of old. And God is like, oh boy, does not like what’s going on downstairs. And so decides he says, I will blot out from the earth the humans I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them. And yes, the text quite literally and indisputably says that God regrets having made humanity, is sorry that he created them.

See whatever our episode was where we talked about God being sorry.

Yeah. So the “no regerts” dogma crowd. I’m afraid you’re not very interested in what the Bible actually says. But. And then enter Noah stage left. Noah is a man of the—not quite a man of the cloth, but a man of the soil, as we’re going to find out. Yeah, but we’re not there yet. In chapter six, Noah is described as a righteous man, blameless in his generation. And I want to bring this up because I want to correct a particularly heinous way that people have gone about interpreting this. Blameless in his generation is the word could be interpreted to mean perfect. And people are like, well, only the Lord was perfect.

So anyway, blameless in his generation, perfect in his generation is whatever. There are people out there who are like, ah, this is coming right after we have had the Nephilim, these fallen angels corrupt human bloodlines by having children. And so what it really means is that Noah is the only pure blood human left on earth. Everybody else is a mud blood. Everybody else has been corrupted with angel DNA. And, and this is, this is an attempt to try to rationalize why God would kill everyone else.

Right?

Women, children, babies, men, everyone in between, and for whatever reason, save Noah. And so. But if your solution is they were pure bloods, you have stumbled upon an awful solution which leads to ideas about being pure of blood.

Right.

And other people not being pure of blood.

So, which is funny, because if you believe in the Noah narrative, then everybody is descended from him. So we’re all pure. Every, Every. Everyone on the earth is of equal purity.

Well, in the 19th century, there was actually, there were actually some folks. It was certainly not the majority of white folks, but there were some folks who insisted that black folks were not descended from Noah, that they were actually.

Yes, they had their own boat.

I guess we won’t get into that story. Maybe, maybe another time we can talk about that. But, but yeah, don’t repeat that idiotic theory about what it means for Noah to be blameless in his generation. Basically, Noah was doing everything right because the, the, the line that we draw between perfect and imperfect today wasn’t really relevant to the audience for Genesis chapter six, back in the middle of the first millennium BCE. So, yeah, stop doing that because it’s gross. So then I want to get to the end of chapter six. God is like, all right, Noah, I’m killing everybody except for you and I guess your wife and kids too, and their wives, because, you know, you got to repopulate the earth. So enjoy. But God says to Noah, verse 19, and of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark to keep them alive with you.

They shall be male and female of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds. And of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind. Two of every kind shall come into you to keep them alive and also take with you every kind of food that is eaten to store it up, and it shall serve as food for you and for them. Noah did this. He did all that God commanded him. So how many animals did Noah bring on the ark? Two of every kind. No qualifications there. All the birds, all the animals, all the creeping things. Every living kind of animal on the planet. Two.

Right. And that’s what we see, you know, when you. When you look at a depiction of it or whatever, when you see the

two lions, both of them with the big manes.

Right, exactly.

Making the ark.

Inevitably, if someone draws a cartoon of Noah, like herding animals onto an ark, you’re going to see two male lions. That’s just a guaranteed.

That’s. That’s required. That’s just how it works. So it’s like, well, they got to know they’re lions, and if we draw a female lion, they’re not going to know it’s a lion. And then. And then we get to chapter seven, you know, we. Screen goes dark, suddenly we’ve got a new setting. Then the Lord said to Noah, go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation. Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals. The male and its mate, and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and its mate. And seven pairs of the birds of the air, also male and female, to keep their kind alive on the face of all the earth. For in seven days, I will send rain on the earth for 40 days and 40 nights, and every living thing that I’ve made, I will blot out from the face of the ground. And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him.

Suddenly the story changes. Right?

That’s more than two pair. One.

Yeah, yeah, it’s 14 of all the clean kinds of animals, and then 2 of all the unclean kinds of animals.

What. What does clean mean in this case? Edible. Like within. Within the Levitical law or something.

Yeah, yeah. And the idea seems to be appropriate for sacrifice, but. Yeah, appropriate. Appropriate for eating as well. But what we seem to have here are two different sets of instructions. One set of instruction is concerned about ritual purity and sacrificial actions and things like that. And then the other set of instructions does not seem to care.

