Place

Jericho

Gustave Doré, La Sainte Bible (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1866). Public domain.

joshuaconquest

Summary

The city of palms whose walls fell flat at the seventh trumpet-circuit; Rahab's city, later rebuilt under a curse, and the road down from Jerusalem where the Samaritan proved neighbor.

The first city Israel took inside Canaan, and it fell without a siege.
Rahab of Jericho and her household lived, and Matthew names her in the line of Christ.
Joshua cursed whoever would rebuild it, and 1 Kings 16:34 records the curse landing on Hiel.
Elisha healed its poisoned spring, and Jesus walked through the city on his last road up to Jerusalem.
The mound at Tell es-Sultan was walled and burned. The date of that burning is genuinely disputed.

In Scripture

Verses: 59
Books: 15

See it on Reference map of ancient Palestine→

Near Jericho

Straight-line distances, computed from the gazetteer coordinates.

Where it is

the country around it

Coordinates: 31.8706° N, 35.4439° Efind it on the Atlas →
Region: Jordan valley
Kind of place: City

1 place the record names with Jericho, the farthest 22 km away

1Jericho named first in Benjamin's allotmentJoshua 18:22 · 22 kmJericho, Beth-hoglah, Emek-keziz, Beth-arabah, Zemaraim, Bethel,

Located: the gazetteer fixes one site
Placed: the point stands for an area, or is rounded
? Proposed: one candidate among several
A dashed line ends at a place the gazetteer does not fix

Not located: Moab. The gazetteer records no location for it, so it is not marked.

Each line joins Jericho to a place one of its verses names, and carries that verse. No line is headed, because none of these verses says which way anyone went. The lines are straight between two coordinates and are not roads. A dashed line ends at a place the gazetteer does not fix. The Dead Sea and the Jordan are drawn from Natural Earth's public-domain outlines. Every mark sits at the coordinates the gazetteer records for it.

Reference map of ancient Palestine: the coast, the hill country, the Jordan rift and the Dead Sea, with the towns of the biblical narrative marked. — Reference map of ancient Palestine: the land from Dan to Beersheba: most of the historical books happen on this one sheet.Rand McNally reference map (1926), public domain.Open this plate full size in The Atlas →

Why Jericho matters

Jericho sat in the Jordan valley, on the floor of the rift, beside a spring called Ain es-Sultan that made a green town possible in dry country. Scripture calls it the City of Palms. It guarded the road up from the river into the hill country, which is why it was the first city Israel had to take once they crossed the Jordan. It fell without a battering ram and without a ramp. Israel walked around it for six days and said nothing, and on the seventh day walked around it seven times and shouted. Hebrews credits the fall to faith and to nothing else. The Bible keeps coming back to this one town. Joshua cursed anyone who rebuilt it, and centuries later the curse landed on a man named Hiel. Elijah and Elisha walked out of it on the last day of Elijah's life, and Elisha healed the spring that had been poisoning the ground. When Jesus went up to Jerusalem for the last time, the road took him through Jericho, and he stopped twice: once for a blind beggar shouting by the roadside, and once for a tax collector in a tree. The climb explains why Luke can speak of going down to Jericho and up to Jerusalem: Jericho sits about 250 metres below sea level, Jerusalem about 750 metres above it, roughly 24 kilometres apart by the old road, and that steep, lonely stretch is the setting Jesus gives the parable of the good Samaritan. That tax collector, Zacchaeus, was not stationed at Jericho by accident. Herod had rebuilt the city as a wealthy winter town, and its revenue came chiefly from balsam and date-palm groves that Josephus calls among the richest in Judea. Zacchaeus is called a chief tax collector, architelones in the Greek text, a title for someone who oversaw other collectors rather than working one toll booth himself. Jesus called him down by name and told him that salvation had come to his house that day, in the wealthiest town on the last road to Jerusalem. The seven days that brought the walls down are told next, step by step, with a full study of the battle elsewhere on the site.

