Pip: There is a battle strategy in the Hebrew scriptures that involves walking in circles and shouting, and somehow it works — which raises the obvious question of what exactly is going on beneath the surface of that story.

Mara: That question is exactly where cj takes us on The Way of the Rabbi — into the Battle of Jericho, and what obedience and covenant actually mean when you read the text closely. Let’s start with the walls, and what had to happen before they fell.

Historical Events Modern Application: Joshua and the Battle of Jericho

Pip: The post opens with a military strategy that, on its face, makes no sense — march around a city for six days, then seven laps on day seven, blow some trumpets, shout, and the city falls. The real argument, though, is about what happened the night before any of that, in the chapter break most readers skip right over.

Mara: The setup is Joshua 5, where Joshua encounters a figure with a drawn sword. The post reads the commander’s reply to “Are you on our side or on the side of our enemies?” as something more conditional than a flat no: “Nought, but I am the commander of Adonai’s army.”

Pip: And that word — nought — is doing a lot of work. In early English it means nothing, zero, but also whether or otherwise. So the commander is not saying he is neutral. He is stating a condition: if you obey, I fight for you; if not, I stand aside.

Mara: The post makes the grammar explicit: “If you will obey Adonai, you will defeat the enemy and will enter the promise land. The Commander wasn’t saying, ‘No, I am neither here for you nor them.’ He was saying in a poetic way which Joshua, a Hebrew would have understood, ‘If you obey, than I have been commanded to fight for you, but if not than I have been commanded to standby.'”

Pip: So obedience is not a tactic — it is the condition that determines whether divine backing is even in play. Which makes the Achan episode immediately after Jericho the proof of concept.

Mara: Achan takes from the devoted spoils, and Israel is routed at Ai. Adonai’s explanation to Joshua is direct: “Israel has sinned; they have transgressed My covenant that I commanded them, and they have taken some of what was devoted to destruction. Indeed, they have stolen and lied, and they have put these things with their own possessions. This is why the Israelites cannot stand against their enemies.”

Pip: One person’s disobedience, and the whole army loses its footing. The stakes are not abstract.

Mara: The post then draws the line into the New Covenant — the punishment has changed, death is not the sentence for those in Messiah, but the covenant itself is not void. Confession and repentance replace the death sentence Achan faced, but the call to walk in obedience remains. As the post puts it, grace saves us to walk in the commands, not away from them.

Pip: The modern church has, apparently, run the logic backward — decided that if obedience is work, and works are bad, then disobedience must somehow be grace. The post calls that out pretty directly.

Mara: It closes with Paul’s line to Timothy — “ALL of Scripture is profitable for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness” — and frames every good work as obedience to God’s instruction. The challenge issued to the reader mirrors Joshua’s challenge to Israel: choose this day whom you will serve.

Pip: Covenant, obedience, consequence — the walls of Jericho are just where the story gets concrete enough to see all three at once.

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Mara: What stays with me is the chapter-break problem — meaning hidden in the seam between two passages most readers treat as separate.

Pip: Read the whole thing. The walls are still falling.

Read the entire post here: Historical Events Modern Application: Joshua and the Battle of Jericho