2.1 Defining “Ruins”

Ruins—the remains of a building, city, or other artifact that have been destroyed or are in disrepair—stand in space and in the landscape as a testimony to past greatness and human creativity, which one sees in later times but often no longer understands. One can ignore them and pass by them carelessly because they are just a pile of stones. One can, however, also pay attention to them in terms of the emergence of their material form, as well as the resulting narratives and interpretations, and thereby ascribe meaning to them.

Ruins, like rubble, are the material manifestation of the violence and dislocation that created them. Ruins and rubble consist prima vista of earth, dust, and stone. Because stones, even if their exact form and function have been lost, stand for durability, they have the potential to inspire reflection on past events.⁵

Over time, a landscape can oscillate between “ruins” and “rubble” multiple times as societies interact with it in various ways—for example, excavating it, restoring it, or leaving it exposed to the elements. The same materiality can be charged with meanings, ideas, and affects depending on time, social conditions, and interpretive authorities. In ruins, as in rubble, the viewer can perceive the forces of past cultures and human will but can never form a complete picture of the past. From the totality of form and culture lost in the destroyed architecture, one can only ever infer partial aspects. That said, we cannot make a clear distinction between ruins and rubble; they are always entangled, contested, and processual.⁶ Both are evidence of past forms of architecture that were exposed to destruction and decay, and in both cases their meaning and significance is determined by later interpreters.

In what follows, I will speak of ruins (rather than rubble) when architectural forms and assigned meanings are recognizable, and I situate ruins within a process (that also includes rubble) in which multiple forces are combined, thus characterizing a ruin as a field of relations. This is because “ruins” are characterized by a particular representational mode of narrating the entanglement of the past, present, and future; culture and nature; progress and decline.

At first glance, ruins are simply fragments and material leftovers of human building activities. Yet they also have an afterlife as spatial markers (depending on the rural or urban context), signs of remembrance, material memorials, or monuments of defeat or victory. They testify not only to the transience of all earthly things but also to the fact that something created by humans has withstood time and the forces of nature.⁷ As spatial markers, they serve an observer or passerby for orientation, but they also give the landscape a particular aesthetic valence. As signs and bearers of meaning, the interpretive authority (Deutungshoheit) of those who ascribe meaning to a ruin and ensure that this meaning is spread synchronously and passed down over time plays a major role. The agents of this authority and its social acceptance also determine whether a ruin is forgotten, further dismantled, maintained as a ruin, or rebuilt.

At the same time, use of the term “ruin” can vary considerably depending on the cultural context and the perspective of the observer. The traces of time and decay are not perceived and interpreted in the same way by everyone. Spaces and architectural remains that are considered dead and decayed to the viewer coming from the outside are spaces full of vitality and new functions to those who inhabit and use them. The concept of a “ruin” thus implies a comparative view not only of past and present, but also of inside and outside.

Ruins have the potential to mediate a sense of materiality, ephemerality, and loss through their outer shape and a sense of temporality through their duration. They can also structure and assign meanings to spaces and landscapes, as well as provoke in their observers reactions (ranging from veneration to looting) and emotions such as respect, disrespect, fear, curiosity, compassion, desire, or perplexity. Ruins also combine culture and nature; they represent the intersection between the human will to control the environment and the powers of nature.⁸ Urban ruin and decay also have a critical potential: they are a challenge to any narrative of unbounded progress or human control over time or nature. They protrude into the present as critical signs from the past because they are witnesses to the fragility of human cultural endeavors, progress, and especially the functional city and human governance. As cultural artifacts, ruins upset and disturb as they disrupt and destabilize the precepts, claims, aims, and progress of human cultural efforts such as settlement, monumental construction, and urbanization. Ruins implicitly undermine any human building project.

Ruins should be understood not only as material, natural, cultural, temporal, or spatial phenomena, but also as social phenomena. Forces, disputes, and meanings are articulated around them that can be attributed to various social discourses and processes.⁹ Different agents attribute meaning to the historical, religious, and political nature of the ruin and decide about its possible reuse. The decision to forget a ruin or give it an afterlife goes hand in hand with the ability of interpreters to recognize and reactualize the fundamental narrative of a ruin in its material forms. A ruin can become a point of departure and a visual medium for various discourses such as historiography, identity, collective memory, sacred topography, etiology, theology, and ethics, and as a program for the future. Ruins are thus not only oriented toward the past and memory, but they also bridge the past, the present, and even the future.

Ruins, then, can function as landmarks within constructions of history and identity or be interpreted as memorials that challenge human conceptions of control, progress, permanence, linear time, and geometric space. Because ruins always refer to origins and reproduce the aura of the authentic, narratives about ruins and etiologies for them play a role in legitimizing claims to power or territory. The supposed authenticity of the ruin, then, can have different explanations. Some ruins are destined by the holders of interpretive authority to become landmarks, memorials, or markers of actual events, while others are integrated into invented stories of a fictional past into which various claims and constructs are projected.¹⁰ By their very nature, all interpretations of ruins are an offensive of the present on the past.

The aesthetic of destruction that pertains to ruins also belongs in this interpretive context. This special aesthetic is characterized by a balance between the discernibility and the dissolution of a ruin’s outward form, which predestines it to become a free arena for new signifying acts and assignments of meaning. The decayed buildings can be semantically reoccupied in a way that differs from their former use, so that one can speak of an aesthetic of ruins.¹¹ Hartmut Böhme points out that this reflexive view of ruins tends toward memory, assigning meaning (e.g., theological, power-discursive, or historical), writing, and archiving.¹² Ruins, memory, and writing are therefore closely connected because ruins can give support to memories but are only permanently immune to oblivion if they are able to “strike the sparks of eternal writing” (“die Funken der ewigen Schrift zu schlagen”).¹³

That said, we have to conclude that ruins are disturbing. They are architectural fragments that question human order, human control, and concepts of cultural progress, and they attest to the destructive forces of time, nature, and human action. They can also imply that power structures thought to be deeply ingrained are temporary, contingent, and even fragile. This can evoke emotions such as respect, disrespect, fear, insecurity, longing, or nostalgia.

