Joshua 6

2–5

But the Jews are sure to say that ever since this precept was given through Moses, the observance has been binding. But it is clear according to the text that the precept was not eternal or spiritual but temporary, which would one day cease. In short, so true is it that it is not in the exemption from work of the sabbath—that is, of the seventh day—that the celebration of this solemnity is to consist, that Joshua the son of Nun, at the time that he was reducing the city Jericho by war, stated that he had received from God a precept to order the people that priests should carry the ark of the testament of God seven days, making the circuit of the city; and thus, when the seventh day’s circuit had been performed, the walls of the city would spontaneously fall. This was done. When the space of the seventh day was finished, just as was predicted, down fell the walls of the city. [By this] it is manifestly shown that in the number of the seven days there intervened a Sabbath day. For seven days, whenever they may have commenced, must necessarily include within them a Sabbath day; on which day not only must the priests have worked, but the city must have been made a prey by the edge of the sword by all the people of Israel.

An Answer to the Jews 4

2–5

Though we appear unarmed in body, we nonetheless are bearing arms with which even in time of sunny peace we grapple in spirit against the unsubstantial foe. Now we need God to help us, and him only we must fear; without him our armor falls from us, but with him our armor gains strength. He will be your tower within the walls; he will be your wall where there are no walls.Let us hereafter recall the deeds of our ancestors recorded in the consecrated books. Observe who had the better protection—those enclosed in a city girded by great walls but without God, or those defended by God’s strength and friendly support but without city walls. I refer to the city destroyed by the eager Joshua, whose own name was changed to delineate his power. He did not subdue it in the usual military way, by conducting the regular long and weary blockade. No, through God’s help his army in sacred symbolism performed a lustration, brandishing its weapons without using them. It withdrew its violence; its arms were silent. For seven days they made seven repeated circuits round the walls. By the strength of this powerful number and by the fearful din of the priests’ trumpets, which aped the flashing thunder of divine wrath, they laid hold of the enemy trapped within. Then that people which trusted in its wealth and city perished, and their graves were mingled with their houses.

Poem 26.99-114

The walls of Jericho fell down on account of the priestly trumpets because they contained within themselves a sinful people. A battering ram did not strike it, nor did a machine of war storm it, but—what is remarkable—the terror of the priestly sound brought it down. The walls that had stood impervious to iron collapsed at the sacred voice of the trumpets. Who would not be amazed that when the sound had been made, stones were broken to pieces, foundations were shattered by the noise, and everything collapsed in such a way that, although the conquerors did not injure their own forces, nonetheless among the enemy nothing remained standing? But although no one touched those walls, still they were taken from without at the sound of the righteous while sinners dwelled within. For this reason, then, they gave way, lest they offer resistance to the ones or somehow protect the others. To the righteous they opened a path and to the faithless they denied protection. Therefore, brothers, if the sound of the priestly voice was so powerful at that time, such that its blast in the air announced a certain confusion, how much more do we believe that that priestly voice is living now, which shows forth something magnificent when it speaks Christ in words!… Or how could feeling creatures resist when even unfeeling ones were unable to endure the sacred dread? For we believe that hearts can more easily be softened than rocks at the words of the priests and that sins can be forgiven in a shorter time than those stones were split asunder. For the voice of the Spirit, when it comes, destroys the stain of sin more easily than it breaks apart a tangible fortification of rock.

Sermon 93.2

Last Sunday we said that the walls of Jericho were laid waste by the priestly trumpets and that, contrary to order and nature, an unfeeling thing gave way before the sacred sounds with a kind of dread of the threat, and everything so collapsed at the loud noise that the most solid fortifications fell to the ground and the sinful people remained without protection. The one occurred lest resistance be offered for any amount of time, the other so that they would be the more easily captured.But we have said that all these things were done then in symbol, for we believe that the priestly trumpets of that age were nothing other than the preaching of the priests of this age, by which we do not cease to announce, with a dreadful sound, something harsh to sinners, to speak of what is dismal, and to strike the ears of evildoers with, as it were, a threatening roar, since no one can resist the sacred sounds and no one can gainsay them. For how could feeling creatures not tremble at the word of God when at that time even unfeeling ones were shaken? And how could human hardheartedness resist what a stone fortification could not withstand? For just as, when the stone walls were destroyed, the clash of the trumpets reached the people within, so also now, when evil thoughts have been destroyed, the preaching of the priests penetrates to the bare parts of the soul, for the soul is found bare before the Word of God when its every evil deed is destroyed. And that the soul is bare before God the holy apostle says, “But all things are bare and uncovered to his eyes.” In this regard, before the soul knows God and accepts the truth of the faith, it veils itself, so to speak, under superstitious works and surrounds itself with something like a wall of perversity, such that it might seem to be able to remain impregnable within the fortifications of its own evildoing. But when the sacred sound thunders, its rashness is overthrown, its thinking is destroyed, and all the defenses of its superstitions break asunder in such a way that, remaining unprotected, as it is written, the Word of God might penetrate even to the division of its spirit and its inmost parts. Just as the ring of the sacred sound destroyed, captured and took vengeance on a hardhearted people then, so also now the priestly preaching subjugates, captures and takes vengeance on a sinful people.

