Joshua6chapter 6

Joshua 6:1-2

Verse 1 stands outside the action to explain it. The city is barred from the inside, so nobody is coming out to fight and nobody is getting in to help, and Barnes reads the verse as a parenthesis that resumes the captain's word broken off at 5:14. The promise at verse 2 is in the past tense, I have given into thine hand Jericho, spoken before a man has moved. Joshua repeats that tense back to the people at verse 16 while the wall is still standing.

Joshua 6:3-5

Seven governs the whole instruction: seven priests, seven trumpets, six days and then seven circuits on the seventh. The horns are rams' horns, the yobel horn that Leviticus 25:9 sounds to open the jubilee, the year land returns to the family that held it, and Keil and Delitzsch make that the reason for the instrument chosen. No ramp, no siege engine and no assault order is given, and the only weapon named in the plan is a shout.

Joshua 6:6-7

Joshua gives the orders back in the words he received them, and the ark sits inside the column rather than behind it. The ark had gone before the people into Jordan at 3:6 and 3:11, and Numbers 10:35 gives the words said over it whenever it set forward, Rise up, Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered. The armed men walk ahead of it and the rest walk behind it, so the fighting men are an escort around a chest.

Joshua 6:8-9

The order of march is fixed and the text prints it twice, here and again at verses 12 to 13: armed men, seven priests blowing, the ark, the rereward. Rereward is the King James word for a rear guard, and Isaiah 52:12 uses it of God himself closing the line behind Israel. The trumpets sound continually, so what a barred city hears for six days is one noise repeated.

Joshua 6:10-11

Joshua had commanded the people: The silence is ordered in three clauses covering shouting, noise and any word at all, which is heavier than a march order requires. What ends it is a shout released on command at a moment Joshua names, so the sound that takes the city is obedience rather than a cry the men work themselves into. Then the circuit is made once, the people lodge in the camp, and that is the whole of day one.

Joshua 6:12-14

These verses repeat verses 8 to 11 almost word for word, and the repetition is the point: six days pass, the same thing happens, and the text records nothing happening. Seven consecutive days of marching means one of them fell on a sabbath, which Henry and Clarke both raise, and the chapter gives neither exemption nor comment. The text never says the people were told in advance how long this would go on.

Joshua 6:15-16

The seventh day begins at first light and runs seven circuits, so one day costs seven times what each of the six before it cost. Joshua's order is Shout, for the Lord hath given you the city, and that is the tense God used at verse 2, spoken now with the wall still up. The shout falls at the end of the thirteenth circuit, and no Israelite has been permitted a word through any of them.

Joshua 6:17-19

The city is placed under the ban, which the King James renders accursed; the Hebrew word is cherem, and a thing under cherem is handed over to God and put past any human use. The accursed thing occurs here at verse 18 for the first time in Scripture, and chapter 7 is what one man taking it costs the nation. Rahab is exempted by name and on a stated ground, because she hid the messengers, and the exemption is announced before the walls fall rather than argued for afterward. The metals go into the treasury as consecrated things, so the ban moves the spoil out of Israel's reach and into God's.

Joshua 6:20

Hebrews 11:30 names this as an act of faith, the walls of Jericho fell down after they were compassed about seven days, and the very next verse names Rahab, so the New Testament sets the falling wall and the woman living inside it in consecutive sentences. The wall falls flat and every man goes up straight before him, which means the army enters on every side at once and uses no gate. The mound at Tell es-Sultan is disputed on date rather than on ruin: Garstang read the collapsed walls as the Jericho of Joshua near 1400 BC, Kathleen Kenyon redated that destruction to about 1550 in Digging Up Jericho, and Bryant Wood reopened the pottery case for Garstang's date.

Joshua 6:21

One verse carries the ban executed, and it is stated without softening and without explanation. The ground Scripture gives is laid down long before this chapter: Genesis 15:16 says the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full, which makes the four hundred years a delay, and Leviticus 18:24-28 places the ground in what the inhabitants had done. Serious readers differ sharply over how to hold this verse, and the verse itself gives one clause and no discussion.

Joshua 6:22-23

The two men sent in are the same two who swore the oath in chapter 2, so the men who gave the word are the men made to keep it. The terms at 2:12-14 covered her father, her mother, her brethren and all that they had, and verse 23 lists that and adds all her kindred. They are set outside the camp for the moment, which is where a foreign household waited before being received, and verse 25 says where they ended up.

Joshua 6:24-25

She dwelleth in Israel even unto this day, which tells a reader the account was written while her family were still there and still known by name. Scripture calls her the harlot every time it names her, here and at Hebrews 11:31 and James 2:25, and Matthew 1:5 puts her in the line of Christ as the mother of Boaz. Hebrews 11:30 and 11:31 sit next to each other, the wall falling and the woman inside it living, which is this chapter in two sentences. The scarlet line of 2:18 is read as a figure of the blood by Henry, Gill and many after them, and the New Testament nowhere makes that link, so it carries their names rather than an apostle's.

Joshua 6:26-27

The curse names a price in sons rather than a general warning, the firstborn at the foundation and the youngest at the gates. 1 Kings 16:34 discharges it by name in the days of Ahab, where Hiel the Bethelite builds Jericho, lays the foundation in Abiram his firstborn and sets up the gates in his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the Lord which he spake by Joshua the son of Nun. People live at the site long before that, at Judges 3:13 and 2 Samuel 10:5, so what the curse holds is the walling and gating of it. The chapter closes on the promise of 1:5 and 1:9 kept, the Lord was with Joshua.