Right.

And one of the things that happens is as soon as they get off the boat, they offer sacrifices.

Right.

And so you gotta have, you gotta have animals as a sacrifice because they’re, they’re not on there long enough for most of the animals that can be sacrificed to reproduce.

Been busy enough to.

Yeah, most of it’s probably going to be spent vomiting from the seasickness because these are land animals. And. Did you, you remember Waterworld, don’t you?

Oh, my gosh.

I was starting to bring that up again.

It’s an incredible show and everybody should watch it, but not because it’s good.

Yeah, some of us had to live through the whole. It actually being released in the theaters finally and then actually going to see it. But the part where he gets on the dry land and it’s kind of like. Right, right, that I, I always think about that part when I think about Noah and them getting off the ark.

Have you ever spent like, like enough time on the sea that when you get back in the, on the land, like the next this. There’s several hours of the land just being wobbly.

I have not. I, I try to avoid as much as possible spending time on the sea. I think the, the apart from taking boats here and there and between little islands in the, in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific, which, you know, is, is some time. I think the. I took a ferry from, from the main island of Malta out to Gozo, one of the smaller islands. And that was probably the, the most time I spent on the sea. And we didn’t get to do our, our cruise, so I didn’t spend.

Right.

But I, I get off a treadmill and I’m kind of like. And, you know, it takes me a while to get recalibrated. So we’ve, we’ve got these two different sets of commandments regarding how many animals to bring on the ark, which indicates, again, two different stories were going on. And, and both, both of these things end with. And Noah did everything that God commanded him. And scholars have noted this for a long time. In fact, the, the first scholars to say, hey, it looks like there are multiple sources. Jean Astruc, a French scholar from the 17th century, I think, was the first to say, I bet Moses had multiple different sources that he wove together to create what we have now. And he was a theologian. He was a faithful Christian. It’s not like he, you know, he wasn’t one of these. Not even wasn’t a proto-Marxist coming into.

Try and ruin everybody’s faith.

Yeah. And so, like, scholars have noticed this for a long, long time, but these days, most scholars divide it up into at least two different stories about the Flood, each with its own beginning, middle, and end. And, and you still have pretty internally coherent and comprehensive stories when you disentangle the different narratives and how many animals to bring on board is just one of the, what are called doublets. And a doublet is, is where you have two different or the same story told twice, either in quick succession or nearby. And they, but they’re told slightly differently. So another one, another one would be somebody going to spend time at, in a city and going in and telling their wife, tell everybody, I’m your sister. And then the leader of the city getting the hots for the sister, and then God punishing the city, and then the guy having to go, okay, she’s not really my sister, she’s my wife.

That happens twice in the book of Genesis and very different times. Like they’re not one after the other. But that’s an example of a literary doublet. And so we’ve looked at texts that we know came together incrementally over long periods of time. And this is one of the things that is present frequently when people are putting text together from earlier sources. So doublets is one example of that.

And then. Go ahead.

We’ve got, so we’ve, we, we’ve got either 14 or two of all the animals we’re getting. We’re gathering them on the boat. All right, what’s, what’s next? Sorry. Well, I’m, I’m jumping the gun here.

We’ve got, we’ve got a few different accounts of, of how long whatever was going on went on. Because in the hundredth year of Noah’s life, second month, on the 17th day of the month, on that day, all the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were open. The rain fell on the earth 40 days and 40 nights. So we got.

I’m just, I’m just going to jump back. You’re sick, so it’s fine. I think you said in the hundredth year, and it’s the 6th.

Oh, 600. Excuse me. Yes, 600th year. I was about to say. I thought it was 600th. Yeah, I skipped over that. So then we have. The rain stopped the waters, Chapter 8, the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed and rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters gradually receded from the earth. At the end of 150 days, the waters had abated. And in the seventh month, on the 17th day of the month, ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters continued to abate until the tenth month. In the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains appeared. And then it says, at the end of 40 days, Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made and sent out the raven. And it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. So we’ve got long periods of time, 150 days the waters abated, but then we go back to 40. Yeah, so like the stories, like, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights and it stopped raining.