Sermon 94.1

15–16

But what was done then to the city of Jericho, as we have said, was done in symbol, since now this very thing happens in reality. For we read that at that time the priests circled the aforementioned city continuously for seven days and that, although a band of armed men was unable to take it, it was overthrown by the sound of trumpets coming from all sides—of trumpets, I say, not played by a rough soldier but sounded by a consecrated priest. Who would not fear a person’s trumpet if he did not fear his sword? After seven days, therefore, the walls that were circled fell at the priestly trumpets; we read that in seven days the works of this world were completed. You see, then, that with this number seven it is not so much one city that is destroyed by the priests as the wickedness of the whole world that is destroyed. For just as in the naming of a single city the condition of the whole world is symbolized, so also the course of seven days indicates the space of seven thousand years during which the trumpets of priestly preaching announce destruction to the world and threaten judgment, as it is written: “For the world will also perish and all the things that are in the world, but the one who does the will of the Lord endures forever.”

Sermon 94.2

Pay attention to me; how strange was the preaching of God’s love toward humanity! He who says in the law, “You shall not commit adultery” and “You shall not commit prostitution,” changes the commandment by clemency and proclaims through the blessed Joshua, “Let Rahab the prostitute live.” Joshua the son of Nun, who says, “Let the prostitute live,” prefigured the Lord Jesus, who says, “The prostitutes and tax collectors go into the kingdom of the heavens before you.” If she must live, how can she be a prostitute? If she is a prostitute, why should she live? “I speak about her previous condition,” he says, “so you may marvel at her subsequent change.” He asks, “What did Rahab, to whom he granted salvation, do?” She accepted the spies peacefully? Even an innkeeper does this. However, she reaped the fruits of salvation not only by speech but beforehand by faith and by her disposition before God.And so you may learn the abundance of her faith, listen to the very Scripture that describes in full and bears witness to her achievements. She was in a brothel, like a pearl mixed up in mire, like gold thrown in mud, the rose of piety hidden in thorns, a pious soul enclosed in a place of impiety. Pay attention so you may understand well. She accepted the spies and the One whom Israel denied in the desert; Rahab preached this One in the brothel.

Homilies on Repentance and Almsgiving 7.5.15-16

This is what is indicated by these words: Take heed that you have nothing worldly in you, that you bring down with you to the church neither worldly customs nor faults nor equivocations of the age. But let all worldly ways be anathema to you. Do not mix mundane things with divine; do not introduce worldly matters into the mysteries of the church.This is what John also sounds with the trumpet of his epistle, saying, "Do not love the world or the things that are in the world." And likewise Paul: "Do not," he says, "be conformed to this world." For those who do these things accept what is anathema. But also those introduce anathema into the churches who, for example, celebrate the solemnities of the nations even though they are Christians. Those who eagerly seek the lives and deeds of humans from the courses of the stars, who inquire of the flight of birds and other things of this type that were observed in the former age, carry what is anathema from Jericho into the church and pollute the camp of the Lord and cause the people of God to be overcome. But there are also many other sins through which anathema from Jericho is introduced into the church, through which the people of God are overcome and overthrown by enemies. Does not the apostle also teach these same things when he says, "A little leaven spoils the whole lump"?

Homilies on Joshua 7.4

And when temples, idols, groves, and other things of the sort are authorized to be torn down, although it is evident when we do this that we are not honoring but despising them, still we should not take away anything for private, or at least personal, use so that our purpose in tearing down must be manifest as devotion, not cupidity. However, when such things are turned over for public, not private or personal use, as when they are used to honor the true God, that same holds true for things as for people, when they turn from sacrilege and impiety to the true religion. God is understood to have taught this by those texts which you quoted, as when he ordered wood from the grove of foreign gods to be brought for a holocaust and ordered that all the gold, silver and brass vessels be carried into the treasury of the Lord.

