Forbidden History - The Fall of Jericho: What Really Brought Down the Walls?

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

The walls of Jericho are said to have fallen after seven days of marching and trumpet blasts – but what does the archaeology actually reveal? Historian Tony McMahon joins Forbidden History to investigate one of the Bible’s most dramatic stories, the ruined city beneath modern Jericho, and its strange customs and of course the enduring mystery of what really brought its walls down. Cast List Eric Meyers: Narrator Tony McMahon: Author & Historian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Welcome to the Forbidden History. podcast, be sure to catch our Patreon exclusive Inner Circle series, featuring live expert interviews and deep dives into your favorite topics. Thanks for supporting the show. It's the 17th century BC, and the inhabitants of the city of Jericho are crowding the ramparts of their walled city, squinting down at a strange procession below. Seven Israelite priests are walking the perimeter of the city in a slow, steady march, carrying a large gold box. The only sound is the crunch of sandals

on dry earth and the occasional low moan of a shofar, a ritual horn. Is this war? They must have just thought this is insane. What on earth are they doing? Presumably they were firing their arrows down at them, but the Israelites persist with this prolonged ritual. For six long days, the bizarre procession continues. No attack, no explanation, just the feeling that something is coming until... And on the seventh day though, the walls miraculously collapse, and this of course is one of the great miracles, a very military miracle in the Bible. Jericho's inhabitants barely have time to react. An Israelite army swarms into the city and takes it.

Every man, woman, and child is put to the sword. The dramatic account of the fall of Jericho is one of the best-known stories of the Old Testament. For centuries, it has captured the attention of historians, archaeologists, and religious scholars alike. All determined to discover whether such an event really could have occurred, and what could possibly have caused the walls of a seemingly impenetrable city to crumble in an instant. To talk us through the story and the history surrounding it, his author and historian Tony McMahon. There's quite a lively debate among historians and archaeologists about whether or not the siege of Jericho actually happened. There must have been battles. The Jewish people, the people of Israel, clearly fought with their neighbors.

There's no reason not to assume that there wasn't a battle at Jericho. I think it's very likely that Jericho was involved. in some kind of skirmish with the Israelites. Welcome to the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals, and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies. I'm Eric Myers, and this is forbidden history. Jericho, in modern-day Palestine, is a natural oasis

that humans have been taking advantage of for thousands of years, even long before the events depicted in the Old Testament. Jericho is one of the oldest examples of settled human living, human civilization if you want, where we go from being hunter-gatherers to pastoralists. It was situated basically at the southern end of the Jordan Valley. It's just north of the Dead Sea. And it's fascinating because it is one of the first cities in the Middle East. and, you know, we're still trying to understand how did these people live, you know, and what do they worship?

By the time of the events related in the Bible, probably somewhere between 1,400 and 1,200 B.C.E. Jericho is depicted as a seemingly impregnable walled city. It's home to the Canaanites and is standing in the way of the Israelites' quest for the promised land. The Israelites had experienced the Exodus. They had escaped from Egypt. They'd got to the promised land. But one problem was they now had to conquer the promised land from the Canaanites.

Jericho was essentially the gateway to the kingdom of Canaan. It was the city in the way of the Jewish people. They had to take Jericho if they were going to advance any further. The Canaanites have no right whatsoever to own this land and it must fall to the Israelites who are worshipping the only true God. It is basically an obstacle that the Jewish people had to sweep aside, as it were. Leading the Israelites is Joshua, Moses's chosen successor, and one of the most important prophets in the Old Testament.

Essentially, he begins as a kind of lieutenant of Moses during the Exodus, but then he succeeds Moses as the leader of the Jewish people. He becomes their military leader, their religious leader. And he's originally referred to as Hoshaya, but then Moses calls him Yeshoshua. In other words, Joshua. For the Israelites, the walled city of Jericho is a formidable obstacle. You have to kind of imagine Joshua turns up with what must have been really a kind of a rag-tanked

army and he turns up outside the walls of what is one of the oldest cities in the world some people believe Jericho is the oldest urban settlement in the world and the situation must have seemed really incredibly hopeless the Bible states that Joshua sends two spies to assess Jericho's fortifications the spies stay at the house of Rahav described as a zonah this is traditionally translated to mean a prostitute, though some scholars argue it may mean innkeeper. When the King of Jericho learns that spies are in the city, he sends messengers to order Rahav to bring them out into the street. Rahav lies to the king's men and hides the spies on the roof

of her house, covering them with bundles of drying flax. The spies then escape the city after promising to spare Rahav and her family from what is to come. After hiding in the hills for three days, they return to Joshua, not with fear, but with confidence, reporting that the people of Jericho are terrified and that the land is theirs for the taking. God speaks to Joshua and assures him that he will take the city if he follows his instructions and deploys his secret weapon, the Ark of the Covenant. It's a difficult thing to understand the Ark of the Covenant. This is a holy relic that we all know because of the Indiana Jones movie.