Being basically real places, ruins are linked with the construction of worldviews, identities, memories, sacred landscapes, etiologies, and theological and ethical programs.¹⁴ Ruins are thus able to intertwine space, time, materiality, and symbolic universes and trigger a variety of sociocultural discourses that are detectible, for example, in literary sources. Ruins are spaces in which different forms of materiality (e.g., organic, inorganic, natural, synthetic), temporality, and agency can be articulated. They are cultural artifacts that activate networks of meaning, but at the same time they perform it as a kind of meaningful manifest that can be read, analyzed, interpreted, (re)thought, and written down. How they are discussed and interpreted is intimately connected to the histories, stories, religion, economic forces, power structures, interpretive authorities, and communities of a given culture, as well as to conflicting visions for its future.

In sum, ruins are complex landmarks in which different spatial and temporal forms come together, whose confrontations materialize on at least five levels: Ruins (1) stand between nature and culture; (2) stand between concepts of past, present, and future; (3) mark and disrupt spaces and landscapes; (4) are focal points of confrontation between different social actors with different possibilities of interpretation and action; and (5) produce an aesthetic of their own.¹⁵ The ongoing confrontations with ruins and their changing interpretations, which are tangible in texts, testify to the search for new configurations for any current or future experience. This is the background for approaches that seek to understand ruins as processes rather than objects or that propose to consider the state of ruin as a precarious equilibrium that, even if inscribed in a fixed materiality, evokes controversial emotions, invites imagination, and is subject to permanent transformations.¹⁶

2.2 Defining “Collective Violence”

The scope of this study does not permit a thorough review of the current interdisciplinary research on collective violence—which includes medical, psychological, sociological, philosophical, historical, and religious aspects—but a brief definition of the term and an overview of the most important characteristics will help us as we move forward. Collective violence may be defined as “the instrumental use of violence by people who identify themselves as members of a group—whether this group is transitory or has a more permanent identity—against another group or set of individuals, in order to achieve political, economic or social objectives.”¹⁷ It can take various forms, including war, genocide, banditry, and gang warfare.¹⁸ Collective violence seems to be an anthropological constant with phylogenetic roots that is triggered and enabled by particular group processes; social, economic, and political factors; and specific psychosocial constellations.¹⁹ It is a social act that occurs episodically and can be used for many purposes (e.g., appeasing the gods, conquering new territories, acquiring resources, or conflict resolution).²⁰ Socially, structures of legitimation can be created in ideologies and religions that allow the use of collective violence to go unpunished or that even reward it and, if necessary, override individually prescribed ethical-moral behavior patterns and empathy with the victims.²¹ In these contexts, collective physical violence requires the coordination of the violent parties and tends toward self-organization and a feedback loop in the experience of power and impunity, which can lead to unrestrained escalations.

Collective physical violence, like individual violence, is primarily the domain of men.²² In this context, group dynamics such as in-group overevaluation and out-group devaluation are of central importance in stabilizing the male sense of self-worth and social identity, as well as in legitimizing, normalizing, and internalizing violent behavior. In the process of constructing an image of an enemy, the persons or groups declared to be enemies are dehumanized, which involves defining the out-group using constructs of otherness and difference, religion, gender, race, or ethnicity. Only minimal differences are needed to discriminate against other groups; sometimes even social classification is enough. The violent actions of one’s reference group are perceived as legitimate acts of self-defense or efforts to implement legitimate claims which justify the violent actions. At the same time, individual members feel less responsible for violent acts committed as a group. This results in fewer feelings of guilt and, at the same time, the feeling of dominance and power over others acts as a psychological reward, an effect that is enhanced by the admiration, solidarity, and friendship within the reference group. In this respect, individuals who participate in acts of collective violence do not experience feelings of guilt, but rather a reward system. The social identity acquired through group membership is reinforced internally by the alignment of attitudes and behaviors and externally by processes of seclusion, so that group ties become the main component of social identity, and the individual can no longer distinguish himself or herself from group goals. In all categories of collective violence, the categorical distinction of “us versus them” is foundational.²³ Collective violence can thus contribute significantly to the identity construction of individuals as well as of groups.

Groups of male youth in particular have an affinity for violence. They are often characterized by a normative cult of masculinity, which is defined by strength and violence and can be combined with a code of honor. In these contexts, collective violence functions as a group norm and a means of demonstrating masculinity, and it serves to secure status in and through the group. Motives for collective violent behavior can be sought in the desire for dominance, the need for belonging, identity construction, territorial claims, resource acquisition and defense, or the staging of masculinity and strength.²⁴ Violence in groups can also be exercised as an end in itself, because the act of violence is experienced as euphoric, reflected in the notion of a “violent orgy.” Intense experiences of risk, tension, pain, rescue, heroism, community, and superiority create bonds among the perpetrators of violence that delimit the in-group to the outside world, an effect that is further reinforced by the telling and literary elaboration of corresponding stories. This can lead to the diffusion and implementation of violence-promoting ideas and traditions and fantasies of violence, which in any case contribute to the socialization to violence. Once violence is accepted as an option for social action, fantasies of violence can also be developed. These fantasies can reach theatrical dimensions without ever being or having been translated into real acts of violence. The potential for violence that occurs in violent fantasies acts as a cognitive script intended to secure power and control over others. This phenomenon of violent appropriation of the world is less about the exercise of violence per se than about the desire for total control and the exercise of power. Violent fantasies are often triggered by threats or humiliation that override one’s inhibitions and create a feeling of being at the mercy of others. The violent fantasies can then act as an escape valve, warding off feelings of inferiority and powerlessness and suggesting a virtual superiority that can “strike” at any time. The triggers and the addressees of the violent fantasies need by no means be the same.²⁵ In this sense, fantasies of violence are like acts of violence themselves: they are an excellent means of creating individual and group identity. External enemies and threats hold the group together, even if they are pure constructs and do not actually exist. Fantasies of violence weld the group together through experiences of commonality, feelings of superiority, fear, and guilt and can reflect existing insecurities, deficits, and instabilities.