And then Noah let the bird out.

Right.

And then we’ve also got. But we’ve also got, hey, the, you know, there were another, like 110 days or maybe 150 days where the boat was just kind of adrift, but it wasn’t raining anymore and the waters were just slowly abating. And scholars have pointed this out as well for a long time. When you look at the, the chronology, it does not add up. Something is, is wrong here with the chronology. And then you’ve got sending out a dove and sending out a. What, it’s a raven. Right. And then it says, in the 601st year, in the first month, on the first day of the month, the waters are dried up from the earth. And again, this is, this is considered evidence by scholars that we’ve got multiple different stories here that are being combined.

Right.

So it’s unclear exactly what the original story was, if there was an original story. Right, but we wouldn’t.

I mean, isn’t it. It seems likely that it was original stories. Right. I mean, I certainly, we’ve talked about how the Epic of Gilgamesh has a flood story. There were lots of flood stories floating around.

Yeah, absolutely. And this was probably, it was probably at least inspired by like, the, the central and northern hill countries of Israel. Like, flooding is not a problem there. It is the plains of Mesopotamia, where the annual floods are critical for their agriculture, and where, when the floods don’t come or when the floods are erratic or get too high, that it can be phenomenally destructive to their agriculture and their infrastructure. And the same is true of Egypt. That’s where flooding is a problem. When you’re living at the tops of mountains, flooding is less frequently something that keeps you up at night. And so, you know, just like tornadoes if they’re like there was this great tornado and it took everybody. It’s like maybe that originates in Kansas and not in the tops of the mountains. But so most likely this is borrowed from Mesopotamia and probably when folks were in Mesopotamia or at least under the thumb of Mesopotamia and were influenced by their literature.

So they’re probably taking from the traditions that are in circulation in the middle of the first millennium BCE. Traditions about devastating floods and it becomes the flood of the whole earth. And, and then we get this, this weird story. We’ve talked about it before at the end of, of chapter nine where verse 20 starts out, Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard.

And I’m, I, I’m going to have to cut you off there and say that I don’t care what translator says what. And, and husbandman is what I want.

And, and you know why it has an “an”, right?

Because it. Well, H’s weren’t pronounced right.

Right, right. It was an husbandman, an husbandman. Right. And this is a funny. So for other members of the, of the LDS faith, something funny about the fact that we use the Blayney version of the King James Version is it still has an help meet. Eve is an help meet. What’s funny is when Joseph Smith was working on his translation of the Bible and creating the, the book of Moses and the book of Abraham and all this kind of stuff, he was using an updated edition of the King James Version that changed that so that it said a help meet and a husbandman. So he was like nah, we’re not going to do the old stuff. We’re going to, we’re going to bring in the updated stuff. And this was actually an American edition of the King James Version. And, and we have since been like, nah, we’re going to go back to the old stuff. So if you look in like the, the book of Abraham and stuff, it says a help meet. And then you go to our official translation of the Bible into English, the King James Version and it’s like an help meet, governor.

I love it.

Because we’re like now we don’t want to. Joseph Smith was up in the night.

We’re going to sound like fancier and, and more and more weirder.

Yeah. So he was a man of the soil anyway was the first to plant a vineyard and this, that seems like

a mean way to call him dirty. He’s a man of the soil.

Doesn’t this sound like the way you would begin a story, though. Yeah, it’s like. It’s. Imagine, you know, you’ve just watched an hour and 15 minutes of the Noah movie, and then it’s like you have a new scene, and it’s like, now there was this dude named Noah, and he was once upon a time.

Wait, what time?

We know this guy. Yeah. He drank some of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent and higgledy piggledy. We know that story, and we’ve discussed this story at length before. But the point we want to make here is that it certainly seems like this is another story that was in circulation independently of the flood narrative. That was.

Right. This is the origin of that delicious drink that we all like.

And so the. Which. Which gets us back to Genesis 4 . It’s like so. And so was the, you know, they’re the origin of the people who dwell in tents. And so they’re the origin of the people who wear, you know, pleated slacks. And they’re the. These are the origins of the people who wear flat front pants and.

