I was watching Mythbusters the other day and they were testing the idea that in ancient China, the cities used large pots of water placed in underground tunnels around the city to detect the vibrations made by enemy sappers (diggers) tunneling in to undermine the walls. The Mythbusters proved that if such a system did exist it would have worked splendidly. The city guards would have been able to precisely locate an incoming tunnel based on vibrations of the water in the jars.
So it occurred to me that this was the reason that the Israelite army marched around the city for seven days, as it says in Joshua 6 – they were stomping their feet to drown out the vibrations made by their sappers. On the seventh day they marched around the city seven times and the priests blew trumpets. This was to make sure that the sappers were not detected as they dug their final few feet under the walls. Then “It shall come to pass that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout, and the wall of the city shall fall down flat…” Josh 6:5. The ram’s horn blast was perhaps the signal that the tunneling had been finished, and the sappers were ready to collapse the temporary supports they had placed to hold up the wall. The “great shout” may have been to let the sappers know the army was ready; they could have heard it underground. Anyway, all this popped into my head as I was watching that program, and it makes more sense to me than any other explanation I have heard.
I never undertsand the rationale behind “explanations” like this.
I mean, it’s obvious that you discount the Bible’s claim that something supernatural happened. And that’s fine. I’m not going to ask you to believe that Jehovah made the walls of Jericho fall.
But if you reject THAT part of the story as a crock, why do you assume the REST of it must be true and look for a rational, natural explanation for the rest of it?
Why not assume it’s ALL baloney (that the walls never fell, that the Israelites just gradually replaced the original inhabitants)? Or that there’s only a tiny kernel of truth (say, that the Israelites conquered Jericho by a long, prolonged siege or a long, slow process of starving them out) in an otherwise grossly exaggerated story?
I had the same problem with Thomas Jefferson’s famous attempt to excise all the supernatural parts of the Gospels and leave us with only the “real” teachings of the admirable, secular teacher he assumed Jesus was. I’d love to have asked him, “Tom, if you think the Gospel writers were deluded, insane or full of crap when writing about God or miracles, how can you asume they were sane, faithful stenographers when writing about non-supernatural things?”
Actually, it never says in Joshua 6 that God made the walls fall down. It just says that they fell.
Whenever I read the accounts of battles in Joshua and Judges, it seems like the accounts have been heavily edited to take away the human element and enhance the supernatural role. For instance, in the battle between Barak and Sisera in Judges 4, the Israelite’s overall strategy can only be pieced together by reference to the song of Deborah in the next chapter, as well as knowledge of the local terrain.
You’ve been here since 1999 and you don’t understand why we try to find rational explanations for everything?
Archaeological evidence from the Jericho site shows that there were walls at one point (a double set of them on a “tell”, or sloped hill surrounding the city.) We know that there was a city. We know that there were walls, and that at one point, they collapsed. Now, the question comes as to why it happened.
Disregard the Biblical aspects. To archaeologists, it’s a ruined city which happens to be mentioned in a religious work. That’s not important to their work. (There are a lot of cities mentioned in many different religious writings.Archaeologists don’t generally use them as blueprints.) They’re not out to “prove” or “disprove” the Bible-- they’re there to study the remains of the city and learn what they can about its inhabitants and the city’s demise.
The inhabitants probalbly weren’t starved. One archaeologist (IIRC) discovered a cache of grain jars from around that time indicating that if the city fell to an invading army, it wasn’t due to a lenghty seige.
Actually, IIRC, the city walls of Jericho were knocked down several times and rebuilt. That was not uncommon for ancient cities: typically, an invader would knock down the walls to capture the city, then rebuild them some time later to refortify their city.
Jericho is one of the oldest cities we know about, so there’s no surprise that the walls were destroyed and rebuilt several times. At least one of those times (again, my apologies, I’m going from memory) there was also fire, and the dates are roughly those of the Israelite invasion. However, most archaeologists think the Israelite invasion happened over a century or two, not over the shorter period described in the bible. As Lissa said, the bible is a document that can be a helpful guide to archaeologists in locating cities, temples, whatever and in describing the way people lived. No reason to discount anything in it, and no reason to accept anything in it, any more than any other ancient document.