3.1 The Point of Departure: Tell Es-Sultan

Jericho (Tell es-Sultan), a site that had been settled since the Epipaleolithic period (eleventh–ninth millennia BCE), developed in the Early Bronze Age I (EB I) from a flourishing village into a city.²⁶ The fortified EB II (3000 BCE) urban center was destroyed by a strong earthquake around 2700 BCE and was rebuilt in EB III with an outer and an inner wall. This form of the city likewise suffered a destruction in the EB IIIB, around 2300 BCE, which was followed by several centuries of nonurban settlement on the site (2300–2000/1950 BCE). At the beginning of the second millennium BCE, a new city arose on the mound, with its center on Spring Hill. In the Middle Bronze Age (2000/1950–1550/1500 BCE), Jericho was a strongly fortified city of approximately 7 hectares with a “solid mudbrick wall with rectangular towers in MB I (1950–1800 BCE)” and “two successive earthen ramparts with a limestone revetment crowned by a mudbrick wall in MB II (1800–1650 BCE).”²⁷ The city suffered violent destruction in the mid-seventeenth century BCE but was rebuilt and refortified in the MB III (1650–1550/1500 BCE) with a new monumental fortification approximately 8 m in height, consisting of a rubble rampart supported by a series of terrace walls (called “triangular walls”) and by a massive Cyclopean wall made of huge limestone boulders at its base (fig. 2.1). At the end of the MB III, the city underwent a terrible destruction and a fierce conflagration, which affected the city and its walls.²⁸ The cause of this destruction has long been a matter of discussion, with both human and natural events held responsible. Earlier scholarship linked the city’s demise to the expulsion of the Hyksos rulers from Egypt or to internal military disputes within Palestine itself, perhaps exacerbated by additional tensions from newly arrived populations.²⁹ Attempts to link the destruction of the strong MB III city fortification around 1550/1500 BCE with the migrating tribes of Israel and the conquest narrative in Josh 6 have failed. Although the biblical descriptions of imposing Canaanite fortifications are reminiscent of the city’s Middle Bronze Age fortifications, the alleged date of Joshua’s conquest and the emergence of early Israel at the end of the Late Bronze Age during the thirteenth or twelfth centuries cannot be matched with the end of urban Jericho in the mid-sixteenth century.

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Figure 2.1

The Cyclopean Wall, Jericho

Image: Ole Depenbrock

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Kathleen Kenyon found evidence of an earthquake that was at least partly responsible for the demise of the city in the MB III.³⁰ An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8 is documented for about 1560 BCE.³¹ The destruction of the nearby site of Tell el-Hammam has recently been dated to around 1650 BCE and interpreted as a Tunguska-like event (i.e., a meteor airburst), which would likewise have hit and destroyed Jericho, 22 kilometers away.³² According to Ted E. Bunch and his colleagues, the destruction of Tell el-Hammam was followed by a post-MB settlement gap of about three hundred years, because the airburst had salinized the sediment of the area by distributing hypersaline water from the Dead Sea in such a way that no agriculture was possible for several centuries afterward.³³ The simultaneous dating of the destruction of Tell el-Hammam and Jericho around 1650 BCE is possible, but this was not the final chapter of Jericho’s history. Without a longer gap, the city was rebuilt and refortified after the destruction of 1650 BCE and flourished for around a century. Radiocarbon dating fixes the very end of Middle Bronze Age Jericho between 1550 and 1520 calibrated BCE, thus around one hundred years later than the airburst at Tell el-Hammam.³⁴ The thesis of Bunch and his colleagues is also undermined by the fact that Jericho was still occupied in the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE) and later, albeit on a very reduced scale and with much weaker fortifications.³⁵ Another piece of evidence that contradicts the theory of a long settlement gap after the MB III destruction is the observation that the burnt and collapsed MB III defensive system was refurbished by adding a mudbrick wall on top of the surviving crest of the Cyclopean wall. The scarcity of material evidence from the thirteenth century BCE is not the result of an abandonment of the site during the Late Bronze Age or of the impossibility of farming; rather, it is due to levelling operations carried out in the Iron Age.³⁶ Like many Late Bronze Age sites, the humble LB Jericho was simply abandoned.

The subsequent layers of the Iron Age I were detected only in a few places on Spring Hill. During the Iron Age IB, Jericho was resettled as a rural village that was built over the ruins of the Late Bronze Age city.³⁷ The site was refortified in the tenth century BCE, reusing the surviving MB III–LB Cyclopean wall. The remains of an administrative bit hilani building from the Iron Age IIA prove that Jericho played an administrative role during the ninth century BCE.³⁸ The small city continued until the end of the kingdom of Judah in 587/586 BCE.³⁹ Tell es-Sultan still experienced a stable occupation during the Persian period, even though the center of the oasis was shifting south toward Wadi Qelt and the road to Jerusalem.