Right.

The origins of the cargo shorts. And. And then we’ve got. Then. Then there was this dude, Noah, and he was a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. And so he’s. We’ve got another aetiology for viticulture. This is where we get the folks who grow wine and make. Or grow grapes and make wine and stuff like that. And then we get this weird story where Canaan, who’s not even supposed to be there yet, gets cursed because of. Whatever.

Because. Yeah, because of the most weirdly conceived story of all time.

Yeah. So it’s. It’s a bizarre collection of stories, but it is precisely that. It is a collection of stories, and it has been woven. I was going to say competently, but maybe not so competently. I mean, if they’re trying to hide their stitches, they’re not doing a great job of it. You see an awful lot of seams in here. You can tell that that these things were. Were probably part of another story. So I think, and many scholars would agree, that initially Noah was really just the. The first viticulturist.

And that the. The flood story was added later and it was like. Well, just put it after the. The Tubal-cain stuff, but before the. The table of nations and. And him getting drunk and something weird going on in his tent stuff. And. And. And so the flood is. Is an interjection into what was probably initially just a very brief story about this dude who is a, is a good, a good warning story about why you shouldn’t get too drunk.

Yeah. And, and also don’t. Yeah. And be an husbandman if you can. Yeah, all right. Yes, I like that.

And Noah, by the way, Noah means, means rest. And so, and you know, the story there at the end has Noah resting.

Okay. Yes.

And. But a lot of people, it will try to read the, the Noah’s name into the story of the flood. It’s like, it makes much better sense as, as the, a name associated with the first viticulturist.

Yeah. The flood narrative provides very little that seems restful. There’s almost nothing that feels like, oh, you know, he’s a guy who by hand was, with maybe the help of his sons, built the most enormous boat that has ever been built up until that point.

or, or a historical one.

Right, right. But.

All right, the, the guy who’s like, I need to lay down. Yeah, that’s, that’s our, our viticulturist.

Yeah, there you go. All right, well, from there let’s, let’s take a journey into our chapter and verse. And this time we’re heading to. We finally made it. We’ve emerged from the Pentateuch into Joshua. So it seems like what we have is we’re following the story of the Exodus. We’re following the story of Moses. Moses is gone now Joshua has taken over as, as the leader and, and they’re on a rampage.

So, so guide us through. Like, what, what are we doing here? It’s, you know, these guys, the, these people just came out of Egypt. They were just freed. They are, you know, they’ve been wandering in the desert for 40 years or whatever it is.

And now it’s time for them to just start destroying people.

So, so Moses was, was told he wasn’t going to be allowed to enter the promised land. The best he got was he got to see the promised land from across the valley. And so Joshua is really the story of the generation that gets to enter the promised land because he and, and Caleb were supposed to be the only ones who gave the, the honest rep, honest reports when they were sent as spies. And so the old generation has all died off and this is the new generation that has arisen. And, but the, the problem is people already occupy the promised land.

Yeah, that seems like a problem. Yeah.

Yeah. So instead of just saying, “Hey, can we come a little over here? You got some space?” They want to run them out. And because it’s like they got, they already got the buildings built. Why would we want to take the time to build more buildings?

I mean, they’ve got buildings, they’ve got, they’ve got a big wall. The walls won’t end up being useful later on.

Yeah, we’re gonna, we don’t need those. And so they, they have to engage in this conquest. And there’s a, the conquest narrative is among the most disturbing. I mean, it starts back with, with Moses and, you know, Ammonites and, and everything that they’ve. And they weren’t collecting ammonite fossils. They were genociding the Ammonite people, trying and then keeping their, the women as, as sex slaves or as concubines. So pretty awful, awful stuff. And then Joshua and Judges is like. And. And here’s how they routed everybody. And it’s really. It’s human sacrifice. Because what they have to do is purge the land of these people who are not worthy to be there. And so they engage in what is called herem, which is a word that is translated a variety of different ways. Devoted to destruction is one way to think of it. But basically it’s that you’ve got to destroy all of this stuff so that it is devoted to God.