Same here. I’ve often found that miracles would be more believable than some explanations provided. Particularily regarding the Exodus. If I were to believe the “natural explanations” given regarding Moses, I would convert, because so many incredibly unlikely events happening to same guy would be a compelling evidence of a supernatural action.
In this case, yes, what the OP describes isn’t completely out of whack. But why exactly search for complicated and totally arbitrary explanations when there’s no reason to assume that anybody walked around the city, or that the walls collapsed at the first place? The OP seems to agree that the bible’s content is mythical, since he doesn’t believe miracles happened. Then, why would he believe that the descriptions included are accurate?
Yes, maybe the Israelites took Jericho, were smart deceivers and had good sapers. And maybe Achilles had a truly excellent armor except for this poorly repaired piece at the heel. But isn’t it much simpler to assume that nothing at all happened as described, as I generally assume when reading a myth? Or at the very least that we don’t know if anything happened, hence that it’s a waste of time to wonder how it could have happened?
Yes, there might be a kernel of truth in myths. And there might not be. And if there is, nobody could tell what this kernel is, barring archeological finds or other sources. All these explanations are completely random guesses about events that in all likehood never happened.
To sum up my post, there’s no need altogether for an explanation.
Well, by way of further explanation: my hobby is military history, especially of the ancient and biblical world. I see the books of Joshua and Judges as originally being “The Israelite Art of War”, containing examples of tactics and strategy written down for the benefit of future generations. But like I said before, it seems like somebody came along later and edited the accounts to make God play the primary role. I’m tryng to figure out what things that may have been edited out.
I don’t mean to be rude, but that simply doesn’t fit in with our mission statement. We don’t just shrug and say, “God must have done it,” because we’re confused by the alternative. That’s what held back scientific curiosity for nearly a thousand years.
Since I don’t believe in the supernatural, I want a concrete explanation for historical events. I, and other like-minded people, do * need* an explanation.
But we do know there were walls and that they did, indeed, collapse. (Seems to have happened many times, actually.) We can further our historical knowledge by discovering why it happened.
As I understand things, there were a number of Jerichos one atop the other. The walls, buildings and everything else fell down in each of them. Jericho was, and might still be, the oldest permanently inhabited place discovered to date. Many of the structures uncovered were ancient when the Egyptian pyramids were new. All of those walls and other structures “fell down” from erosion, earthquakes, various invaders, etc. The city was abandoned from time to time and the modern city of Jericho is some distance from the tell that contains the old cities.
Why give the explanation? Because it’s entirely possible that the Book of Joshua actually records much of what happened, and the OP’s explanation is a fascinating speculationon this. as a kid, I remember reading about the fall of the walls of Jericho, and historians’ speculations about what “rastional” explanation might lie behind it. The many walls of Jericho were discussed, and the possibilities of enemy action and earthquakes in making the walls fall were discussed. ASll of this is a Catholic work that presented the Biblical account as well. There’s nothing odd about discussing the mundane alongside the miraculous. Catholic works did it all the time when I was growing up. It’s not solely the province of embittered rationalist atheists (or any other sort of atheist).
As a similar kind of thing, but without the modern religious slant, consider the Fall of Troy. It all happened a long time ago. The city has several sets of walls, there’s evidence of some falling in warfare. There’s an ancient text, but it involves m,iraculous intervention by gods, and nobody today takes it as a historical document. So why should anyone take the account of the Trojan Horse at all seriously? Yet the idea that behind the fantastic story of the Trojan Horse there might lie a recollection of siege enginers has apparently been floated several times. It’s not needed, we’d never even consider it if the myths didn’t exist, and there’s no com[pelling need to believe it. But it’s a fascinating and very possible speculation deriving from ancient reports that might hold a bit of truth in them.
The best explanation I’ve seen is in Huxley’s comments on Hume’s On Miracles:
Yes-- people of the ancient past “recycled” their cities. Many of the homes were built of mud brick, which crumbles after a while, or melts in a rare rainstorm.
This page discusses some of the historical debates surrounding Jericho:
However, there is evidence of the destruction of the city at various times, which is quite interesting, archaeologically speaking.