To conclude, repeated reuse of the MB III–LB Cyclopean wall at Jericho shows that the ruins of these walls were noticed through the centuries and motivated the inhabitants of Jericho and the surrounding area again and again to restore these fortifications to their original function. Whenever Jericho was rebuilt and refortified, the remains of the wall were reused. The material remains of the Middle and Late Bronze Age city were part of an ongoing processes: they were a permanent resource of building material but also the focus of an ongoing confrontation between contemporary observers and the ruin on the five levels mentioned above (see section 2.1 above).

3.2 The Ruins of Jericho and Joshua 6

The foregoing survey of Jericho’s settlement history indicates that, during the end of the Late Bronze Age (thirteenth–twelfth centuries BCE), when the “Israelites” are usually supposed to have settled “Canaan,” Jericho surely was not an impressive city; rather, it was a small settlement on a very impressive ruin.⁴⁰ Late Bronze Age Jericho was apparently only abandoned (without major destruction events such as sieges and battles), as was also the case at many other sites in the region during this time of deurbanization. Because the modest dimensions of LB Jericho are not an adequate setting for the battle scene narrated in Josh 6, conservative readers of the Bible had to backdate Joshua’s conquest as presented in Josh 6 to the end of the Middle Bronze Age (instead of the end of the Late Bronze Age).⁴¹ Yet there is no way to harmonize this early (MB III) date for the arrival of new groups of proto-Israelites with the situation in Late Bronze Age Palestine as reflected in the archaeological record. And, when we take into account that the first version of Josh 6 was written in the eighth, seventh, or sixth centuries BCE and continued to undergo development, it becomes clear that any attempt to identify one of the many destructions of Jericho with biblical figures and their actions is very hazardous.⁴² This remains true even if we assume that a conquest story was transmitted orally over several centuries. Jericho suffered several destructions by natural or human forces between the third and first millennia BCE, and it was almost always able to overcome them without a settlement gap. The experience of the unstoppable survival of this very old city with its ruins of considerable height (today 21.5 m) became part of the local memoryscape and the multiple social discourses and interpretations from the first millennium BCE until today.

The Middle and Late Bronze Age Cyclopean wall stood out among the material remains of Jericho that were already ancient when Josh 6 was written. It could not be ignored but became part of the visual communication and was integrated into the “social genesis of the view.”⁴³ From a semiotic perspective, it could function as a sign carrying meaning. Its perception was (like the perception of texts and images always is) a cultural construct and a self-referential process; perception is interpretation and involves assigning meaning with the aim of appropriating what is seen (or heard/read) and adapting it to prior experiences or interpretations, which are thereby expanded and stabilized. The ancient observers of the ruins, as well as the producers (and the audience) of adjacent written or oral interpretations (as well as readers/observers today), were thus governed by their respective social, religious, and historical contexts and their interests. A selection of these interpretations is perceptible in Josh 6.

Jericho’s walls lost their original form and function after the Bronze Age. The ruin witnessed past grandeur followed by a massive destruction without a clear indication of who its earlier inhabitants were or who destroyed the site. It could therefore become the free arena of new signifying acts and assignments of meaning. The authors of Josh 6 used their chance to semantically reoccupy the decayed buildings.

Of all the possible destruction scenarios that could be associated with the ruins of Jericho, the authors of Josh 6 chose a time horizon that was central to Israel’s identity and its land claims: the time of Israel’s seizure of the promised land. And of all the possible participants in the destruction of the city, they chose the people of Israel under the leadership of Joshua and Yhwh. The ruins of Jericho were thus integrated into the biblical discourses on this key moment of the “Israelites’ ” very first contact with the land and its inhabitants. Paradigmatic decisions were taken. In Josh 6, the inhabitants of Jericho were used pars pro toto for the Canaanite population of the land and thus served as a model for differentiating the in-group of the “Israelites” versus the out-group of the “Canaanites.” The in-group is portrayed as a non-sedentary newcomer in the area, living in camps under the guidance of Joshua and Yhwh, while the out-group consists of the long-established urban population, whose cultural features such as kings, walls, and gates are highlighted. By assigning urbanism, fortifications, and kingship to the out-group, the text promotes an antiurban and an antiroyal tendency, which is said to be part of “Israel’s” identity from its very beginning.⁴⁴

The textual perspective fully subsumes the reader within the in-group of external (but legitimate) aggressors that also otherwise characterizes the martial fantasies of conquest in the book of Joshua. By doing this, the biblical text promotes one of the basic parameters of “Israel’s” identity formation—namely, the “Israel versus Canaan” pattern, through which biblical authors reshape cultural memory and express their distance from their own habitat, language, and ethnicity by specifying criteria of demarcation to the outside and identity formation to the inside.⁴⁵ This “us versus them” distinction prepares the ground for collective violence not only in Josh 6 but throughout the book of Joshua and in other biblical books.

Apart from this paradigmatic in- and out-group distinction, several other meanings assigned to the ruins of Jericho are in evidence in Josh 6, a text that has shaped the “social genesis of the view” (see section 2.1 above) and the perception of the ruins up to the present. The ruins of Jericho and the text of Josh 6 are mutually connected with each other, transforming the ruined walls of Jericho into a means of communication and a material witness of the biblical construction of memory. The ruins became an illustration of Josh 6, producing an aura of authenticity for the story, while Josh 6 also became a caption of sorts for viewers of the ruin. The text of Josh 6, which underwent several stages of supplementation, reflects a longstanding engagement with the ruins of Jericho and an evolving assignment of meanings that sought to reshape the past according to present interests and discourses.

