Joshua 6:6 - Meaning and Application

Here is the account of Israel’s march around Jericho, the instructions Joshua gave as the Lord had told him, and the people’s careful obedience. We are not told that Joshua repeated to the people the clear promise God had given him, that the city would be delivered into their hands. Instead, he tested whether they would obey with simple trust that it would all end well. The result was that both the people and Joshua showed careful obedience to God.

Wherever the ark went, the people went with it (Joshua 6:9). The armed men marched in front to clear the way, and they did not count it beneath them, though they were men of war, to serve as helpers to the ark of God. If any obstacle stood in the roads around the city, they would remove it. If the enemy tried to stop them, they would face that too, so the priests could carry the ark safely and without trouble. It is a great honor for the strongest and most important people to do any good service for the ark and to support true religion in their country.

The rear guard, whether another group of armed men, or Dan’s division, which had marched last through the wilderness, or perhaps the crowd of unarmed people who followed as many as could, came behind the ark. They did this to show respect, to add dignity to the solemn scene, and to witness what God was doing. Every faithful and eager Israelite would have been willing to share the same hardship and danger with the priests who carried the ark.

Seven priests went just in front of the ark, each with a trumpet in his hand, sounding them continually (Joshua 6:4-5, 9, 13). The priests were God’s ministers, and in his name they did two things. First, they announced war against the Canaanites, striking fear into them. God’s ministers must also warn sinners plainly of God’s anger against all sin, sounding the alarm so that those who live in sin may be afraid. They are God’s messengers, sent to declare war on all who keep going in their sins while saying, “We will have peace.”

Second, the priests proclaimed God’s gracious presence with Israel, filling the people with courage. When Israel went to war, the priests were to encourage them with the assurance that God was with them (Deuteronomy 20:2-4). Their trumpets were also a sign that the Lord would remember them in battle (Numbers 10:9), and this encouraged Abijah (2 Chronicles 13:12). In the same way, God’s ministers, by sounding the trumpet of the lasting gospel, which announces freedom and victory, are to strengthen the good soldiers of Jesus Christ in their spiritual battle.

The trumpets they used were not the silver trumpets made for ordinary service. They were trumpets of rams’ horns, hollowed out for the purpose, as some think. These trumpets were made of the poorest material, gave the plainest sound, and had the least outward beauty, so that the power would clearly be seen as God’s. In the same way, by the “foolishness” of preaching, which this well matches, the devil’s kingdom is brought down. Our weapons in spiritual warfare are not human weapons, and to human eyes they do not seem likely to accomplish much, yet they are powerful through God for tearing down strongholds (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). The word here points to trumpets of jubilee, the kind used in the year of release, which many understand as a sign that Israel was now being set fully free and that Canaan was coming into the hands of its true owners.

All the people were commanded to keep silent, not saying a word and not making any noise (Joshua 6:10). This was so they would listen carefully to the sacred trumpets, which they were now to treat as God’s voice among them. It is not right for us to speak when God is speaking. Their silence also showed their reverent expectation of what would happen. “Be silent, all flesh, before the Lord” (Zechariah 2:13). “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still” (Exodus 14:14).

They were to do this once a day for six days, and seven times on the seventh day, and they did so (Joshua 6:14-15). God could have made Jericho’s walls fall at the first march around the city, but instead they had to go around it thirteen times before the walls fell. This taught them to wait patiently for the Lord. Though they had only recently entered Canaan, and their time was precious because they still had much work ahead, they had to spend many days circling Jericho and seeming to do nothing. Just as promised rescue must be sought in God’s way, so it must also come in God’s time. The one who believes does not hurry ahead, or make more haste than God allows. “Go again seven times,” before anything hopeful appears (1 Kings 18:43).

One of those days must have been a Sabbath day, and the Jews say it was the last, though that is not certain. Still, if the one who commanded them to rest on other Sabbath days also commanded them to walk on this one, that was enough to justify it. God never meant to bind himself so tightly by his own laws that he could not, when he wished, make an exception. The man who had been healed used this same principle when he said, “The one who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your bed’” (John 5:11). In this case, it honored the Sabbath day, because our time is divided by weeks, and exactly seven days were spent in this work, with seven priests sounding seven trumpets. That number was made notable here, as in many other places, in remembrance of the six days of creation and the rest of the seventh day. Also, the Sabbath law forbids our own work, the kind that is merely secular and ordinary. What they did here was a religious act. It is no breaking of Sabbath rest to do the Sabbath work for which the rest was given, and what is the Sabbath work, if not attending the ark in all its movements?

They kept doing this for the full time appointed, and on the seventh day they went around the city seven times, even though they saw no immediate effect. They believed that, in the end, the vision would speak and not lie (Habakkuk 2:3). If we keep going in the way of duty, we will not lose anything in the long run. It is likely they walked at such a distance from the walls that they were out of range of the enemy’s arrows and beyond the reach of their mockery. At first, the strange sight may have amused the people inside Jericho, but by the seventh day they had grown careless, feeling no harm from what perhaps they thought was only a spell.

They likely mocked the attackers, as the men in (Nehemiah 4:2) did: “What are these weak Jews doing? Are these really the people we feared? Is this their way of fighting?” In effect, they were saying, “All is well,” so that the coming disaster would strike all the harder. As Bishop Hall says, wicked people think God is joking when he is getting ready to judge them, but they will see their mistake when it is too late.

At last, they were to shout, and they did, and then the walls fell (Joshua 6:16). It was a battle cry of victory, a triumphant shout, the kind of shout spoken of as “the shout of a king among them” (Numbers 23:21). It was also a shout of faith. They believed the walls of Jericho would fall, and by that faith the walls came down.

It was also a cry of prayer, answering the sound of the trumpets that announced God’s promise to remember them. Together, as one people, they cried to heaven for help, and help came. Some use this to show that we should not expect full victory over our own sinful desires until the very end of life, and then we will shout in triumph over them when we reach the full measure of what God has made us to be, as Bishop Hall says.

A good heart, he says, groans over its weaknesses. It wants to be free from them, and it struggles and prays. Yet, until the end of the seventh day, it cannot be fully so. Then justice will finally win the day. And at the end of time, when our Lord comes down from heaven with a shout and the sound of a trumpet, Satan’s kingdom will be completely destroyed, and not before then. Only then will every opposing rule, authority, and power be fully and forever put down.