The Fall of Jericho in Joshua 6 is one of the most distinctive military accounts in ancient literature: God commands the Israelites to march around the city once a day for six days, with seven priests carrying trumpets made of rams' horns marching before the Ark of the Covenant, and on the seventh day to march around it seven times with the priests blowing the trumpets, and at the long final blast, for the entire people to shout - and the walls will fall flat. The victory over Jericho is thus designed so that no human military strategy can claim credit: the city falls not through siege engineering or superior force but through liturgical obedience.
Doré's engraving captures the catastrophic moment of collapse. The walls of Jericho are rendered with architectural specificity - massive stone construction, towers, battlements - and Doré conveys their fall with a drama of collapsing masonry that draws on both his knowledge of classical ruins and his capacity for rendering physical catastrophe. The Israelite army in the foreground watches, their trumpets raised, as the wall before them disintegrates. The composition's use of scale makes the walls enormous and their collapse correspondingly dramatic, giving the miracle its full visual weight.
The theological interpretation of Jericho in the tradition has consistently emphasized the theme of faith as the mechanism of divine action. Hebrews 11:30 explicitly includes Jericho in its catalogue of faith: 'By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled for seven days.' The march - seven days, seven priests, seven circuits on the final day - is a liturgical performance whose logic is obedience rather than strategy. The faith is not intellectual assent but embodied trust expressed through action that looks, from any military standpoint, absurd.
The figure of Rahab the prostitute, whose household is spared because of the scarlet cord in her window (Joshua 2:18-21, 6:22-25), adds a further theological dimension to the Jericho narrative. She is a Canaanite outsider who nonetheless acts in faith toward the God of Israel, and her inclusion in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1:5 makes her one of the most significant characters in the salvation-history typology of the Old Testament. Doré's engraving focuses on the walls' fall rather than Rahab's rescue, but the broader narrative context that informed Victorian readers' engagement with the image included this strand.
The Jericho narrative has had a complex reception history in Christian missions and colonial theology. Its pattern of divine sanction for territorial conquest was cited in contexts ranging from the Crusades to colonial expansion, making it one of the more troubling hermeneutical inheritances of the Old Testament conquest narratives. Victorian Christian engagement with the image of Jericho's falling walls carried these theological tensions even when they were not explicitly addressed, and Doré's dramatic rendering of divine military power contributed to a visual culture in which the conquest of the Promised Land was seen as a template for other forms of divinely authorized advance.
Archaeologically, the site of ancient Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) has been extensively excavated, and the relationship between the archaeological evidence and the biblical account remains contested. But for the generations who encountered Jericho through Doré's engraving, the story's visual reality was established before any archaeological question arose, which is itself a significant cultural fact about the role of illustration in shaping biblical imagination.