But why Jericho? Jericho stands temporally and spatially at a key point. It was a famously ancient city, representing a long tradition and distant past. Its destruction by a new immigrant group therefore programmatically erased this past and began a new era. The monumental ruins of Jericho also marked a prominent point in the surrounding landscape, something that has not changed to this day. This domination of space stimulated the creation of a narrative that frames the city of Jericho as a potent enemy of the Israelites because it blocks their way as they enter the land from Transjordan. Although the occupation of the land in the book of Joshua took a different direction (Ai and Mount Ebal; Jerusalem comes into view only in Josh 10), Jericho stood spatially for the entrance into Cisjordan and for the route from the lowest point in the landscape up into the hill country and to Jerusalem.

Jericho also stands for the “low-high” symbolism of another perspective: The view of Jericho’s ruins from the outside implies a certain line of sight on the part of the observer. One can only approach the ruin by looking up from below, from fertile fields to stones. This unavoidable perspective on the tell (low = outside; high = inside) corresponds to the contrast in Josh 6—namely, that of the open Israelite camp below against the high enclosed and fortified Canaanite city. These spatial categories also correspond to the biblical construct of the landless hordes of the tribes, approaching the urban settlements of Canaan only from below and outside, standing as outsiders before Canaanite cultural and architectural achievements such as gates, towers, and walls. The remains of the Cyclopean wall of Jericho were an ideal symbol of the polarities of low versus high, camp versus fortified city, outside versus inside, and rural/nonsedentary versus urban societies. These polarities express central themes in the book of Joshua (see also Josh 10, the camp at Gilgal and the five kings), making city walls a key issue. This is because they are the boundary par excellence between the aforementioned polarities. City walls, towers, and gates are liminal zones. They have a protective function and a highly symbolic meaning. They are borders between the center and the periphery, controlling the access to the inner center of human settlement, granting it security or, in cultic categories, purity. In the ancient Near Eastern worldview, city walls were thought to divide the space into an inner and outer area, with the latter being a zone of reduced divine presence, protection, and order.⁴⁶ It is the task of the king (in cooperation with the city god) to control the gates and walls and to maintain their integrity, form, and function. City walls thus represent intact power, wealth, and divine protection; an intact human-divine relationship; and control over different forms of economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital.⁴⁷ Consequently, city walls were not only built by mighty kings (such as Gilgamesh) using slave labor but were also consecrated (see Neh 12:27–43) or even deified (such as the inner and outer walls Imgur-Enlil and Nemed-Enlil of Babylon, whose names also express the involvement of the god Enlil).⁴⁸

Of course, one’s view of city walls and their assessment depend heavily on one’s perspective. For the inner circle of the city’s inhabitants, the wall is something that evokes trust and the feeling of inclusion, safety, and being at home. For those outside, it evokes distance, exclusion, respect, fear, and perhaps even aggression with the motivation to destroy or appropriate the wall. The collapse of the city wall is the worst-case scenario for a city and its inhabitants, god, and king (see, e.g., Deut 28:52), while it is the desired result for the aggressor from outside. It signals the end of divine protection, human rule, personal safety, and the security of the city’s wealth and other capital and the beginning of the city’s vulnerability to enemies and dangers from outside. In this respect, the ruin of the destroyed city wall of Jericho is a visible sign that a city, its population, its king, and its patron god failed at some point in the past. Joshua 6 provides an interpretation of who failed, when, against whom, and why.

On the basis of the ruins of the massive walls of Jericho, the contrasts of low versus high, camp versus fortified city, outside versus inside, and rural/nonsedentary versus urban societies could be illustrated at a key place and key moment in the best and most visible way. With these assignments of meaning, Josh 6 provided significant parameters for the perception of Jericho’s ruins, integrated this perception into social discourses, and used it for the production of memories and as a didactic tool for passing on the corresponding patterns of interpretation to the next generations. The writers of Josh 6 chose Jericho in order to create a sociosymbolic, sacred, and didactic landscape and transformed it into a site of memory and identity formation. Another polarity that characterizes the narrative of Josh 6 is that of the new (and dynamic) versus the ancient (and static) culture. This polarity is best illustrated by the warfare that the Israelites are said to have used against the city, a topic which leads us to the theme of collective violence.

3.3 Joshua 6 and the Discourse of Collective Violence

Joshua 6 is part of the history of social discourses and of the production of memory constructs that were triggered by and attached to the ruins of Jericho. The text foregrounds their impact on the ancient observers, on their social life, and on their construction of identity, symbolic universes, ethics, memory, time, and space—in short, their world and its symbolic meanings. These discourses on memory and identity started with the first version of Josh 6, written during the reign of Hezekiah, Manasseh, or Josiah, and continued, as can be seen in the multiple layers of expansion in the text, until the time of the Maccabees.⁴⁹

According to the present text of Josh 6, the ruin of Jericho is said to have resulted from the fact that the intact city was destroyed by a collaborative action of Joshua, an advance guard of armed men, seven priests with seven trumpets, the ark of Yhwh, and the rear guard of the people. Joshua coordinated all of these violent forces. The collapse of the walls is said to be the work not of weapons and siege instruments, but of six plus one silent encirclements, trumpet blasts, and war shouts. This is a peculiar composition for an army, not to mention peculiar equipment and a peculiar strategy. Literary or redaction critics usually explain these peculiarities by interpreting the priestly participation and most probably also the ark as later additions to the text, leaving a semirealistic military force in the original version.⁵⁰ This army acts, as is typical in ancient Near Eastern war constructs, in perfect unity with its deity and does not have to mourn any victims. We can observe a strong contrast in warfare: the Israelites are characterized as acting with Yhwh (Josh 6:2), while the inhabitants of Jericho have no divine help at all. The Israelites are also portrayed as dynamic in their aggression, while Jericho remains static and only shows passive resistance (v. 1). The reader’s perspective is shaped by the view of the in-group of the people of Israel having no king but Joshua and Yhwh, and the out-group of the inhabitants of Jericho having a king but no god. With regard to religion, kingship, and dynamic power, the starting position of the opponents is very different. Jericho does not stand a chance.