You are not keeping any of it for yourselves. Whether whether animals or property or people, everything gets destroyed. And, and by so doing, by sacrificing everything, the land is purged.

Right.

Of the evil that is the people of Canaan. So it’s human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together. Yeah.

Mass hysteria.

Mass hysteria indeed. And so it’s awful, it’s horrific, and it didn’t happen. Like, a lot of people are. Get rightfully upset about, about this rhetoric. And it’s not historical. It didn’t happen. So Jericho is, is kind of the, the main event for this, the start of their routing of the people of Canaan.

Do we think there was an actual historical Jericho? Is this a real place?

I have been to the historical Jericho, yes.

In fact, don’t look like I’m dumb for asking.

I don’t know that Jericho is the, the oldest more or less continually inhabited city on Earth. So if you go there, there’s a sign that says world’s oldest city or world’s first city or something like that.

Oh, okay.

And, and so it’s, it’s kind of a tell. It’s. It’s a big hill that, that sticks up around the, the geography around it, it’s next to some cliffs and mountains and things like that, but it’s on a relatively flat land in the Jordan River Valley, and it’s just northwest of the northern end of the Dead Sea. So if you’re like in Qumran and you head out of Qumran, you turn left, you head north, and then you’ve got a road that goes west and that takes you up over the hills to get into Jerusalem, or if you can turn right and you head up to Jericho.

All right, well, put a pin in that because I, you’re gonna have to explain something to me at the end of this story then. Okay, so, okay, now, now let’s, let’s go back. They, you know, they arrive at Jericho.

And, and we’ll, we’ll skip the, the spies that they sent in and, yeah, and, and the, the sex worker who protects them, Rahab. They do the whole thing where the Lord tells them how to take the city.

And it involves marching around the city.

Once a day until the final day where they do it seven times. Right, seven times around the city. They blow their horns and then, and

then scream and all the people will shout. Yeah.

And then, and that shouting and horn blowing is sufficient to crumble the, the, the walls, the city walls. And then they just go in and kill everybody.

Yeah. And they’re, they’re marching, they’re marching the Ark of the Covenant right around the city. And yeah, the, the walls come a tumbling down and that allows you to get into the city because that was your defense anciently. You built the city up on a hill and you built walls around it. And that just made it that much more difficult to get up over the walls and to get into the city to access the people that you would like to unalive. And so, you know, you had siege ramps that would be built up. You would fire arrows at them. You would, you know, stop up their wells and their springs to try to, you know, starve them out and stuff. And, and God’s solution is just, what if I just make the walls fall down?

Right. And it’s an elaborate methodology, but, but apparently that was. I’ll tell you what, it would, it would feel weird and intimidating for people in a city, in a walled city, to have this group of people, just every day they march around your city and blow their horns and whatever. That would feel weird.

It would be a little off-putting. Yeah, it’s one way to put it. And, and what’s interesting is these, these are casemate walls, which means that, or from the story, it sounds like that.

Right.

There’s a part where Rahab is actually, she’s got a ribbon tied around or tied to the window or something like that, which means that her window or her house would have had to have been built into the city wall. And that’s frequently the case, particularly with casemate walls. And casemate walls are where you’ve got like two walls and there’s, you know, several feet to several yards of space between them and then they’re filled in with rubble or something like that to make them thicker. Yeah. And it is, yeah, it’s just supposed to fall down. And there’s a theory that the reason they came up with this story is because Jericho was around, but it would not have been there. We have no indication that it was a walled city or that those walls came a tumbling down anywhere near what

where the historical Joshua would have had to have been located.

We have indications that this was a fortified city earlier in the Bronze Age, and that there were destruction levels associated with some of those earlier fortified cities. But basically the last time Jericho had significant walls, and we have evidence that those walls were destroyed, at least in part. You didn’t go down and destroy walls. You just destroyed enough of the wall to get through.

So it wasn’t like, keep knocking it down. All right, now go around the other side. Now we got to, you got one.

Well, you guys are in trouble when we finish demolishing this wall.