What has been found

the evidence, and where it is disputed

Jericho is often called the oldest city in the world, and the claim rests on real evidence. Kathleen Kenyon's excavations at Tell es-Sultan uncovered a Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlement with a stone tower about 8.5 metres tall and a town wall, dated to around 8000 BC, among the earliest walled settlements yet found anywhere. The claim overstates continuity: the mound shows real gaps in occupation across its long history, so calling it the oldest city, continuously inhabited, asks more of the evidence than the layers themselves support. The honest form of the claim is that Jericho is among the oldest walled settlements known anywhere. Jericho also names more than one place, and the four are easy to conflate. Tell es-Sultan is the Old Testament mound, beside the spring of Ain es-Sultan, on the west side of the Jordan valley about ten miles north of the Dead Sea. New Testament Jericho grew roughly two kilometres away, at Tulul Abu el-Alayiq on the Wadi Qelt, and the Hasmonean and then Herodian winter palace complex that Ehud Netzer excavated stands beside that New Testament town, the two effectively adjoining one another. Modern Jericho, Arabic er-Riha, is a fourth location, a living town beside the ancient mound. The Jericho Jesus entered was the New Testament town near the palaces, not the tell where Joshua's wall fell. The mound itself is one of the most excavated sites on earth, and its layers are read in more than one way. John Garstang dug the mound between 1930 and 1936 and reported a burned city with fallen walls, which he dated to roughly 1400 BC and identified as Joshua's Jericho. He published the account in The Story of Jericho (1940). Kathleen Kenyon re-excavated between 1952 and 1958 using finer stratigraphic method and reached a different date. On her reading the walls Garstang had assigned to the conquest belonged to the Early Bronze Age, about a thousand years earlier, and the Late Bronze city was small and largely gone by about 1550 BC. Her report is Digging Up Jericho (1957), and hers remains the majority position in the field. Bryant G. Wood re-examined Kenyon's own pottery evidence and argued in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1990 for a Late Bronze I destruction around 1400 BC. His case rests on four observations: the city fell after a short action rather than a long siege, the grain stores were found full and burned rather than emptied by hunger, the mudbrick city wall had collapsed outward at the base of the stone revetment, and the destruction came at harvest time. Piotr Bienkowski answered him in the same journal later that year, holding to Kenyon's dating, and later radiocarbon work has generally supported the earlier date rather than Wood's. Wood's institution, Associates for Biblical Research, is a confessional body, and this page says so rather than presenting it as neutral ground. What is not disputed: the mound is Jericho, it was walled, it was burned, its grain stores were found full and carbonised, and mudbrick from the city wall lies collapsed at the foot of the revetment. What is disputed is the date of that layer, and so whether it is Joshua's city or an older one. This page prints the positions and the works, and leaves the question where the evidence leaves it. The collapse evidence itself, the fallen bricks, the burn layer and the grain stores, is examined at event depth on the Fall of Jericho study.

The fall of Jericho, outlined

Joshua 2 to 6, in the order it happens

Read Joshua 2 to 6, in the order it happens

The curse of Joshua 6:26 is not the end of it. 1 Kings 16:34 reports it landing on Hiel of Bethel in Ahab's reign, and names the sons it cost him.

The Fall of Jericho: the full study

What happened here, in order

in the order the canon tells it

Where it points

Rahab tied a scarlet cord in her window, and everyone inside that mark lived while the city fell. The earliest surviving Christian reading of the cord is in 1 Clement, written around AD 95, which takes it as a sign that redemption comes through the blood of the Lord. She was a Canaanite of a city under the ban, and she is the one who is saved. Hebrews names her faith, James names what that faith did, and Matthew puts her in the genealogy of Jesus as the mother of Boaz. Hebrews credits the wall's fall to faith and to nothing else. Nothing about six days of silent walking makes military sense, which is the point: what broke the wall was obedience to an instruction that offered no visible reason to obey it. And Scripture does not leave Jericho as rubble. The last thing that happens there is that Jesus walks in, gives a blind beggar his sight, calls a tax collector down out of a tree, and says over that man's house, “Today salvation has come to this house.”