The attack on Jericho from the Jordan Valley is not only the very first conquest in the book of Joshua; it also begins Israel’s appropriation of Cisjordan from the east, the direction of the sunrise. A symbolic meaning cannot be excluded because the rising sun brings light, dawn, and, often in the Bible, salvation.⁵¹ Joshua 6 not only refers to symbolic meanings within Israel’s mental map but also includes an ideal program for its social organization: the conquest is carried out not by single tribes or individuals but by the entire people (according to Josh 6:5) acting in total obedience to Yhwh. By outlining such basic parameters in space, time, and human-divine interaction, the narrative of Jericho’s destruction has a proleptic function in the book of Joshua. It anticipates the destruction of Canaanite cities and the conquest of the land as a divine act of holy war. Jericho’s defeat functions as a paradigm for the conquest of the entire land. Because of its key position in the book of Joshua and for the identity of Israel, it is not surprising that the narrative’s original version has been continually updated and modified—especially with regard to the extent of Jericho’s destruction and the participants in this seminal event—through the mention of the “ban” (‮חרם‬‎), the priests, the ark, and Rahab.

From its first to its last textual form, the narrative of Josh 6 communicates Jericho’s destruction as the result of divine and collective violence. In the original version of the text, the violence used against the city and its king is not physical violence but psychological terror and acoustic violence, as only noise (the war cry) and siege are used by the people. The walls are also not stormed by the Israelites from below, but only surrounded. The actual destruction work on the walls is done by Yhwh, reflecting the motif of divine warfare, which has nothing to do with real military action.⁵² Only after the walls have been miraculously brought down by Yhwh do the people enter the city. The later priestly expansion of the story elaborates on the motif of the weaponless war in that priests, armed only with musical instruments instead of weapons, carry out an ark procession accompanied by music.⁵³ No real siege warfare takes place; instead, the priests perform an annihilation ritual, while Jericho’s wall itself is not even touched by the Israelites.

Apart from the fall of the wall, nothing and nobody comes to harm by human or divine martial violence until Josh 6:16. Ernst Axel Knauf speaks here of a “demilitarization” of divine warfare, which, however, is completely annulled by the Deuteronomistic additions to the earlier narrative.⁵⁴ Joshua’s command to execute the ban (Josh 6:17–18), its execution (Josh 6:21), and the second introduction of the narrative in Josh 5:13–15 (theophany of the divine warrior) are later additions that amplify divine as well as human violence. The collapse of the wall is transformed into Yhwh’s preparation for the people’s collective physical violence.

Under consideration of the oath of rescue to Rahab promised in Josh 2, and under diversion of metal goods for the temple treasury pointing to the sacrilege of Achan in Josh 7 (both of which are even later post-Deuteronomistic additions), the people executed the ban “on man and woman, on old and young, on ox, sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword” (Josh 6:21) and burned the city with everything in it except the metal goods (Josh 6:24).⁵⁵ Everything in Jericho created by Canaanite hands was to be eliminated so that the place could be appropriated and completely remade by the people of Israel and their deity. In this respect, it is quite consistent that a curse against the destroyed city (v. 26) would be added in the context of a textual expansion; it functions as a parenthesis to 1 Kgs 16:34 and proves Joshua to be a true prophet.⁵⁶ The pattern of the announcement and later fulfillment of punishment recognizable in this curse further elaborates what was inherent in the narrative already in its first version. Yhwh and his chosen ones totally control not only space—the land of Canaan and its cities—but also time, which is structured by divine announcements and their later fulfillments. With the conquest of Jericho, the announcement of the takeover of the land that had started the exodus was fulfilled.

From the earliest version of Josh 6 to the received versions of the Hebrew Masoretic Text or the Septuagint, it is less a question of whether Jericho was destroyed in the past—that can be seen with a glance at the ruins and is part of the collective memory—than how it happened and what lesson can be drawn for the present and future. Thus, Josh 6 is not in the first instance (or only through additions such as v. 25) an etiological saga, the hieros logos of a feast, or a biblical “report” of historical events, but an exemplary, didactic narrative that deals with the consequences of human faith, obedience, and solidarity in collective as well as individual dimensions.⁵⁷ The text also provides clear categories for Israel’s identity formation and a code of correct behavior: the obedient people, trusting in and acting with God, reach the goal of the exodus—namely, receiving the promised land.⁵⁸ Divine violence against a foreign city is presented as a proven means of reaching this end. As can be observed in the Deuteronomistic additions, this fundamental divine approval of destructive violence, already perceptible in the basic version of the story, in the end legitimates the most extreme human collective violence against those who do not belong to the in-group of the Israelites.

The extremely violent Deuteronomistic fantasy of the ban was not the last word on the topic of collective violence by Israel toward out-groups. Another addition to the story modified the discourse in Josh 6. If Israel’s identity and social boundaries were largely defined by faith in and obedience to Yhwh and solidarity with the people, then this faith and solidarity could also open the way for inclusive models of conviviality with out-groups. The insertion of the Rahab episode in Josh 2 and 6 exemplified how it could be possible to survive within Israel.

