According to the Bible, the first big city the Israelites attacked when they crossed the River of Jordan into Canaan, The Promised Land, was Jericho.

Josuha set his troops circling the city for 6 days, carrying the Ark of the Covenant before them and blowing trumpets. And on the seventh day they circled the city 7 times, still with the Arck and still bloewing their trumpets. Then all the Israelites let out an almighty shout.................and the walls of Jericho fell down, allowing them to sack the city.

But what really happened?

digging under the walls or using some time of early explosions

personally i always put it down to the fact that they had copied the walls from somewhere else that had them
but they were not shown how to build them
even a garden wall falls down at some point if an idiot builds it

An earthquake.

None of the above..........Jericho had been in ruins for over 200 years at the time of the supposed (notice I said supposed - most archaeologists now say there is no evidence of a Israelite exodus or conquest) conquest! No God's help, no earthquake, no undermining, no early explosives. Just a war over 2 centuries before the Israelites!

I think it was divine intervention.


By the way, some of your poll results seem a little...wow...





I just know somebody's going to come along with notion that the Israelites got their hands on nuclear weapons thousands of years before they were invented...

I choose devine intervention...using the ark of the covenant

Sounds more metaphoric than reality due to Jericho being in ruins 200 years prior.

Most of the stuff that Essan comes out with is WOW

I actually believe this to be one of the very few literal refrences in the bible. anyway have you ever heard of a resonant frequency? it can easily be caused by two or more musical instruments, or two or more human voices. given enough trumpets, you could produce a strong enough resonance to do real physical damage. hence it would be a "sonic weapon".

and you've tried bringing down a 100 ft stone wall with a couple of trumpets have you ?

i wanna know who put god helped them lol god wont help us when say terroists blow stuff up, but hey look a big wall ill take it down for you sure why not

An earthquake. To get to Jerhico, they crossed the River Jordan. When earthquakes happen in the area in modern times, mudslides often make a point at which it is possible to cross the river. The walls may have been weakened during the quake, then finished by tremors a few days after or the resonant frequency. Although it would have been difficult for the trumpets to be loud enough to destroy the walls.

Remember that resonant frequency (in terms of sound) only applies to objects of uniform material, such as crystal glasses. Structures made up of multiple materials, such as walls and bridges, to say nothing of being designed for the purpose of holding itself up, are not going to be brought down by sound. Especially when the sound is not a sustained parallel frequency applied continously in a specific direction and range.

how bout, the stomping weakened the top ground allowing better penetration to a more better layer under? regardless, the wave produced (because it's my story, 110hz) by the trumpets traveled into the earth, partially deflected by the surrounding terrain/walls, and took a day to return stored energy. Then they amplified the pulses the next day, then the next to bring the walls down.

Sound isn't a storable energy, not in the way that you described. Particularly in an expandla substance such as loose earth, where the sound become instantly dispersed among the gaps in the material.

Every time sound moves through a layer, be it thermal, physical, or otherwise, it looses energy. The more layers to move through, the more energy lost. In loose earth, with the many air gaps, the energy disappears almost instantly. In a solid wall, it passes through a bit more, but still loose in transition between brick and mortar and air. The only time you get any significant amount of energy transference in when you have a single material with a specific resonant frequency that is sustained and paralleled, such as with the famouse wine glass example.

Oi! You were suppose to leave me to reveal that!

But yes folks, Mako is right: there were no walls of Jericho, there weren't even any people there at the time of the supposed conquest of Canaan.....

Unless of course God removed all the archaeological evidence and rearranged the site in order to hide his crime

oh he's always doing that.
he even restocked the oceans to hide the evidence of his flood
thats quite an in depth cover up (pun intended)

LOL!

If anyone's interested in the archaeological record of the Middle East and what it tells us about the veracity of the Bible I can recommend This Book You'll never look at the Bible the same again!

The truth may astound you
then again..............

There might have been an earthquake in the region and the walls crumbled down as the trumpets blew, hence the Walls of Jericho came down as the trumpets blew. More bible mumbo jumbo IMO.

Could be. They were blowing for, what, three days? Gotta give them credit for their lung power!

And that's another thing: after a couple of hours they'd have to stop or their lungs would burn with hurt.

Gotta give them credit for a good deal of stupidity too though: all that blowing just to bring down non existent walls around an empty ruined village.....

Reminds of H2G2 (again!) - when the Golgafrincham 2nd in Command returns to England to announce that he's found another continent and declared war on it, "and we interogatted a gazelle". Probably weren't even any gazelle in jericho. Perhaps the Israelites were laying seige to a couple of desert mice?

those Golgafrincham eh
crazy guys
whatever happened to them in the end Essan.
didn't they become the Israelites

As I was there in a former life I feel I must relate my tale.

