Jericho

Jericho is a city in the lower Jordan Valley, on the west bank of the Jordan north of the Dead Sea, and Scripture also calls it the “city of palm trees” (Deuteronomy 34:3; Judges 1:16). Its setting is an oasis fed by a perennial spring rather than by the river, and the text places Israel’s crossing of the Jordan directly opposite it, with the waters cut off “near Jericho” (Joshua 3:16). Archaeologically, the mound known as Tell es-Sultan, just north of the modern town, is among the longest-occupied settlement sites in the region, with occupation layers reaching back to the Neolithic period; that a spring, not the river, sustained life there is established fact and explains the site’s continuity.

The book of Joshua makes Jericho the first objective of the land. Joshua sends two spies, who lodge with Rahab the prostitute (Joshua 2:1); near the city Joshua meets a man with a drawn sword who names himself “commander of Yahweh’s army” and declares the ground holy (Joshua 5:13–15). The text then records the seven days’ march, the collapse of the wall, and the city’s devotion to destruction, followed by Joshua’s oath that whoever rebuilds Jericho will lose his firstborn in laying its foundation and his youngest in setting up its gates (Joshua 6:26). That oath is presented as fulfilled generations later when Hiel the Bethelite rebuilds the city “according to Yahweh’s word, which he spoke by Joshua the son of Nun” (1 Kings 16:34). The narrative thus treats Jericho as a ruin under a curse, and Judges 1:16 notes Kenites going up with Judah “out of the city of palm trees.”

In the Gospels Jericho is a place Jesus passes through on the road toward Jerusalem: two blind men are healed as he leaves it (Matthew 20:34), and Zacchaeus, a chief tax collector, receives him and is told that “the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:8, 19:10). Hebrews holds up Rahab as an example of faith, spared because she received the spies in peace (Hebrews 11:31). Elsewhere the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho carries the parable of the wounded traveler (Luke 10:30), and Elisha is said to have healed the city’s spring (2 Kings 2:19–22).

Traditions differ chiefly over how to read the conquest account alongside the site’s archaeology. Most archaeologists hold that the last great Bronze Age destruction at Tell es-Sultan came well before the thirteenth century BCE and that the Late Bronze Age settlement there was small and apparently unwalled, so the excavated evidence does not match Joshua 6 in a simple way; some conservative scholars defend an earlier or later date for the destruction and read the narrative as straightforward history. Confessional readings also diverge on emphasis: patristic and liturgical tradition often treats Jericho typologically, as the stronghold overcome before the holy war and Rahab as a figure of the gathered nations, while other traditions simply read the chapters as reported event and stress the fulfillment note in 1 Kings 16:34. One interpretive suggestion, offered as such: the varied uses of Jericho in Scripture—oath and curse, healing and restoration, a tax collector’s repentance, a prostitute’s faith—mean the city functions less as a single symbol than as a place where the text repeatedly tests what divine favor and divine judgment look like.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.