Letter 47

But when our Lord Jesus Christ comes, whose arrival that prior son of Nun designated, he sends priests, his apostles, bearing “trumpets hammered thin,” the magnificent and heavenly instruction of proclamation. Matthew first sounded the priestly trumpet in his Gospel; Mark also; Luke and John each played their own priestly trumpets. Even Peter cries out with trumpets in two of his epistles; also James and Jude. In addition, John also sounds the trumpet through his epistles, and Luke, as he describes the Acts of the Apostles. And now that last one comes, the one who said, “I think God displays us apostles last,” and in fourteen of his epistles, thundering with trumpets, he casts down the walls of Jericho and all the devices of idolatry and dogmas of philosophers, all the way to the foundations.

Homilies on Joshua 7.1

At the coming of Jesus [Joshua], the walls of Jericho were overthrown; at the coming of my Lord Jesus, the world is overcome. Yet I want to know more plainly how the world is overcome and to understand more clearly those things that are said. I myself, I who teach you, want to learn equally with you. Let us summon Paul as a teacher for all of us, for he is a fellow priest of Christ, so that he can disclose to us how Christ overcame the world. Therefore, hear him saying, “That which was opposed to us he took away from our midst and fixed to his own cross; and stripping principalities and authorities he exposed them openly, triumphing over them on the wood of the cross.” From these words, therefore, I understand that when the heavenly powers saw the fight of Jesus—the principalities and hostile authorities stripped of their authorities, “the strong one bound and his goods plundered”22—they thundered with their heavenly trumpets, because with the prince of this world bound, the world was overcome and the heavenly army gave the joyful shout at the triumph of Christ. Truly, therefore, blessed are the people of the nations, those who know this joyful shout of the heavenly army and who begin to recognize the mysteries and believe.

Homilies on Joshua 7.3

How, therefore, is Jericho captured? The sword is not drawn against it; the battering ram is not arranged, nor is the spear hurled. The priestly trumpets alone are employed, and by these the walls of Jericho are overthrown.We frequently find Jericho to be placed in Scripture as a figure of this world.… Consequently, this Jericho (that is, the world) is about to fall; for indeed the consummation of the age has already been made known a little while ago by the sacred books. In what way, therefore, will the consummation be given to it? By what instruments? By the sound, it says, of trumpets. Of what trumpets? Let Paul make known the mystery of this secret to you. Hear what he himself says: “The trumpet will sound,” he says, “and the dead who are in Christ will rise incorruptible,” and, “The Lord himself with a command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, will descend from heaven.” At that time, therefore, Jesus our Lord conquers Jericho with trumpets and overthrows it, so that out of it, only the prostitute is saved and all her house.

Homilies on Joshua 6.4

The consummation of the world will not happen in stages, but suddenly. With this ought to be compared, I think, what was written in Joshua, when by a single sound of a trumpet the crumbling city of Jericho suddenly perished; and like this example Babylon also in the consummation of the age will fall and suddenly be obliterated.

Homilies on Jeremiah 28.11

And did Joshua, the son of Nun, err in recognizing the leader of the heavenly host? But after he believed, he forthwith conquered, being found worthy to triumph in the battle of faith. Again, he did not lead forth his armed ranks into the fight, nor did he overthrow the ramparts of the enemy’s walls, with battering rams or other engines of war, but with the sound of the seven trumpets of the priests. Thus the blare of the trumpet and the badge of the priest brought a cruel war to an end.

Exposition of the Christian Faith 5.10.126

Besides the signs just mentioned and the voices which could be heard in the neighborhood of the ark, other miraculous testimonies to the law were witnessed. For example, when the people were entering the promised land and the ark was crossing the Jordan, the river stood still above them and flowed on below them so that the ark and the people had a dry place for crossing. Again, when they came upon the first hostile city where the religion was pagan and polytheistic, the ark was carried around it seven times and then, suddenly, the walls collapsed before a hand was raised or a battering ram was used.

City of God 10.17

So the walls of that city, called Jericho, which in the Hebrew tongue is said to mean moon, fell when they had been encircled seven times by the ark of the covenant. What, then, does the announcement of the kingdom of heaven portend—signified by the encircling of the ark—except that all the battlements of mortal life, that is, all the hope of this world, which is opposed to the hope of the world to come, will be destroyed by the sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit, working through the free will? For, those walls fell of their own accord, not by any violent push of the ark in its circuit. There are other references in Scripture which suggest the church to us under the symbolism of the moon, as it makes its pilgrimage in this mortal life, amid toils and labors, far from that Jerusalem whose citizens are the holy angels.