So like there I was with the Isrealites and like we had been walking simply forever, like my sandals were totally bogarted. We like crossed this river and there was this city over there so I was thinking Awsome there will be a mall and I can get some new vans, I am so there.

So I like asked this dude what city it was and he said like its Jericho dude, don't you know anything? But like there was security at the gate and they said step off!

So we like had a conference ya know like secret like, and like no one had a good fake ID so Josh says, "Like we will so take over this city and make it like ours even!" And I said Yo Josh dude, like they have a righteous set of walls. I think it might be hard maybe. And he was like no way! I know this God dude and he will kick like all of their butts totally.

And so he was like passing out horns to everyone and saying like walk around, and I am thinking whoa more walking just farging awsome. And like this guy behind me was playing like so flat it was driving me nuts but like I think it was worse for the Jericho dudes cause like they started going over the walls and falling on us like lemmings, and one fat dude like broke the whole wall. Like this big piece of rock totally anialated my head and I died so it was really bogus I think.

I am pretty sure it was Jericho, but it might have been like Topeka or an episode of veggi tales instead. Got to go take my meds now.

yes it's Saturday and I am very bored.....

LOL
10/10
the gospel according to grand master Imaginos

okay whos the retard that guessed nukes? i take it that they werent serious.

Nukes? Hmmmm. Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and Herculaum exploded with the power of 100 nukes.

100,000,000 megatons Yucatan http://www.maar.us/yucatan_asteroid_explosion.html
21000 megatons Krakatoa http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/freque...uestion879.html
5000 megatons Tunguska http://home.flash.net/~manniac/tunguska.htm
150 megatons Pompei http://harpy.uccs.edu/roman/html/pompeiislides.html
4 megatons Bikini atoll http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq76-1.htm
0.015 megatons Hiroshima http://www.lclark.edu/~history/HIROSHIMA/


really puts it in perspective doesn't it.
If humans ever went to war with nature..........best not to think about it really

yeah but i dont think they had nuclear weapons back then. maybe swords, knives and the lot but not nukes.

They didn't have Nukes at the end of the Cretaceous Period in the mesozoic era either but the Yucatan was hit by a blast that had a 100,000,000 megaton yield
1 megaton is equivalent to a thousand tons of T.N.T. going off all at once
so thats 1,000,000,000,000 tons of T.N.T.
Or a trillion in understandable common everyday language
thats a very big bang (no pun intended)

was that comment directed at me marduk?
if it was please dont be a boob. of course i have never tried. i was merely making a comment that unlike almost every other story in the bible, this one IS physically possible, even if improbible. it would require a VERY large amount of sound but it is NOT impossible.

yeah forgive my sarcastic tone
caught me in a fun moment
it would have to be a bloody big trumpet wouldn't it
with about a kiloton yield
hehe

I'm not so sure it is physically possible (since we are talking about 'physically', and not just the standard, theoretical "everything's possible" rule of thumb). If we are talking about a standard mud brick and mortar wall, then resonant frequency does not apply, and that means that the only way sound would bring down a wall is in the same manner any force would, meaning more of it on one side to overcome the inertia from the other side. Sound, not being a very efficient transmitter of force, would have to be so strong that, even though a large majority of it was wasted (by means of reflection, which means everyone, including the trumpet blowers and army would have their eardrums blown out), there would still have to enough left over to affect the wall. I can't think of what material the trumpets would be made of to withstand that amount of power, to say nothing of the wind force that would be required to generate it (lungs aren't going to do it).

that could be argued as well. on some level, resonant frequency applies to all physical objects. But I will grant you the fact that mud bricks and mortar are incredibly ineffective carriers. i do understand that breaking them with resonant frequency would be less effective than trying to use them as an electric conductor. So you make a very well founded and fair point, however I will always hold to my ideal that it IS possible.

I see 2 people have now voted for Nuclear weapons Well, makes sense really - how else would you have taken out an uninhabited, undefended, village in the bronze age?

Apparently they used cluster bombs to kill a rabbit for supper. And napalm for lighting a camp fire to cook it on

How else are soldiers supposed to hunt Rabbit when they don't have landrovers with high beams ?
You don't know much about hunting Rabbits from an army perspective Essan
and that all i'm going to say on the matter.

The Great Walls Of Jericho were brought down by a sound wave.
A well placed Sonic Boom from the Great Horns. Similar to the Tibetan and Swiss horns.

Isn't the Walls of Jericho a wrestling move?

I bet they hellusinated the whole thing and wrote a whole story on how they took over an imaginary city! I mean they are in the desert right? lol, jk

-Mateo

Maybe the walls couldn't stand the noise any more.

Thread title:


It didn't really astound me...........

Sorry But you have to admit - some of the answers that other folk have given were pretty astounding........

Not really. Most of the answers were what I expected. Some were amusingly novel. None of it really astounded me though.....