Rahab as “the quintessential Other” is the paradigm designed to illustrate that confessing monotheistic belief and acting in solidarity with the people of Israel could enable foreigners to live in the midst of or alongside the people of Israel.⁵⁹ The late insertion of the Rahab episode clearly shows that the final composition of the book of Joshua assumes that foreign peoples were an enduring reality in Israel/Palestine and that there was a discourse about how they might live together. Being a narrative of identity formation placed at the key moment of the beginnings of “Israel” in the promised land, the story about divine and human violence in Josh 6 was the perfect place to insert an episode relating to the issue of the limitations of violence and possible inclusion of foreign people in Israel.

In summary, the discourse on identity formation, land possession, faith, obedience, solidarity, and social borders, which the first version of Josh 6 fixed to the ruins of Jericho, was also consistently continued in the later expansions of the story, when collective (the Israelites) and individual (Rahab, Joshua) obedience toward Yhwh and solidarity with the people was said to be rewarded, whereas collective opposition against Yhwh and his people (the city of Jericho) or disobedient solo actions, breaches of oaths, and lack of solidarity led to divine punishment (see Josh 6:26 in connection with 1 Kgs 16:34; see also the Achan episode in Josh 7). Readers up to the present learn that one must not break divine orders and curses despite the brutality involved because disobedience is fatal. The text of Josh 6 explores various aspects of the act-consequence nexus, which was considered to be valid for Israelites and foreign peoples alike and totally controlled by Yhwh as the lord of all nations.

With respect to collective violence, which appears in various facets in Josh 6, the following differentiations can be identified. The “us-them” categorical distinctions were foundational already in the basic version of Josh 6*. The constructed image of the enemy separated the in-group of the tent-dwelling people of Israel and its god, Yhwh, from the out-group of the city dwellers without any god. The persons or groups declared to be enemies are denounced, whereby the foreign group definition in Josh 6 is oriented toward constructs of otherness of religion, social organization, urbanism, and ethnicity. Only the late postexilic insertion of the Rahab episode differentiated the image of the “other” in such a way that the option was opened for individuals of the out-group to acquire the right to conviviality under certain conditions in the long run.⁶⁰ In this way, Josh 6 corresponds to what was formulated above for intergroup processes in the context of the collective use of violence. Of central importance is the overvaluation of Israel’s own in-group and the devaluation of the foreign group, which stabilizes Israel’s (very male-dominated) self-worth and social identity, legitimates violence against others as a way of implementing claims grounded in Yhwh, and normalizes violence as a possible option of social action against out-groups with promises of reward rather than threats of punishment. According to Josh 6, then, four different possibilities arise for the use of collective violence against out-groups.

1. The earliest reconstructible version of Josh 6* refers to the conquest of the promised land by a divinely ordered war against Jericho (as pars pro toto). The collective violence of the people, Yhwh, and Joshua results in a wall collapse caused by Yhwh’s power and the collective war cry of the people. Yet this is a nonmartial conquest because the people only shout, while it is Yhwh who causes the walls to collapse. Even if Yhwh and his people form a team in perpetrating collective violence, human beings are not allowed to touch the walls of Jericho themselves or any living being. No weapons are involved, no killing is reported.

2. The Deuteronomistic expansion, which incorporated the concept of the ban, makes collective violence explicit and transfers the modus operandi to the Israelite warriors. Now Israelite men act according to (Joshua’s order, who represents) Yhwh’s will, who legitimates genocide with the sword, extinction of living beings, and total destruction. The previous collapse of Jericho’s wall caused by Yhwh is interpreted as the preparation of the later massacre executed by Israel’s men. Yet the Achan episode in Josh 7 (with references to Lev 27) develops the idea that it is not the use of violence per se with the ban that functions as the group norm, but obedience to Yhwh. In the Deuteronomistic expansion, human collective violence becomes physical, weapons are needed, and killing is reported.

3. A priestly expansion inserts the priests as leaders of the conquest, making them the agents of collective violence together with Yhwh. However, they do not engage in physical violence against Jericho, nor do they use any weapons. Instead, their “weapons” are musical instruments; they make music together with Yhwh (represented in the ark) and never even touch the enemy. The insertion of the priests and their procession turns a martial narrative of conquest into a story about the effects of a procession (connected to the number seven) and sanctity. The musical instruments and the ark are used as weapons against the walls; no killing is reported.

4. The Rahab episode. Even if Josh 6 legitimates collective violence on the part of the Israelites in cooperation with Yhwh’s divine violence, the Rahab episode relativizes it as a general means of confronting “the other.” Instead, it promotes the view that it makes sense to have a closer look into individual behavior and that there are times to make well-founded exceptions. Through the categories of individual faith, obedience, and solidarity with Israel and its god, the survival of “the others” is possible. The Rahab episode breaks through the male-dominated collective violence of the story and teaches the Israelites a lesson regarding the acceptance of outsiders. Rahab belongs alongside Ruth as an example of how foreign women can counter xenophobia as known from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah in the postexilic discourse of Persian period Yehud.

With Nili Wazana, the question should be asked: Why was Rahab’s house “placed in the wall, which in chapter 6 dramatically collapsed, with no harmonizing explanation in the additions to chapter 6 connecting the two stories (6:17b.22–23.25)?”⁶¹ Again, the visible ruins of Jericho’s walls (and no other spatial element) are employed in the story. It is surely correct that the dwelling of Rahab plays an important part in her ability to rescue the spies (Josh 2). But, at the same time, her localization in the liminal sphere of the wall, between center and periphery, expresses her marginality as an outsider within her own Canaanite in-group. As a prostitute, she was on the lower fringe of society, but she was also in control of her own actions since, according to the prevailing social norms, a respectable married woman or unmarried daughter would not have been able to act on her own, and her husband or father would have been the one interacting with the spies. As a woman without status and honor, living in a liminal sphere between “in” and “out,” she is able to switch from being a member of the previous out-group to the Israelite in-group. Her behavior not only secures her survival but also earns her a permanent place in Israel’s collective memory. Without being made explicit, the possibility arises that, because Rahab survived the disaster of the fall of the wall, she was already spared by Yhwh’s act of destruction and later by the oath of rescue. Rahab is thus saved first by Yhwh and then by the Israelites. Her behavior puts a stop to Yhwh’s violence and to that of the people.