Letter 55

Human salvation is useless, and my strength lends me no strength if I lack the strength of God. What good was the boundless vigor of giants? Or the kings of Egypt? Or mighty Jericho? Their own inflated glory was the cause of death for all of them, and God’s power broke them not by the strength of heroes but by that of the weak. The famed giant died like a dog, felled by a shepherd boy’s sling. The din of trumpets shook down the famous city. The renowned and haughty king lay dead on the sand of the shore, and the riches of the kingdom were equated with his naked corpse. So wherever Christ is with us, a web is a wall; for the person without Christ, a wall will become a web.

Poem 16.129

The divine reading attests that the walls of Jericho at once collapsed at the din of trumpets. So there is no doubt that the sounds of music, at the Lord’s command or with his permission, have unleashed great forces.

Exposition of the Psalms 80.4

22–25

Let us prepare ourselves for the sacrifice of the lamb.… Nor let us be under the impression that this yearling lamb can be eaten anywhere. The precept bids us to partake of it in one house only, lest we think that the lamb may be immolated outside the church. From this, it is evident that the Jews and heretics, and all assemblies of perverted doctrine, because they do not eat the lamb in the church, do not eat the flesh of the lamb but the flesh of the dragon, which, as the psalmist tells us, was given as food to the Ethiopians. Just as in the flood no one was saved who was not in the ark of Noah, and in the fall of Jericho, only the house of the harlot Rahab—which signifies the faithful church of the Gentiles—was spared, so is it true that in the sacrifice of the lamb, the lamb is slain only when it is sacrificed in the one house.

Homily on the Exodus 91

But the woman Rahab, how is she said to be joined to the house of Israel up to this very day? Is a succession of posterity on her mother's side ascribed so that she is considered to be preserved in a renewal of offspring? Or rather must it be understood that she has really been bound and united to Israel up to this very day? If you want to see more plainly how Rahab is bound to Israel, consider how "the branch of the wild olive tree is implanted in the root of a good olive tree." Then you will understand how those who have been implanted in the faith of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob are rightly called attached and "joined to Israel up to this very day." For we have been attached up to this very day in the root of those former ones, we, the branches of the wild olive taken up from the nations, who at one time were dealing with harlots and worshiping wood and stone instead of the true God.

Homilies on Joshua 7.5

Therefore, our Lord Jesus will come, and he will come with the sound of trumpets. But just now let us pray that he may come and destroy "the world that lay in wickedness" and all things that are in the world, because "everything that is in the world is the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes." May he destroy that, may he dissolve it again and again, and save only this one who received his spies and who placed his apostles, received with faith and obedience, in the high places. And may he join and unite this prostitute with the house of Israel.But now let us neither recall nor impute to her the old fault. Once she was a prostitute, but now "a pure virgin, to one man" she has been united, "to Christ." Hear the apostle speaking of her: "But I have determined this itself, to present you to Christ, a pure virgin to one husband." It was also surely of her that someone said, "For once we ourselves were also foolish, unbelieving, wandering, serving desires and various forms of pleasures." Do you still wish to learn more about how the prostitute is no longer a prostitute? Hear Paul saying in addition, "And this surely you have been; but you have been washed, you have been sanctified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God."

Homilies on Joshua 6.4

It is said of the time when Ahab reigned, “In his days Hiel of Bethel built Jericho; he laid its foundations in Abiram, his firstborn; and he set up its gates in Segub, his youngest son.” The apparent sense is that when the above-mentioned city’s builder began to lay its foundations, his firstborn, named Abiram, died; and that after the city had been built, when he tried to fortify its gates, he lost his youngest son, named Segub. Joshua predicted that this would happen when, after Jericho’s destruction he made it anathema by cursing it, saying, “Cursed be the man before the Lord that shall raise up and build the city of Jericho, and in his firstborn may he lay its foundation, and in the last of his children set up its gates.” Because Hiel is translated as “living for God” and Bethel as “house of God,” Hiel of Bethel restores Jericho’s walls (which Joshua had destroyed and cursed) whenever any who have taken up the religious life in the church resume doing the evil deeds for which the Lord Jesus forgave them on the day of [their] baptism and whenever they who have renounced the devil’s pomp return to it by wanton living or prefer false doctrines or Gentile fables to the church’s truth in which they were instructed.

Questions on the book of Kings 16