Joshua 6:3

3. Ye shall compass the city Here is a peculiar and unprecedented mode of reducing a walled town to carry a small chest containing, not the enginery of death, but a few religious relics, attended by a band of priests blowing on their trumpets, and followed by the whole army marching in procession. We may not assign with certainty the reason of this strange command, but we plainly see at least four objects attained: (1) The whole army is honoured as a subordinate agent in the conquest of the city. (2) God, the efficient cause, is magnified before all men. (3) His ark and his ministers, by their prominence at the head of the procession, are especially honoured in the eyes of Israelite and Canaanite. (4) A course of proceeding so unmilitary and apparently absurd was a severe test of the faith of the Israelites in Jehovah.

4. Seven trumpets of rams’ horns [Or, seven trumpets of alarms; that is, signal trumpets. The Hebrew word here rendered rams’ horns is יובל , yobel, and Furst still adheres to this explanation, which is also that of the Targum and the Rabbins. But according to Gesenius yobel is an onomatopoetic word, signifying a joyful sound, ( jubilum,) and hence some scholars hold that the trumpet of yobel was so called because it was used to proclaim through the land the return of the year of jubilee. Leviticus 25:9-13. But long before the sabbatical year was instituted the trumpet that sounded from Sinai was called the yobel, (Exodus 19:13,) and hence it is but natural to infer that the year of jubilee took its name from the trumpet, not the trumpet from the year. The best supported etymology of yobel is that which gives it the sense of a loud and startling sound, and hence we adopt the rendering signal trumpet. In Joshua 6:5 occurs the expression horn of yobel, so that the words trumpet ( shophar) and horn ( keren) are here used interchangeably. The common opinion is that the shophar was a long straight instrument, and the keren a crooked one.] Eustathius says that an instrument in the form of a bent trumpet was in use among the Egyptians for the purpose of calling the people together to the sacrifices. It is not quite certain whether the trumpet of jubilee was made of the horn of an ox or of metal; but the latter seems the more probable, since a much larger instrument could be made of metal. The priests on this occasion carried “sonorous metal, blowing martial sounds.” “The seven days” procession, the sevenfold repetition of it on the seventh day by seven priests, and the use of seven trumpets, are unmistakable proofs of the importance of the number seven.” Keil. This may be best explained by observing that the word for seven is radically the same as the word for oath. Seven, then, was a sacred number, the seal of the covenant. “By this march of seven days, and the sevenfold repetition on the seventh day, with the seven priests blowing the seven trumpets, the host of Israel were to show that they were the people of the covenant.” [

The seventh day These seven days of marching must have included one Sabbath, and perhaps, as the Rabbins have assumed, the last day of the seven, on which the city fell, was itself the Sabbath. But this solemn marching and carrying of the ark about the doomed city was no ordinary work, such as that contemplated in the prohibition in the fourth commandment. It was rather a service of obedience to a special Divine mandate, and the grand triumph given on the seventh day was, even in that age, a sublime indication that “the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”]

Seven times We have no means of knowing the circumference of Jericho, but allowing that it was five miles, a not unreasonable estimate, the seven marches around it would be thirty-five miles, a distance not exceedingly difficult for a host all aglow with intense enthusiasm, and disciplined to the route by having travelled it for six preceding days. Then, too, they began their travel early in the morning. Joshua 6:15.