Yeah, yeah. It was usually just there was one or two spots where you would find a big hole in the wall unless they managed to set fire to everything and other parts crumbled. But the most significant and the latest destruction layer from that time period dates to about 1550 BCE, which is long before any historical Moses could have been born. So it clearly has nothing to do with any historical Joshua that came through.

So the archaeological data is not going to come to the salvation of this story. The walls of Jericho came tumbling down a number of times long before any historical Joshua could have existed. And that was because of battering rams and siege ramps and torches, and not because of the Ark of the Covenant, the blast of a ram’s horn and everybody yelling really loud.

Right. And that is. That is the thing that actually does it, isn’t it? It’s the. It’s the yelling. Yeah, that. That actually takes down the walls.

And then you shall shout. Yeah, yeah.

And then in verse 21 of Joshua. What is this? Or Joshua 6 , verse 21, they. Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword. All in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen and sheep. Oxen, sheep and donkeys. That’s not very nice.

No, that’s. And that’s. That. That idea of herem where everything is supposed to be destroyed as a. It’s a. It’s a bit of costly signaling. It’s. And we’re not. we just want to show you all, we’re not doing this so that we can take all this for ourselves. We’re doing this because God told us. And so we’re going to destroy all the goods that we would be expected to take.

Right.

As to signal to you that we’re serious about this. This is. Well.

And they said. So they burned down the city and everything in it. Only the silver and gold and the vessels of bronze and iron they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord. So that’s. That’s. That’s just for. That’s just for the priests to use, I guess.

Right.

And. And everything else. They’re. They’re not supposed to have any. Any booty. And we’ve talked about the story in the next chapter of. Of what’s his name.

And his wife, who took. Took a little bit of something.

Yes. And at the end of chapter six, says Joshua then pronounced this oath saying, cursed before Adonai be anyone who tries to build this city Jericho, at the cost of his firstborn, he shall lay its foundation, and at the cost of his youngest, he shall set up its gates. For so the Lord was with Joshua and his fame was in all the land. Which is. Is suggestive to me of the composition of this story in a time period when it was like, look, the walls have. Were fallen down and the city was never rebuilt.

So when I read that, this is me pulling the pin from earlier. When I read that part, I thought it meant you’re not supposed to rebuild this city ever. And if you try to, then you’re going to. Your firstborn is going to. Going to die and blah, blah, blah. But obviously you’ve been to it, so someone rebuilt it. Wasn’t that supposed to be a bad thing?

Well, I’ve been to the ruins, but yeah, there were people who settled around the ancient tell. There were certainly. There were certainly people who occupied Jericho, the, the actual tell, the hill itself, you know, after the, the 14th and 13th centuries BCE so if, if we were to take this story seriously, the Joshua was ignored. Okay. More likely what’s going on is in a later period when it was maybe abandoned again, they were looking at the city and were like, oh, it’s so old and it’s got walls that fell down. Oh, okay. And. And I bet it’s been like that since Joshua. So we’ll just tell the story like, like he cursed anybody who, who tried to rebuild it. But, but the city of Jericho now is, is quite large and none of it is actually located on the tell. The town is just an archaeological site. So. So now Jericho spreads out significantly around the tell.

And it was.

So he was cursing anyone who builds on the hill, but if you go, if you go next to it, you’re okay.

How close can my property line get? All right, I’m putting this stick. Is this. Where’s the curse line?

Where, where does the, where does the curse end?

Yeah. Does it have to go up the hill or is it… and, and the whole reason Jericho was a city and was so important is because there’s a, there’s a natural spring right next to it and still going today. So, okay. There was a constant source of water

in a desert land right next to the Dead Sea. I can see how a, a spring, a natural spring would be exactly where you put a city in.

Yes, that works.

It is. It is the foundation, in fact, of the Promised Land, apparently. All right, well, there you go. We, we have Jericho. We tumbling down… the walls come tumbling down. I think that’s very interesting. I don’t know what to make of it all other than just, yeah, interesting story. That doesn’t really… I mean, I don’t know what we learn from it in terms of it being useful to modern readers other than just a story. Yeah, about, about, about a bunch of mass murder. All right.

Yeah, there’s, there’s definitely genocide… definitely features heavily. Yes. In the story.

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Uh-Oh, Jericho

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