The Invention of Difference

Jericho

Gog and Magog were in Egypt. Or perhaps Ethiopia. They might, in fact, have been in Libya, or somewhere on the far side of the Black Sea. They may have been two people or two places; they may have been one place and its king — Gog of Magog — or they might have been a single person — Gogmagog, a medieval giant so powerful he was said to have lifted up an oak tree and waved it around like a wand. In the Book of Revelation, it was foretold that at the time of Armageddon, the armies of Gog and Magog would encircle the city of Christ. Arrayed around the fortress of the saints, their numbers would be "as the sand of the sea."

This malevolent double entity is first named in the Book of Ezekiel, when God addresses the titular prophet and commands him to "set [his] face" against the foes of Israel. As with much of the Nevi'im — the second segment of the Hebrew Tanakh — Ezekiel was composed during and after the forced exile of the Jewish people in Babylon, when their traditions and language were in peril as never before. Gog and Magog were boogiemen (or, as the case may be, boogieman), a rhetorical effigy for God's chosen to burn as they sat in bondage waiting for the return to Zion.

But before they could lament their lost homeland, the Jews had to have a homeland to lament. In the traditional biblical chronology, Canaan, the country of their fathers, had been seized by the Twelve Tribes beginning around 1500 BCE following the death of Moses, seven hundred years prior to the Babylonian captivity. The record of its conquest is given in the Book of Joshua, written at the same time as Ezekiel and featuring some of the most harrowing passages in ancient literature. On that occasion, it was the Jews themselves who were the menacing outsider, sweeping across the Jordan River and into the basin north of the Dead Sea. For the Canaanites, the approaching Hebrew host was as horrible a specter as any Gog or Magog. So they dug in — at Jericho, their walled capital, where the Israelites first met them in battle.

Such, at any rate, is the story. Beginning in the 1950s, with the pioneering work of archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, scholarship has fairly well debunked the biblical account, showing that no invasion occurred in the Jordan Valley at the time the Hebrews supposedly arrived there. But Jericho was no fiction, nor was its wall, as attested by Kenyon's discovery of ruins radiocarbon dated to as early as 8300 BCE, long predating the Israelites' arrival. The wall of Jericho was by most estimates the oldest of its kind in the world, the first urban fortification anywhere.

And this walled settlement, or its second-millennium BCE counterpart, is what the Israelites would claim to have attacked. "Now Jericho was straitly shut up," reads Joshua, "because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in." The Canaanites thought themselves secure behind their sloped barricade: The wall that most closely corresponds to the biblical period was covered in smooth plaster, making a seamless and apparently impregnable envelope around the city. But the Hebrews had an inside man. More precisely, they had an inside woman, a prostitute named Rahab.

Fearing the wrathful Adonai whom the Jews claimed as the one true god, Rahab hid a team of Hebrew scouts on their arrival in Jericho. As she lived atop the wall itself, she was able to let them down again by rope on their departure. In accordance with divine command, the Israelites then paraded around the walls of the town bearing before them the Ark of the Covenant — the gilded chest, decked with winged cherubim, that betokened their fealty to the Creator. On the seventh day, the walls of Jericho miraculously fell, and as the children of Israel overran the city they slaughtered every single man, woman, and child in it, sparing only Rahab and her kin.

The principle of herem, the holy ban placed on unbelievers in the Torah, is a subject little dwelt upon by modern Jews. The Canaanites, along with other vanished Semitic peoples (Jebusites, Hittites, Hivites) were prescribed for annihilation in the post-Mosaic settlement of the Promised Land, a program bearing a most discomfiting resemblance to what would now be known as ethnic cleansing. That the Hebrews could have carried out this agenda, considering their own predicament in Babylon (and later), is ironic enough. Even more so is that a history so laden with violence has been received, by the spiritual heirs of the Israelites, as a story of redemption.

Born of a people confined within walls, the Jericho story has long been used as an allegory for the triumph of justice over inequity, its unseemlier aspects — to say nothing of its archaeological improbability — all but ignored. In the early 1800s, slaves at work in the fields of the American South began to sing of Joshua, how he "fought the Battle of Jericho" and how "the walls came tumbling down." The spiritual would become, in the century that followed, an anthem of the Civil Rights movement and its latter-day admirers. On January 20, 2008, parishioners at Ebenezer Baptist Church of Atlanta, Georgia, formerly the home church of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., heard a speech from a special guest about the wall of Jericho and its meaning. One year later to the day, Senator Barack Obama was sworn in as president of the United States.

Be it in songs and sermons, or in bricks and mortar, walls are sui generis among the artifacts of human culture. If not quite a precondition of culture as such, they must count among its first fruits, as elemental (or nearly so) as the sharpened stone and the roaring fire.

Prehistories of the built environment are notoriously shaky. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the intellectual scene in Europe was riven by debates — led by now-obscure figures like the Frenchman Quatremère de Quincy and Germany's Gottfried Semper — about the origins of manmade structures: Were the first dwellings something like a Greek temple made out of wood sticks or more akin to a Bedouin tent? But those arguments tended to end in a mist of conjecture. To search for the beginnings of the wall-as-defense is to disappear into the same fog: The minute a house's wooden frame (or the fabric of a tent) is rendered sufficiently sturdy, that membrane might be considered a shield. Restrict the definition to freestanding walls, and one is still confronted by a structure so rudimentary that it is hard to imagine not imagining it. For all archaeologists have learned since the days of Semper and de Quincy, the best we can say is that walls have been with us as long as there has been an "us."

The proof is at Jericho — the real Jericho, not the storied place of the Bible but the historical site, known today as Tell es-Sultan (Hill of the Sultan), located in the modern-day West Bank in...