Jericho's Wall Sank Straight Into the Earth

On the seventh morning the priests carried the ark around the city for the seventh time, and the long blast went out over the plain, and Israel shouted. Then the wall of Jericho came down.

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It did not come down the way walls come down. Nothing leaned. Nothing scattered across the field. There was no sound of stone landing on stone.

It Went Down and Not Over

The whole structure sank straight down where it stood. Its height and its breadth came level with each other, the top sinking until it sat flush with the dirt at its own foot, and then the ground opened and took the rest of it in.

A fortress that had held the road into the country for as long as anyone could remember went under the ground it had been built to guard. No leaning tower. No slope of rubble for the soldiers to climb. Dust hung over the line where the wall had stood, and drifted, and settled, and when it cleared there was flat ground.

Men who had walked that circuit for a week stood there with their mouths open at a field.

What the Horns Had Meant Until Then

Israel already knew what horns were for. In the wilderness two beaten silver trumpets ran the whole camp, and a man had to know which sound he was hearing before he moved a foot.

One long note, tekiah, and the congregation gathered at the door of the tent. Long, then a broken flurry, then long again, and the camps struck the tents and traveled. The two calls could not be allowed to blur into each other. A broken note at a gathering would send hundreds of thousands of people packing, and a plain long note on a travel day would leave them standing in the sun waiting for orders that were never coming.

Joshua's priests did not carry the silver. They carried rams' horns, seven of them, walking in front of the ark for six days without a word from anyone behind them.

Mystics reading those same three sounds much later gave each one a face. Tekiah is the white face. Shevarim, the broken one, is the red face of a man under judgment. Teruah is green, the color of a woman close to her time, and by that sound Israel comes up out of exile. Happy is the nation that knows the teruah (Psalm 89:16). At Jericho the horns were doing older work than repentance. They were taking a wall apart.

The One Man Who Reached Into It

Everything in that city had been placed under the ban before the first circuit. The silver, the gold, the bronze and the iron went to the treasury of the Lord and nothing else came out at all.

Achan took three things anyway: a Babylonian coat that had caught his eye, two hundred shekels of silver, and a bar of gold. He buried them under the floor of his tent and told nobody.

The next town was small and Israel sent a small force, and the men of Ai came out and chased them from the gate and killed thirty-six of them on the slope. Joshua tore his clothes and lay on his face in front of the ark until evening. Then the lots were cast, tribe and clan and household and man, and the circle closed around one soldier standing in the open with his hands empty and his tent full.

The earth at Jericho had already taken the first claim on that city. Achan had reached past a ground that had swallowed a fortress whole.

A Blessing for a Patch of Flat Ground

Long after the conquest, when the sages ruled on what a traveler says at the sites where wonders happened, they made room for Jericho, and the wording is careful. One who sees the wall of Jericho that was swallowed into the ground says a blessing.

Not the wall that fell. The wall that was swallowed.

So a man comes off the road to Jerusalem, stops at a stretch of open dirt outside a town, and stands there. Nothing is standing. Nothing has fallen. There is nothing to point a child at, no famous stone to lay a hand on, no broken arch for anybody to sketch. He says the blessing over an absence, over the shape of a thing the ground closed its mouth around, and then he picks up his bag and keeps walking.

Who is like You among the exalted, doing wonders for Your people, the house of Israel. Some wonders leave a monument. This one left a field a man could plow.