fter the death of Moses and a period of forty years, God brought the Israelites back to the banks of the Jordan River. All of those who had stood there and refused to trust God were now dead. Those who had been under twenty years old now had their opportunity to trust Him. Joshua became their leader. God anointed him as leader and gave a sign to the people that he must be obeyed. God ordered the priests to carry the Ark before the people into the Jordan, which was in flood at this time of year. When they entered the river the waters stopped flowing as if the gates of a dam had been closed,1 so the people saw again the power of God as they entered the Promised Land, and recognised that Joshua was God’s chosen leader.
Joshua sent two spies into the city of Jericho to check it out and they entered the house of a prostitute called Rahab. This woman had heard about how God had brought the Jews out of Egypt and also how the Jews had destroyed the Amalekite army which attacked them on the way to Canaan forty years earlier. She told them that many of the people were terrified of the Jews and their God. When the King of Jericho discovered that the spies were at her house, Rahab hid them and made them promise to spare her and her family’s lives when they conquered the city. Rahab later married a Jewish man, and is listed in the human lineage of Jesus Christ.
The conquest of Jericho was rather strange. One might call it a kind of siege, however, a siege without bombardment from catapults or the like. The Lord commanded them to march in a particular order, with the priests carrying the Ark, the army following, and the priests blowing trumpets. This they did once a day for six days. On the seventh day they marched around seven times and then at the sound of the trumpet all of the marchers shouted as loudly as they could. The Bible says that the walls collapsed and the army rushed in and overcame the inhabitants and burned the city. Jericho had double walls and was well protected against siege attacks with an internal water source. The archaeological evidence points to an earthquake as the main reason for the city’s collapse, and this may well be true; however, if so then the earthquake happened precisely at the moment that God commanded the Israelites to shout.
Since the early twentieth century various archaeological digs have been undertaken at the site of ancient Jericho. In the 1950s, a British archaeologist named Kathleen Kenyon excavated the site which had been started in 1907 by a German team, and using modern methods she determined that the walls had been destroyed and burned about 1500BC2, however, there is strong evidence to support a slightly later dating which is consistent with the biblical account. A recent team, which according to sources had been trying to discredit Jewish biblical claims concerning Jericho, rediscovered that a part of the wall was still intact, and had never been destroyed by the conquest of Joshua. Incidentally, Rahab’s house was built against the outer wall, and her house was not destroyed. Coincidence? Throughout Canaan, many excavations have found evidence of burned cities at the same time as the destruction of ancient Jericho, consistent with a major invasion of a foreign power.
Critics of the Bible often point to the fact that Israel often totally destroyed every person within the cities they conquered. The fact that women and children died, not as a consequence of accidentally being shot, but purposefully, is abhorrent to most people and rightly so. It was very common in ancient times for an army to offer an enemy to its gods as a sacrifice for victory. In such cases no provision was made simply on the grounds that one was a child or a woman. Sometimes people were spared for their workforce potential as slaves; however, the destruction of every person was believed to be the only proper sacrifice to some gods.
This, however, was not the practice of the Jews. The Bible totally condemns the murder of men, women and children in sacrifice, and its condemna- tion is consistent with Jewish practice. So why do we have an apparent contradiction in the conquest of Canaan? A close study of those tribes where God demanded total destruction reveals one consistent thread. All of them were related to Nephilim. Every tribe has a Nephilim bloodline. This doesn’t mean that they were all giants, but that all had Nephilim blood flowing in their veins. Consider this! The world has witnessed and continues to witness the evil and suffering that human beings can inflict upon one another. It is out of our sinful natures that we desire power and control over others. Every war, rape, murder, and selfish deed comes from the ugly side of our human nature expressing its autonomous ego. And yet humans are capable of love, goodness, self-control and generosity, clemency and mercy, pity and caring; we are not totally depraved in any real sense.
But imagine a being that has no such capability. Demons are incapable of any good thing. By means of their very nature they are totally corrupted. They have no opportunity for salvation for two reasons. Firstly, they have seen the absolute glory of God and His paradise and rejected it, and secondly, they are incapable of a righteous deed or thought. Imagine the nature of such a creature joined to that of a human being, and add also the supernatural powers that such a creature would have to help it manifest the evil it craves to constantly produce. Such were the children of Nephilim. Those who were demon spawn were destroyed by God, because they were a living perversion of creation. They were created for a single purpose, namely, to turn people’s hearts to evil, to turn them away from the love of God.
But the Jews failed to obey God’s command and some of the Nephilim offspring survived. We read of other giants in Biblical history. One had six toes on each foot and six fingers on each hand, and of course another giant become famous because of the means of his death at the hands of a young boy called David, the Philistine champion Goliath. In that story, it is the blasphemies against God which the Nephilim descendent is yelling for forty days which enrages David so much. The Nephilim were a satanic creation designed to attempt the destruction of God’s plan for salvation. They failed, but this does not mean that some form of these creatures will not appear again at the end of this age. If, for example, demons manifested themselves as some form of alien creature, this would deceive millions of people into rejecting the Bible.
Many people in our time are fascinated with the idea of alien creatures, and this form of thinking has become popular with those who understand that Darwin’s theory of macro-evolution is no longer valid as an origin of life on our planet. God may allow Satan to bring a final deception on those who are so desperate to be deceived. At this time some claim that alien creatures interfering in our history can explain all of the mysteries of the world. For me, the Nephilim were simply that, a form of alien creature who should never have been here, creatures who were an abomination to God.