3.4 Violence, What Is It Good For?

In the course of the literary growth of Josh 6, the purely divine unarmed violence against Jericho’s walls in the original version became a (Deuteronomistic) military massacre against the city and its living beings, then a priestly unarmed procession that celebrated a ritual of destruction against the city wall without any physical contact. In a sense, Jericho was destroyed three times.

The ruin of Jericho was at the center of these discourses on divine and collective violence, which were subject to constant change. The material remains of Jericho were also in a process of transformation but remained visible as a ruin and thus could be repeatedly assigned new meanings during the first millennium BCE. The ruin could serve as a witness, illustration, material memorial, and memorialization of divine and collective violence, land claims, identity formation, social borders, Rahab’s story, and the effects of total obedience. The biblical narrative mirrors the ongoing interpretation of Jericho’s visible ruins and contextualizes them in the conquest of the Promised Land, which is constructed as an act of war. The story was less about the use of violence per se and more about the total control of space and time by Yhwh and the exemplary message that Israel’s identity formation and its social borders are defined by solidarity, obedience, and faith in Yhwh.

The violence used by God against the walls of Jericho—and, with the Deuteronomistic expansion, by the Israelites against all living beings in the city—is a prime example of ritualized and theologically exaggerated collective violence that unites human and divine perpetrators. Especially through the Deuteronomistic expansion, extreme human violence is legitimated by stylizing it as fulfillment of the divine will. This expansion paints a picture in which the divine violence against the walls was the preparation for the human violence against Jericho’s inhabitants, thus increasing its efficiency. Violence is clearly gendered: in all textual stages of Josh 6, human collective violence is the domain of men. Men are the partners of Yhwh in the holy war, the perpetrators of the Deuteronomistic ban, and the priests of the procession in the priestly expansion. Men are also the ones who grant life to the only woman in the story, Rahab, in yet another later extension of the text. Within the framework of the story’s male-defined fantasies of violence, it is a woman who reactivates ethical-moral patterns of behavior and evokes empathy with the victims in the story’s readers. Her role is to serve as an emblem of mercy in a male-dominated martial world. This is a gender-typical ascription.

Joshua 6 is a narrative that conceptualizes collective violence as an option of divine and social action that can be used for many purposes; the text also advances the construction of a social and political ideal of a martial-military masculinity. This ideal applies to the Israelites as well as to Yhwh, whose identity construct includes violence. The martial story creates legitimizing structures for collective violence and thus contributes to the socialization of violence. In the end, the perpetrators of violence receive their reward in the form of conquest and land appropriation.

Joshua 6 reflects different motivations for collective violent behavior, including territorial claims, the staging of masculinity, total obedience to God, and the display of control and strength, all of which ultimately serve the construction of identity for both Israel and its god Yhwh. Israel and its god are said to have migrated into the land from outside and conquered it militarily. Because there is a growing conviction that “Israel’s” emergence within the land of Canaan was far less spectacular in history than it is in biblical narrative, one must ask why the narratives had to involve violent appropriation of the land by military campaign.⁶² What is the display of war and violence good for?

One possible answer is that the potential for violence in this fantasy acted as a cognitive script intended to secure power and total control over “the others.” Joshua 6 would thus be an expression of the desire to pursue violent appropriation of the world as a possibility of social action, even if the text is less concerned with the exercise of violence per se than with the desire for total control over “the others” and with the program of teaching total obedience to Yhwh. An equally good answer would be that this fantasy of violence and memory construct—through the enactment of intense experiences of risk, danger, community, superiority, and success—was intended to create bonds that would stabilize the in-group of the people of Israel internally and delimit it externally. Both effects can be observed in Josh 6, a text that was repeatedly updated and reactivated through literary expansions and passed on to future generations. Josh 6 and other stories like it led to the diffusion and implementation of violence-promoting ideas and traditions and contributed to the legitimization and socialization of violence, but also to the limitation of violence: according to the final version of Josh 6, there are good reasons to leave the exercise of violence against others to Yhwh and to spare people of the out-group.

The question of who or what could have been the trigger of the drastic fantasies of violence in the book of Joshua cannot be answered precisely. Because the triggers and the addressees of violent fantasies as a reaction to experiences of powerlessness need by no means be the same, one can always think of the Assyrians, who could evoke the feeling of inferiority in Israelite and Judean writers of the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. But the same may have been true of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Phoenicians, or Greeks, against whom the kingdoms of Israel and Judah could not do a thing. The violent fantasies of Josh 6 could thus act repeatedly as a release valve when needed, warding off feelings of inferiority and powerlessness.⁶³ They were an excellent means of constituting and constructing the identity of the “whole people of Israel” by creating a dramatic scenario in which external overwhelming enemies were defeated through a sense of community, solidarity, and obedience to Yhwh. By creating a narrative of a purely fictional experience of togetherness, the group was welded together and to its god. By portraying the ruin of Jericho as part of the drama’s stage set, appropriating it and interpreting it accordingly, biblical authors gave the site major significance for the formation of “Israel’s” identity, which could be reactivated and updated at any time.