So the people shouted and the priests blew the trumpets. When the people heard the sound of the trumpet, the people shouted with a great shout, and the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight in front of him, and they took the city.
A city's massive walls collapsed flat after people marched around it blowing horns and shouting.
History/Archaeology
26
passages in this field
Show this passage in
The cited passage
Anatomy of the claim
- Documented Toppling stone fortifications requires structural or seismic force rather than acoustic energy. USGS
- Documented Tell es-Sultan, the site of Jericho, has been excavated across several campaigns. British Museum
- Debated The dating of Jericho’s destruction is debated: an earlier excavation dated a destroyed wall to about 1400 BCE; a later campaign re-dated the major destruction to about 1550 BCE, concluding the site was small and unwalled at the traditional conquest date; a later re-analysis argued for a destruction about 1400 BCE from the pottery. John Garstang (1930s); Kathleen Kenyon (1950s); Bryant Wood (1990)
What the text says
This comes from Joshua 6. After the Israelites circle the city for seven days and sound trumpets, the walls of Jericho fall down flat.
Three honest ways to read this passage
-
As history
The text records how its authors understood the world with the knowledge they had. Read this way, a difference from modern science is a window into the ancient mind, not a failure.
-
As accommodation
The text speaks to its first audience in their own terms, to make a point that isn't mainly about physics or biology. Read this way, the scientific detail is the vehicle, not the cargo.
-
As contradiction
The text makes a claim about the physical world that modern findings dispute. Read this way, the difference is a genuine factual disagreement worth naming.
GEBible doesn't pick one of these for you. Each entry shows the passage, what it says, and what current science says — nothing more.