The voices

each quoted from the work named

EVERY little incident in a remarkable conversion like that of the harlot Rahab is worthy of notice. The Apostle James selected her as an illustration of the fact that faith is always attended by good works, and he asks, "Was she not justified by works when she had received the messengers?" while Paul quotes her as an instance of justification by faith, and says, "By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not." If both these eminent Apostles found an illustration of an important Doctrine in her life, we may surely do the same.

Charles Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 3168: “The Scarlet Line in the Window” (1909), on Joshua 2:21

Joshua adjured them at that time--that is, imposed upon his countrymen a solemn oath, binding on themselves as well as their posterity, that they would never rebuild that city. Its destruction was designed by God to be a permanent memorial of His abhorrence of idolatry and its attendant vices.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Joshua 6:26

But as an example of free grace justifying men through an operative, as opposed to a mere verbal faith, none could be more suitable than a saved "harlot." As Abraham was an instance of an illustrious man and the father of the Jews, so Rahab is quoted as a woman, and one of abandoned character, and a Gentile, showing that justifying faith has been manifested in those of every class.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on James 2:25

1 more teacher on these versesJohn Calvin

Zaccheus, make haste, and come down. It is a remarkable instance of favor, that the Lord anticipates Zaccheus, and does not wait for his invitation, but of his own accord asks lodging at his house.

John Calvin, Commentaries, on Luke 19:5

Jericho in Scripture

59 verses name it, in 15 books

Open a book to read its mentions here. Text: Berean Standard Bible.

First namedNumbers 22:1Then the Israelites traveled on and camped in the plains of Moab near the Jordan, across from Jericho.Last namedHebrews 11:30By faith the walls of Jericho fell, after the people had marched around them for seven days.

Old TestamentNew Testamentsegment width = share of mentions

Old Testament11 books · 53 mentions

Numbers9 mentions

1 further mention in Numbers, read them in the book.

All of Numbers→

Deuteronomy3 mentions

All of Deuteronomy→

Joshua26 mentions

18 further mentions in Joshua, read them in the book.

All of Joshua→

2 Samuel1 mention

2 Samuel 10:5When this was reported to David, he sent messengers to meet the men, since they had been thoroughly humiliated. The king told them, “Stay in Jericho until your beards have grown back, and then return.”

All of 2 Samuel→

1 Kings1 mention

1 Kings 16:34In Ahab’s days, Hiel the Bethelite rebuilt Jericho. At the cost of Abiram his firstborn he laid its foundation, and at the cost of Segub his youngest he set up its gates, according to the word that the LORD had spoken through Joshua son of Nun.

All of 1 Kings→

2 Kings5 mentions

All of 2 Kings→

1 Chronicles2 mentions

All of 1 Chronicles→

2 Chronicles1 mention

2 Chronicles 28:15Then the men who were designated by name arose, took charge of the captives, and provided from the plunder clothing for the naked. They clothed them, gave them sandals and food and drink, anointed their wounds, and put all the feeble on donkeys. So they brought them to Jericho, the City of Palms, to their brothers. Then they returned to Samaria.

All of 2 Chronicles→

Ezra1 mention

Ezra 2:34the men of Jericho, 345;

All of Ezra→

Nehemiah2 mentions

All of Nehemiah→

Jeremiah2 mentions

All of Jeremiah→

New Testament4 books · 6 mentions

Matthew1 mention

Matthew 20:29As they were leaving Jericho, a large crowd followed Him.

All of Matthew→

Mark1 mention

Mark 10:46Next, they came to Jericho. And as Jesus and His disciples were leaving Jericho with a large crowd, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, was sitting beside the road.

All of Mark→

Luke3 mentions

All of Luke→

Hebrews1 mention

Hebrews 11:30By faith the walls of Jericho fell, after the people had marched around them for seven days.

