"How the walls of Jericho fell to the trumpets of JOSHUA has been discovered,

Sir CHARLES MARSTON  tells us, by the last excavations.  Earlier and rather

conjectural skepticism had instructed us that the narrative in the Old Testament was

rhetoric and metaphor. `The wall fell down flat', one orthodox modern commentary

interprets, `is merely literary hyperbole'. But Professor GARSTANG's excavations

show that the wall did actually fall down, and fell outwards in the manner most

convenient for a besieging force to enter the city. The cause of the collapse was indeed

not the march of the Hebrew host, or its trumpet peals, but an earthquake.

If this is confirmed, the picturesque Biblical narrative will be closer to the fact than

the corrections of critical scholarship. The general accuracy of the tribal traditions on

which the early books of the Old Testament are based is indeed to be expected, and the

process of interpreting it by subtracting all that does not seem sufficiently probable to a

twentieth-century mind is not likely to be invariably valid."