Priestly Warfare and the Battle of Jericho

While the identification of priestly materials in the book of Joshua is a common part of scholarship at this point, the battle of Jericho in Josh 6 is one text that has not typically been identified as containing priestly elements. In the first part of this article, I argue that the representation of warfare in Josh 6 is constructed around three distinctly priestly elements: its ideology of ḥērem, use of trumpets, and description of the Israelite battle order. In the second part of this article, I explore the implications of this identification across three different compositional models: the Neo-documentary hypothesis, the DtrL hypothesis, and the model of a late priestly (or post-priestly) redaction of the Deuteronomistic History.