All of Hebrews→

The account

Read the account as one telling

About 8000 BC
About 8000 BC, the first known settlers came to this spring and built the tower and wall that make Jericho one of the oldest walled sites yet found anywhere. What the oldest city claim can honestly support is set out further up this page.
By the time Israel reached the Jordan, Jericho was a walled Canaanite city guarding the road into the hill country, the first city inside Canaan that Joshua's forces would have to take. That city's fall, the spies, the six silent days and the shout that brought the wall down, is the story told above.
After the conquest, Jericho was counted among the cities of the tribe of Benjamin, named first in the list at Joshua 18:22. A very different era followed a generation later, when Eglon of Moab, joined by Ammon and Amalek, took the City of Palms and held it until Ehud killed him, as Judges 3:13 records.
ninth century BC
In the ninth century BC, a company of prophets lived at Jericho under Elisha. 2 Kings 2:5 calls them the sons of the prophets, and 2 Kings 2:19 records the men of the city telling him that its water was bad and its land unfruitful. Elisha healed the spring by casting salt into it, and that spring, Ain es-Sultan, is still called Elisha's spring today, the reason a city exists at all in this stretch of the Jordan valley.
586 BC
In 586 BC, Judah's last king, Zedekiah, fled Jerusalem as the Babylonians broke through its wall, and the Chaldean army overtook him in the plains of Jericho, 2 Kings 25:5, the same plains where Israel had first camped opposite the city under Joshua.
When the exiles returned from Babylon, 345 men of Jericho were counted among them, Ezra 2:34, and some of them went on to rebuild a stretch of the wall of Jerusalem, Nehemiah 3:2. The city that had once fallen to Israel's trumpets now sent its own men to raise a different city's wall.
By the Hasmonean and then the Herodian periods, the city itself had moved. New Testament Jericho grew about two kilometres from the old mound, where Ehud Netzer excavated a winter palace complex built first by the Hasmoneans and then rebuilt on a grand scale by Herod the Great. Herod wintered there and died at Jericho, and Josephus records his body carried from the city to Herodium for burial, in the Antiquities of the Jews, Book 17, and the Jewish War, Book 1.
A third site, modern Jericho, Arabic er-Riha, stands beside the tell today, so three places carry the name in sequence: the mound Joshua's Israel faced, the Roman-era town of Zacchaeus and Bartimaeus two kilometres off, and the modern city beside the ruin of the first. Jesus walked through that New Testament town on his last road to Jerusalem, an event this page tells more of below.

Common questions

Did the walls of Jericho really fall? What has archaeology found?

Readers differ; the positions are named

Tell es-Sultan was walled, it was burned, and mudbrick from its wall lies collapsed outward at the foot of the stone revetment, with grain stores found full and carbonised. What is disputed is the date of that layer. Kathleen Kenyon dated it to about 1550 BC and concluded there was no city left for Joshua to take, which is still the majority reading; Bryant Wood re-read the same pottery in 1990 and argued for about 1400 BC, and Piotr Bienkowski answered him in the same journal that year.

The evidence and the names are set out in full further up this page.

Joshua 6

Why did Israel march in silence for six days?

The instruction came from the Commander of the LORD's army, whom Joshua met with a drawn sword before the siege began, and who told Joshua to take off his sandals. The march was one circuit a day for six days, silent except for the horns, and only on the seventh day did they circle seven times and shout. Hebrews credits the fall to faith rather than to any tactic.

Why was everything in the city destroyed? What is cherem?

Cherem is the Hebrew word for something given over to God irrevocably, either destroyed or handed to the sanctuary. At Jericho the living things fell under the ban while the silver, gold, bronze and iron went into the treasury of the LORD's house.

Genesis 15:16 frames the conquest as judgment long delayed, and the same law warns Israel that the same standard applies to Israel. The full range of readings on the ethics of the conquest is set out on the Joshua study.

Was Rahab's lie a sin? Why is she praised in Hebrews and James?

Readers differ; the positions are named

Scripture never comments on the lie. What it praises is what she believed and what she did with it: she confessed the LORD as God of heaven above and earth below before any army had crossed the Jordan, and she hid the spies.

Hebrews names her faith and James names her works, and both point at the same act. Readers have long disagreed about the lie itself, and the text leaves that question where it found it.

