2. and the mighty warriors. The Masoretic Text lacks “and,” which has been added in the translation.

3. town. At most, Jericho would have had a scant few thousand inhabitants. So “city” would be an exaggeration.

4. seven priests . . . seven ram’s horns . . . on the seventh day . . . seven times. The rite devised to bring down the walls of the town involves a quadrupling of the sacred number seven. But the destruction of the town is also an anti-Creation story: six days they go round the wall, and on the climactic seventh day, it collapses and the town is reduced to rubble.

ram’s horns. These were primitive trumpets that produced a shrill and piercing sound. They were used to assemble troops in battle and at coronations.

5. the people. Given the military context, ʿam may have its secondary sense of “troops.”

9. blowing. The consonantal text seems to read “they blew,” but the Masoretic marginal correction properly has this as toqʿey, “blowing.”

10. until the moment. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “until the day,” but the word for “day,” yom, is often a fluid indicator of time.

17. the ban. This total prescription of destruction, ḥerem, of the conquered city, which means annihilating its population and its animals and, at least in this instance, dedicating all objects of value to the LORD’s treasury, is the grimmest aspect of this triumphalist story. The enactment of the ḥerem is in keeping with the reiterated injunction in Deuteronomy to exterminate the native population of Canaan. That project is what Moshe Weinfeld has called a “utopian” plan because it is highly unlikely that it was ever acted upon. For the Deuteronomist, it is a brutal way of expressing the absolute separation from the pagan population—a separation that never really occurred—called for in his program of uncompromising monotheism, and the hallmark of the Deuteronomist is often detectable in Joshua. The ḥerem was not an Israelite invention, as there is archaeological evidence that it was sometimes practiced by various Canaanite peoples.

except that Rahab the whore shall live and whoever is with her in the house. There is, of course, a contradiction here with the story of the collapse of the wall. If the wall around the town collapsed, how could Rahab, whose house was in the wall, have been saved, and what good would the scarlet cord, which implied protection against conscious human destroyers, have done? The medieval Hebrew commentator David Kimchi tried to save the consistency of the text by proposing that only one part of the wall fell, through which breach the Israelites entered the town, though all the encircling with ram’s horns certainly leads one to imagine that the entire wall came down. One suspects that the story of the two spies and the story of the ram’s horns reflect two different traditions about the conquest of Jericho. Indeed, if the plan was to bring down the walls miraculously, there would scarcely have been any need to reconnoiter the town and the surrounding terrain, and the tale of the spies appears to assume a scenario in which the Israelite warriors will break into the city using conventional means of warfare.

18. lest you covet. The received text reads, “lest you put under the ban,” pen taḥarimu, which doesn’t make much sense. The translation follows the Septuagint, which appears to have used a Hebrew text that showed pen taḥmedu (a reversal of consonants and a dalet for the similar-looking resh), “lest you covet.”

20. the people let out a great shout, and the wall fell where it stood. Attempts have been made to recover a historical kernel for this fabulous event by proposing that it records the memory of an earthquake that leveled Jericho. (In fact, Jericho was built on a seismic fault and has been subject to earthquakes over the ages.) But nothing in the telling of the tale remotely suggests an earthquake. The ground is not said to move, and the destruction occurs through the deployment of sevens and the ram’s horns’ blasts and the shouting. One can also dismiss the idea of shock waves of sound splitting the walls as a scientific non-starter. The whole point of the story is its miraculous character. Almost everywhere in biblical narrative, Israel triumphs not through any martial powers, which get scant representation, but because God battles for Israel (compare the Song of the Sea, the Song of Deborah, and Moses’ upraised arms in the defeat of the Amalekites). This story, then, is framed to vividly illustrate how the Israelite conquest of the first principal Canaanite town in the Jordan Valley is entirely due to the spectacular intervention of the LORD, Who gives Joshua the detailed instructions for the procedures of circumambulating the town with the Ark and the ram’s horns. It should also be noted that the extensive archaeological exploration of Jericho indicates that its conquest by Joshua could not have taken place. There was a very old town on this site, but it was destroyed by the Middle Bronze Age, and at the putative time of Joshua’s conquest in the Late Bronze Age, toward the end of the thirteenth century B.C.E., there had been no walled town on this site at least for a couple of centuries. The writer no doubt had in mind Jericho’s antiquity—it is one of the oldest cities in the world—and its role as eastern gateway to Canaan, but historically it could not have been an object of Joshua’s conquest.

23. the young spies. Only here are they identified as ne‘arim, “lads” or young men, although it is possible that the term has its secondary sense of “elite soldiers.”

24. the LORD’s house. This phrase is an anachronism—in general, it refers to the Temple—because at the time of the conquest there would have been only a portable sanctuary, not referred to as a “house.”

25. she has dwelled in the midst of Israel to this day. This clause must mean that Rahab’s descendants have dwelled in the midst of Israel to this day. It is thus an etiological note, explaining how a particular Canaanite clan came to be naturalized Israelites.

26. Cursed be the man . . . who will . . . rebuild this town. The reason for the implacability toward Jericho is not entirely clear since there is no indication that its inhabitants perpetrated war crimes, as did the Amalekites in Exodus. Perhaps this should be understood in the context of the miraculous destruction of the walls: that event is a token for the laying low of the inhabitants of the land before the invading Israelites (something that never happened historically), and so as a sign and symbol of the whole conquest, the town razed through divine intervention should never be rebuilt.

With his firstborn shall he found it, / and with his youngest set up its portals. The solemnity of the vow is reinforced by casting this dire prediction in a line of poetry. Rashi nicely catches the narrative progression from the first verset to the second: “At the beginning of the foundation when he rebuilds it, his firstborn son will die, whom he will bury and go on until the youngest dies at the completion of the work, which is setting up the portals.” In 1 Kings 16:34, it is recorded that at the time of Ahab, “Hiel the Bethelite built up Jericho. At the cost of Abiram his firstborn he laid its foundation and at the cost of Segib his youngest he put up its gates, according to the word of the LORD that He spoke through Joshua son of Nun.” Joshua’s curse may have been formulated to explain a calamitous event that occurred three and a half centuries later.