We know it was very dangerous and you mustn't look inside it and so on. That really popularized the idea of the Ark of the Covenant. But let's go back to the Bible and try and work out why it was this weapon of mass destruction. The Ark of the Covenant was this golden covered wooden chest, which was built specifically to hold the Ten Commandments, which had been given by God to Moses. It's an incredibly important chest, but it's not just a chest. Really, it was believed that there was a kind of a divine presence.

I'd almost say divine electricity attached to the Ark of the Covenant. It was dangerous. The Bible states that the chest is more than a mere repository of rules. In fact, there are multiple accounts of it taking the lives of those who come into contact with it. You couldn't touch the Ark. I mean, there's an incident, for example, where the ark's been carried along, and it's tipping slightly to one side or the other. And one of the Jewish people kind of steadies it and puts his hand on the Ark of the Covenant

to steady it and is killed. You know, and he's actually trying to do something good. He's trying to stop the Ark of the Covenant falling on the ground, but he commits a sin. He should not touch it. According to the Bible, he is merely one of countless victims of the ark's power. And the Ark of the Covenant, you know, kills thousands of people who defy the will of Yahweh, who defy the will of the Lord. So this is an object with huge power when it's actually a one stage taken by the Philistines,

enemies of the Jews, plagues break out among the Philistines, their God is toppled, Dagon is toppled and the Philistines give the Ark of the Covenant back to the Jewish people and say, look, take this thing back. We don't want it. It's terrible. It's a really horrible thing. You have it. So that is the nature of the Ark. The Ark, with its mysterious and deadly power, is central to the ritual that God tells Joshua will result in the fall of the impregnable city. I mean the exact words that God says to Joshua says you know he says see I have delivered Jericho into your hands along with its king and its fighting men march round the city once with all the armed men do this for six days have seven priests carry trumpets of ram's horns in front of the ark on the seventh day march around the city seven times with the priests blowing the trumpets when you hear them sound a long blast of the trumpets have the whole army give a loud shout then the walls of the city will collapse and the army will go up everyone straight in now I mean Joshua must have thought well goodness God's really often one today but that

he does exactly what God tells him to do and indeed the Bible states that on the seventh day after circling the city seven times while the priests blow ramshorns the walls do miraculously collapse the Israelites rush in destroy the city and spare only Rahav and her family. One of the most shocking things about the siege of Jericho and its aftermath is that, like so many battles in the Old Testament, nobody is spared, essentially. Men, women, children, even animals are killed in the fields.

The idea being that it will never rise again. Of course, this is always justified because, you know, how dare you defy the wrath of Yahweh and his chosen people, Some people have tried to, in modern times, have tried to get around this issue by saying, well, you know, God nevertheless would have welcomed the children into his arms in heaven, but it doesn't really seem much of a consolation because, you know, the children that were still slain. Given the nature of the story, it's no wonder that it has captivated generations of historians and archaeologists alike, all trying to ascertain whether there is any verifiable proof,

of the biblical account. The first task was to find Jericho. The first archaeological team to really identify the biblical city of Jericho was in the 1860s led by a man called Charles Warren and they identified a site, Telas Sultan was the site as being the biblical city of Jericho. And Charles Warren was working for the Palestine Exploration Fund. He was doing biblical archaeology in the region. He did a lot of digs around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. There's still a water shaft that he excavated there that is to this day known as Warren's shaft. And he dug a series of tunnels under the Temple Mount carrying out a lot of excavations looking for holy relics. But he also identified

the site of Jericho. Its location is about a mile north of the modern-day city center, but the man who discovered it, Charles Warren, is an intriguing figure. Warren was not primarily an archaeologist. He was a Royal Engineers officer, whose early work included surveying Gibraltar's fortifications. He developed a reputation for precision surveying, engineering skill, and topographical mapping. Between 1867 and 1870, he carried out the first systematic explorations of the Temple Mount and the topography of ancient Jerusalem. At the time, it was this work that made Warren famous.

His work at Jericho was a mere brief exploratory visit. In the 1880s, he would become the Commissioner of Police in London and lead the unsuccessful investigation into Jack the Ripper. But people have questioned the methods he used in both of these jobs. Now some people are quite disparaging about Warren. They say that he wasn't a very good archaeologist and he wasn't a very good commissioner of police. But nevertheless, he left his mark on the Holy Land, on the Middle East, and it's thanks to him pretty much that we know where Jericho is today.

We may be able to thank him for finding Jericho, but even calling Warren an archaeologist is generous by later standards. This isn't a problem unique to him. In the 1860s, Archaeology barely existed as a science. What he was doing was more a combination of engineering and treasure hunting. He dug trenches and shafts to locate walls and foundations, and believed that he had found parts of ancient fortifications, evidence of collapsed walls, and remains that may match the biblical

account. But by the 1890s, archaeology was emerging as a science in its own right. Warren's successors stopped digging for things and started digging for context. Stratigraphy saw them carefully excavating layer by layer, the evidence they uncovered getting older and older as they dug further down. Fragments of pottery became the technique by which the remains at different layers were dated, and over time, Warren's Victorian trenches gave way to true scientific excavation. In 1953, an archaeologist called Kathleen Kenyon arrived on the scene.