What was the curse on Jericho, and did it come true?

Joshua swore that whoever rebuilt Jericho would lay its foundation at the cost of his firstborn and set up its gates at the cost of his youngest. Centuries later, in Ahab's reign, Hiel of Bethel rebuilt the city and lost Abiram and Segub. The record says plainly that this happened according to the word the LORD had spoken through Joshua.

Why was Jesus in Jericho, and who did He meet there?

Jericho stood on the road up from the Jordan valley to Jerusalem, and Jesus passed through it on his way up to the city for the last time. Herod had rebuilt Jericho as a wealthy winter town on the profits of its balsam and date-palm groves, and that is why a chief tax collector, architelones in the Greek text, a title for someone who oversaw other collectors rather than working one toll booth, was stationed there. Jesus called that man, Zacchaeus, down out of a tree and told him that salvation had come to his house that day, and he also healed a blind beggar sitting by the road. The same road is the setting of the parable of the good Samaritan.

Why does Matthew say Jesus healed the blind men as He was leaving Jericho, while Luke says it happened as He was approaching?

Readers differ; the positions are named

Matthew says the healing happened as they were leaving Jericho, and Mark places it the same way, as Jesus and His disciples were leaving the city with a large crowd, naming one of the men Bartimaeus. Luke says the healing of a blind man happened as Jesus drew near to Jericho.

Readers have proposed more than one explanation: that Jericho named two real places by then, so a traveler could be leaving the old site and approaching the new one on the same stretch of road; that Luke arranges his material by topic rather than by strict sequence; or that two separate healings took place. No single reading has settled the question, and this page names the positions rather than choosing between them.

Is Jericho really the oldest city in the world?

Kathleen Kenyon's excavations at Tell es-Sultan found a Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlement with a stone tower and a town wall dated to around 8000 BC, among the earliest walled settlements yet found anywhere. The word oldest still needs care: the mound shows real gaps in occupation across its long history, so a continuously inhabited city from that tower to today overstates the evidence.

Among the oldest walled settlements known is the honest form of the claim, and the full case for it is set out further up this page.

Why is Jericho called the City of Palms?

Scripture uses that name more than once. Moses is shown the Valley of Jericho, the City of Palms, from Mount Nebo; Eglon of Moab takes the City of Palms; and captives are carried to Jericho, the City of Palms.

The name reflects the oasis the spring made possible. Josephus praises the city's palm groves and its balsam, the same balsam Mark Antony gave to Cleopatra according to his Antiquities, Book 15.

Notable art

2 verified pieces depicting Jericho

Rahab and her household brought out alive, Joshua 6:22 to 6:25Gustave Doré, La Sainte Bible (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1866). Public domain.

The crossing of the Jordan that brought Israel opposite Jericho, Joshua 3:16Gustave Doré, La Sainte Bible (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1866). Public domain.

Sources cited

OpenBible.info Bible Geocoding: Jerichoread 2026-08-20The coordinates on this page. Used under CC-BY with attribution to OpenBible.info.
Gustave Doré, La Sainte Bible (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1866)The engravings on this page. Public domain.
Kathleen M. Kenyon, Digging Up Jericho (1957)The excavation report behind the later dating, cited for the position it argues.
Bryant G. Wood, "Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho?", Biblical Archaeology Review 16:2 (1990)The conservative re-dating of the destruction layer.
Piotr Bienkowski, reply on the dating of Jericho, Biblical Archaeology Review 16:5 (1990)The answer to Wood, in the same journal.
Charles H. Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 795Public domain, CCEL edition.
Charles H. Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 3168Public domain, CCEL edition.
John Calvin, CommentariesPublic domain, CCEL edition.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)Public domain.
Ehud Netzer, Hasmonean and Herodian Palaces at Jericho (Israel Exploration Society, final reports, 2001-2013)The excavation of New Testament Jericho and the Hasmonean and Herodian winter palace complex.
Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book 15 and Book 17Cited at book level for Jericho's balsam and palm revenue and for Herod's death and funeral procession to Herodium.

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