Type "Jericho" into Google Maps and you arrive at 31.86°N, 35.45°E — in the Palestinian Authority area of the West Bank, about 38 kilometers east of Jerusalem and 250 meters below sea level. Jericho is one of the lowest permanently inhabited places on earth and, by archaeological consensus, the oldest continuously settled town in the world — with evidence of habitation going back roughly 10,000 years.
A Verse and a Wall
The book of Joshua records the most famous siege in the Hebrew Bible at this town. The Israelites circle the city for seven days. On the seventh day, they march around it seven times. The verse comes after.
"So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city."
The Hebrew for fell down flat is naphlah tachteha — fell beneath itself. The verse uses an image of collapse rather than breach: the wall went down where it had stood. The action takes one verse. The preparation took seven days.
What the Excavation Found
Tell es-Sultan, the archaeological mound on the western edge of modern Jericho, has been dug repeatedly — by Charles Warren in 1868, Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger 1907–1909, John Garstang 1930–1936, and Kathleen Kenyon 1952–1958. Kenyon's stratigraphy established that the site holds layers from the pre-pottery Neolithic (c. 8000 BC, including the famous round stone tower) through Bronze Age, Iron Age, Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. The matter of which layer corresponds to Joshua 6 is still debated. Garstang dated the destruction to roughly 1400 BC; Kenyon revised it to about 1550 BC, which would put the city in ruins before any plausible date for Joshua. The verse and the spade have not yet finished arguing.
What the New Testament Adds
Jericho appears again in the gospels. Jesus passes through on the way to Jerusalem, healing the blind man Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46) and dining with the tax collector Zacchaeus (Luke 19). The Jericho of those scenes was Herod the Great's new Jericho, two kilometers south of the old tell — a winter palace complex with aqueducts, baths, and gardens. Some of Herod's structures are still excavated and visible. Two different Jerichos, both inside the modern city's municipal boundary.
A Town in the Center of Everything
Jericho's location explains its longevity: a permanent freshwater spring (Ein es-Sultan, the Spring of Elisha of 2 Kings 2:21) on the only practical crossing point between the Jordan Valley and the Judean hills. Anyone moving east-west across the southern Levant has had to come through here. The modern town has about 20,000 residents, mostly Palestinian Muslim with a small Christian minority. The economy depends partly on archaeology and partly on agriculture; the spring still flows, and the gardens still produce dates and citrus.
Jericho Today
The site has been on UNESCO's World Heritage tentative list for years; in 2023 the broader Tell es-Sultan area received full UNESCO inscription. The modern city is administered by the Palestinian Authority. Israeli checkpoints control access from the west; the Allenby Bridge crossing into Jordan is to the east. The verse, the spring, the trumpet, and the wall are all in a city of roughly two square kilometers. Whoever walks Jericho walks all of them at once.
The verse named the wall. The wall fell. The town outlived the wall by 10,000 years.