She was one of the world's leading archaeological methodologists. She came armed with the latest techniques and a new way of seeing the site. Gone were the wide Victorian trenches and the hunt for spectacular walls. Instead, she laid out a precise grid of square excavation units, each separated by standing walls of Earth left intact so she could read the site's vertical history. She and her team descended through the different eras of Jericho's past. Every inch deeper took them further back in time. The standing walls of Earth revealed the city's rise and fall.

Mud brick walls, collapsed ramparts, layers where burning took place, the floors of houses, the debris of thousands of years of human life. And deep in the bowels of the earth, she found seven skulls that revealed evidence of bizarre prehistoric rituals. These skulls date way back. We're talking about like 9,000, 8,000, 7,000 BC. So way before the Old Testament. And it seems like a form of ancestor worship where skulls were decorated with a thick layer of plaster. So they still look like a human face, you know, like your Auntie Flo or Uncle's.

and then had shells inserted for eyes, then they'd be put on a shelf in the house. The purpose of these strange macabre skulls has been debated by historians ever since. Some people think it wasn't their ancestors. It was actually they were basically headhunting their enemies, but I'm inclined to think it's ancestor worship. This was a kind of revering of their parents, their grandparents, who then kind of continued to live with them, if you want kind of exercise, a protective power over the household, and it kind of made families aware of their lineage, where they'd come from, who their ancestors had been. The purpose behind their creation may never be truly known, but they do serve as evidence of

the human occupation of Jericho going back thousands of years. But when it came to the walls of Jericho from the biblical story, Kenyan's findings did not tally with the Bible's account. Kenyon did uncover massive fortifications in the middle bronze layers of the dig. These included a stone wall, a mud brick superstructure, a burn layer, the debris of the wall's destruction, and evidence of a violent end. But then she deployed the most accurate dating technique of the day, ceramic typology. Nearby pottery remains were analyzed for their shape, surface treatment, and decoration, as well as for the composition of the material they were made of.

Using this technique, she concluded that the destruction of Jericho's walls happened in roughly 1550 BCE, centuries before the biblical conquest. Her conclusion was that the Jericho of the time of Joshua was not a fortified city at all. The famous walls had fallen long before the Israelites arrived. This conclusion remains dominant among modern archaeologists, even as techniques continue to improve. There was a walled city of Jericho, but it was destroyed before the biblical account. And so debate today centers not on if Jericho was destroyed, that much seems to be verifiable,

but when the destruction occurred. By the time Joshua arrived, was there even a walled city to besiege? quite a lively debate among historians and archaeologists about whether or not the siege of Jericho actually happened. I would say that most historians think that it didn't, that this was a kind of a literary construct that was told essentially to kind of, a kind of almost a fairy tale, a myth that was told around the conquering of Canaan by the Jewish people. And they also say that the timing is all wrong, that the destruction of Jericho, as evidenced by the archaeology, doesn't match up with, if we assume when this happened in the Bible, it just doesn't match time-wise.

The most widely accepted explanation today is that the Bible story is a cultural memory of a real ancient catastrophe. Jericho's great destruction most likely did happen and was so dramatic that it was remembered for generations. Then, centuries later, when the Israelite identity was forming, this event was absorbed, theologized, and retold. It then became the story we now read in the Bible, much as Homer reshaped the fall of Troy into epic poetry. But of course, there are still historians that believe there is evidence for the biblical account. There are also literalists and other historians who say, no, no, no, the Siege of Jericho did actually happen and they've pointed to archaeological evidence at Jericho which shows that it was indeed destroyed.

Now, some people say that it shows evidence of being destroyed in the right time period and in the right time frame as well that there was a rapid destruction. I think the truth is most likely somewhere in between. There must have been battles. The Jewish people, the people of Israel, clearly fought with their neighbors. There's no reason not to assume that there wasn't a battle at Jericho. It was a city with strategic importance. So, you know, it's reasonable to assume that there must have been skirmishes there, a battle, maybe a siege. But whether or not things happened exactly as they are described in the Bible, well, of course, to the modern mind, it simply stretches credulity to breaking point. Though for people of faith, of course, it happened. You know, it's God's word, it is scripture,

that's exactly what happened. I think it's very likely that Jericho was involved in some kind of skirmish with the Israelites, but whether or not it happened to quite the way it's described in the Bible, well, the skeptic inside says no. Either way, what cannot be doubted is the importance of the story of Jericho's fall. It continues to resonate to this day, whether it happened in the way the Bible describes or not. Because while the walls of Jericho may or may not have literally fallen to the sounds of trumpets, it's a story that shapes how millions understand courage, identity, and faith to this day.

Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you liked this episode, don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. Thanks for listening.