That could be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater - back in more superstitious times, people would still be able to describe happenings (such as the walls of Jericho collapsing) but might not be so reliable as to the mechanics (newfangled undermining vs the supernatural). I don’t see what’s wrong with trying to clarify past events with the benefit of hindsight.
Sure, but you have to show first that the “historical event” occured at the first place, before trying to explain it. For instance, before trying to find a natural explanation for the crossing of the red sea, you should first show that the red sea was actually crossed. In this case, you should have some reason to assume that the details of the description of a miraculous event found in a book chok full with legends and myths is accurate hence needs to be explained.
Was the OP trying to demonstrate that Jericho was at some point capured by the Hebrews, on the basis of a reasonnably reconstructed timeline, and archeological evidences found in the level IVa (number just made up) of the town’s stratas, I’d admit it could be interesting. But here, he tries to explain why people walked around the city for days during a siege, while we don’t even know if there was a siege to begin with, let alone people walking around the town and walls suddenly collapsing.
It’s no different from trying to explain why Achilles appeared to be invulnerable, except for his heels. I kind see the point of trying to make up (because it’s what he’s doing) a competely arbitrary explanation for a mythical event.
If Achilles’ armour looked someting like the Dendra panoply it is easy to see where the invulnarability bit stems from.
Only his heels would be exposed.
It’s muxch more like the Trojan Horse, as in my post above. Achilles being invulnerable is pretty unbelievable (and isn’t in the Iliad, BTW), but building a giant wooden horse, while weird, is perfectly believable. As believable as marching around a town. You don’t have to prove that eithe thing actually took place to consider whether or not they might contain the germ of some remembered event – there aren’t a lot of corroborating sources that old, and you’re not going to be able to prove these things by archaeology. Speculating about such realistic explanations for odd behavior is certainly defensible.
And there certainly have been efforts to try to account for even such odd mythological details as Achilles’ heel. a lot of ‘em, in fact. Have a look at commentaries on mythology and the Greek epics, like Robert raves’ The Greek Myths. Just take Graves with a considerable amount of salt.
Mostly any element of a myth or tale is believable or can become so if you actively try to remove the most fantastic part of it or try to explain it in some way or another. Were the Norse gods actual characters who somehow ended up being remembered as gods? Was Samson suffering from acromegaly and does it expain why he was so easily dispatched by David? Has the small shoe of Cindirella something to do with the Chinese custom of binding women’s feet? Does the celtic legend of the drowned city of Ys actually refers to a rising of sea level on northern Germany coast? Were vampires actually people with porphyria? Was the fairy tale character Bluebeard inspired by Henry VIII or Gilles of Rais? All these questions and many many more have been asked and “answered” many times over.
Myths and tales are complex, borrow from each others or from widespread themes, they change over time, their origins are generally untrackable and when they are, it just pushes the question backward in time. They recycle elements from past or foreign cultures. They use archetypal characters, and symbolism. And so on…Basically, they’re a complete mess mostly impossible to sort out. Lacking external evidences, arbitratily picking a specific element in them, arbitrarily deciding that this particular element should somehow be taken more seriously than the rest, and proposing an equally arbitrary explanation for it is gratuitous and unfalsifiable speculation. It might be a fun game, but nothing more.
A mention of the capture of Troy or Jericho might be an interesting hint for historians, but as soon as elements like gods guiding arrow’s flight or having walls crumble appear in the picture, you leave the realm of history and enter the realm of myths, legends and tales, and what I wrote above applies : you can find an unprovable “explanation” for anything that you arbitrarily decided has more merit than the rest, and it’s a gratuitous exercise.
I was of course refering to Goliath, not Samson.
I most emphatically beg to differ. I wrote a whole book about this, and intend writing at least two more.
You must not have read my third post (#7) where I explained my theory about Joshua and Judges being “The Israelite Art of War”. The story of Jericho, whether true or not (I don’t care) would have had the section heading How to Take a City by Undermining the Walls. Likewise, the next section (the story of the capture of Ai) would be How to Take a City by Luring the Defenders Away. Get it?