First Wall of Jericho

Jericho's claim to fame is the way it was captured by Joshua. As the Lord commanded, he and the children of Israel marched around the city once a day for six days. On the seventh, after a blast of trumpets and a mighty shout, the walls came tumbling down.* This happened about 1370 B.C., but it was a comparatively recent episode in the long history of Jericho.

Modern Jericho is a grubby Jordanian town, 17 miles northeast of Jerusalem, built among the heaped remains of many earlier Jerichos. Archaeologists burrow into the ruins with insatiable delight, and last week Kathleen Kenyon, director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, was completing the excavation of Jericho's first city wall. She believes it was built at least 3,500 years before Joshua and the children of Israel came trumpeting out of the wilderness.

The wall lies under 50 feet of debris. It is made of dried mud faced with stone, and it enclosed an area of about eight acres. The inhabitants were broad-headed "alpines" of neolithic culture. They had no pottery or metals. Their tools, beautifully made, were of polished stone.

The remarkable thing about these neolithic people is that they lived in a walled town at a time--more than 7,000 years ago--when man was only just beginning to build any kind of settlement. The reason for the wall is probably the character of Jericho's site. A copious spring of fresh water (Elisha's fountain in the Bible) gushes out of the hillside and makes possible the irrigation of a fertile, subtropical plain beside the Dead Sea. The people of the first Jericho must have developed irrigation and built their prosperity upon it. This settlement may have been the first walled town in the world.

The archaeologists do not know how long the first Jerichans prospered in their little oasis. It was probably not for long-Jericho lies on a natural roadway exposed to the comings and goings of fierce invaders. Above the remains of the first city many others lie in layers, and they were inhabited by a long series of different cultures. Most of them came out of the desert wilderness. They attacked Jerich, destroyed it, and built it up again.

About 2200 B.C. came the Semitic Amorites, who held Jericho until the arrival of the children of Israel. Director Kenyon has not found Joshua's wall (or its shouted-down fragments), but she does not care. She is not interested, she says, in "modern" history.

* Joshua 2-6.

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