Unfortunately, due to my then wife damaging my phone in the Dead Sea and our subsequent divorce (unrelated events), I don’t have any photos of our trip to the Holy Land.  

Jericho is at least 10,000 years old, probably 12,000, maybe older.  Americans have trouble wrapping our heads around such long ago time periods.  Jericho dates back to the beginnings of agricultural settlements around the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia.  The last Ice Age was ending and a warming world enabled people to settle permanently.  Jericho as a community likely predates those first agricultural settlements, although such simple groups leave no traces.  The walls are 9,000 years old—the oldest known walled city in the world—, and that’s of course what made the city so famous.  But the Bible story of Jericho (Joshua 6:1-27) only dates back 3,500 years, and the song less than 200 years.  I find it powerful that it was enslaved Americans who created the song, Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho, before the Civil War, perhaps dreaming of the day when the walls that confined them might come tumbling down, that the ram’s horn, trumpets and children’s shouts would be enough to bring down the plantations of their oppressors.  So, that dream popularized the song that made the Old Testament story known to all Sunday school kids about the Bible story that drove archeologists to dig in Jericho that found the walls that brought my family here.  

Our visit was several years ago, but I will never forget how I struggled to comprehend the scale of history.  The locals are used to the idea that Jericho stood for ten millennia, like a few other cities in the world, but my American idea of archeology is a few centuries.  We have tea, as traveling guests, in a shady arched alcove and listen.  They quickly explain that a Tell is a hill and that Tell es-Sultan is the hill upon which Jericho stands.  And by digging carefully, one can see back thousands of years.  Joshua is not the Old Testament book to describe Jericho, as the later Second Kings book describes the miracle spring of Elisha, protege of Elijah.  And, they show you the spring, now protected by a tin roof.  

Americans are often skeptical of Bible stories, with many believing them all myths.  We believe ourselves too clever to be fooled by historic claims.  But standing here, amid walls carbon dated by archeologists back many millennia before the Bronze Age even started, I suddenly feel foolish.  Looking around at nearby agriculture, I realize that this is not some fake or theoretical place.  This small city is quite real, and extremely old.  Nobody brought artifacts to this location in order to attract tourists.  The ground is full of much older artifacts, and the ones we’re looking at aren’t even that old in comparison.  The people explaining the history in a brusque matter-of-fact manner are doing so, because they live here, their ancestors lived here and they know all the stories.  Here is the sycamore tree, descended from the one in the Bible.  They’re not making stuff up to impress you.  They’re just showing you what’s in their town, just as you would do if they visited your town.  

Visiting Jericho changed my perspective on history.  Before, I might have agreed with arrogantly dismissive historians casting doubt on old stories from afar.  Now, especially after visiting a place, I tend to start with the oldest and most original stories and assume that people told their descendants those stories because they were true.  I may not believe in the miraculous, but I believe a wall, a spring and a tree when I see it.  Perhaps the walls were torn down in wars or crumbled due to age, not due to trumpets.  The Bible stories were recorded centuries after the events and are often allegorical mashups.  But the walls of Jericho are real, some stones just exposed to open sky, visible to me just as they were to the ancient people who placed them there to defend against invaders.  

Today, Palestine is quite dry and dusty, as the occupying authorities have redirected much of their water.  Travel is difficult, and there is fear of violence—as there was in ancient times.  I imagine it is worse now, due to Gaza.  And our climate is warming again, dangerously this time.  If some future people try to imagine what our world was like, I would want them to believe what we say and not arrogantly dismiss our stories out of hand.  We all need to broaden our view of history, of humanity, and see the scope of changes, not to try to assert some conceited superiority over history, but out of humility, so that we might find ways to live for as many millennia as our predecessors did.