Did the walls come tumbling down, as the chorus says? Not exactly. It’s more amazing than that!
A little history might help here. During a series of excavations from 1930 to 1936, British archeologist John Garstang found a burn layer at Jericho which he identified with the biblical story of Joshua. But in the 1950s, Kathleen Kenyon, darling of the archeological world, said there was no walled city there during that time period. She published her conclusions, but her actual data wasn’t released until after her death in 1978. Archeologist Bryant Wood, using her data, showed that the facts uncovered by both Garstang and Kenyon matched perfectly with the biblical narrative, though they disagreed on the date. He also showed that Kenyon’s conclusions were primarily based on what she didn’t find—two-color pottery imported from Cyprus, used by the wealthy. From this she assumed Jericho was therefore not an important city at that time. But Garstang had found such pottery there! Something else, only found at Jericho, were large quantities of burned grain. This showed the attack was in the spring, as the Bible record states, the siege was short-lived (7 days), thus the grain wasn’t eaten, and it had been purposely burned, since this first city was to be a burnt offering to the Lord. In addition, Kenyon’s drawings show the mud brick walls (perhaps 12 feet high) were not at ground level, but on top of a large mound held in by a revetment, or retaining wall, itself 15 feet high. It’s her drawings that show how “the wall fell down flat” (Jos 6:20), outwardly, making a ramp of the bricks so “the people went up into the city,” using the inside of the fallen city wall as a rough stairway to get over the lower retaining wall. What a God we have who can turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones for His people!