Walls of Jerico

 

NKJ Joshua 6:2-5

Then the Lord said to Joshua, “See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men.    You shall march around the city, all you men of war; you shall go all around the city once. This you shall do six days.  And seven priests shall bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark. But the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets.  It shall come to pass, when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when you hear the sound of the trumpet, that all the people shall shout with a great shout; then the wall of the city will fall down flat. And the people shall go up every man straight before him.”

Why is this ponderable?

After spending forty years wandering in the desert of Sinai, the people of Israel were now on the eastern banks of the Jordan. Their challenge: take the land of Canaan, the Promised Land. However, an insurmountable obstacle, the city of Jericho, stood in their way. It must have seemed to these weary travelers that God was playing a cruel joke on them: placing an unconquerable, walled city right at the entrance of the promised land. 

Excavations of this ancient city reveal that its fortifications featured a stone wall 11 feet high and 14 feet wide. At its top was a smooth stone slope, angling upward at 35 degrees for 35 feet, where it joined massive stone walls that towered even higher. It was virtually impregnable.

In ancient warfare such cities were either taken by assault or surrounded and the people starved into submission. Its invaders might try to weaken the stone walls with fire or by tunneling, or they might simply heap up a mountain of earth to serve as a ramp. Each of these methods of assault took weeks or months, and the attacking force usually suffered heavy losses. However, the strategy to conquer the city of Jericho was unique in two ways. First, the strategy was laid out by God Himself, and, second, the strategy was a seemingly foolish plan. God simply told Joshua to have the people to march silently around Jericho for six days, and then, after seven circuits on the seventh day, to shout.

Though it seemed foolish, Joshua followed God’s instructions to the letter. When the people did finally shout, the massive walls collapsed instantly, and Israel won an easy victory.

Fast-forward a few thousand years and we find American Christians courting God's favor in their struggle to enter the promised land. However, this promised land was not proffered by God, but by godly Politicians at the Jericho rally.

A toxic ideological cocktail of grievance, paranoia, and self-exculpatory rage was on display at the “Jericho March,” a protest staged...in Washington, D.C., by the president’s most devoted Evangelical Christian supporters. Their aim was to “stop the steal” of the presidential election, to prepare patriots for battle against a “One-World Government,”      [source: Christianity as Ideology: The Cautionary Tale of the Jericho March]

 

Non-Christians might ponder how Christianity can be twisted and drafted into the service of a political ideology that is not readably compatible with Christianity. However, ideology goes hand in hand with politics and nationhood because its purpose is to abstract from the particular lives of individuals certain general rules or truths about human behavior that can then be used to organize society.  For this reason, ideology excludes the unique and unrepeatable personality of each human, what we usually call our “self.”

This flattening-out of people into manipulable abstractions is necessary to have a political order at all. American Politicians govern over 300 million people. They can’t hope to have a personal relationship with each and every citizen or to legislate according to the unique predilections of personal lives. They have to search for concerns their constituents share then treat them as avatars of those concerns. So in the eyes of the state, they are "members of a tax bracket", "pro-lifers", "pro-choicers", "white", "black", residents in a particular zip code. In all cases, their unique and individual personalities, as distinct from the things shared with other members of a political group, are excluded. Because of this, politics is, in a very real sense, inhuman.

We can ponder whether this scenario in Joshua is factual or just an Old Testament tale meant to bolster trust in a Higher Power in the face of insurmountable obstacles. However, don't be too quick to dismiss it as fiction. We are just beginning to understand the power sound waves have over matter. Here is one example:

Sonic Weapons' Long, Noisy History

by Eric Niiler

Bullets, missiles and swords may be what most people think of when it comes to weapons, but sound has also been deployed over the millennia to disrupt, confuse or even injure opponents on the global battlefield.

From the Israelite army of trumpet-blaring priests who shook the walls of Jericho 3,500 years ago to the U.S. Navy’s current use of long-range acoustic devices, nations and their armies have deployed both sonic weapons and various sounds as a form of attack.