Battle of Jericho

I made the mistake of telling my kids that in a few days, we’d be building the city of Jericho as part of our homeschool history lessons and then destroying it (I’d never do this as a Sunday School lesson because too much chaos for our class of 30). As you can imagine, that immediately led to our having to do three or four history lessons at once.

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Supplies for the Battle of Jericho history lesson

We grabbed from our LEGO stash, so that’s why you see everything from Star Wars LEGO to Castle LEGO, and some odd rabbit LEGO that I had from my childhood, but have no clue where it came from.

But, so you can build your own:

• over-sized LEGO baseplate– I love these because one side is normal LEGO and the other side is DUPLO. I think these are designed to go inside of a train table, and when we had a train table we certainly put them in there. But it’s perfect for this.
• LEGO basic bricks– these are great ways to just get large numbers of blocks
• minifigures– I miss the minifigure heavy sets LEGO education used to have because I could get one of those suddenly have large numbers of mini-figs for history lessons

Side note, I really like BrickForge for getting specific types of accessories for LEGO history lessons. You’ll see their accessories in many of my posts.

That’s not sponsored, just a useful tip I thought I’d share. Now back to my Battle of Jericho LEGO history lesson.

Oh, and this all came up because of our Mystery of History 1 lesson.

Putting together the Battle of Jericho LEGO history lesson

So, after reading about it we made our very own city of Jericho to be assaulted by the Israelites.

There were some rather unusual people in the city of Jericho.  Namely a giant rabbit, and battle droids.  And part of the Jericho walls was the kitchen sink.

The Israelites dutifully marched around the city.  And I bet you didn’t know that among the Israelites were pirates, a one-handed British soldier, and some astronauts, but there were.  It’s a little-known fact.

Oh, and don’t forget the bearded lady in the top corner with the red shirt.

The people of Jericho were properly mocking of the Israelites’ attack methods.  They however did not throw any grape slushies.

And finally, the walls fell down, with much shouting and yelling.  The city fell down.

And of course, you can’t read about the battle of Jericho without then watching the Veggietales: Josh & The Big Wall (affiliate link).

Ahhhh…….  The awesomeness of Veggietales.

Let’s get some Battle of Jericho history

This is one of those Bible stories that people argue about. Did this literally happen, if it did where is the evidence? Can walls really fall down like that?

I’ve seen Biblical archeologists argue for it really happening and pointing towards some things that might support it.

I’ve also seen some people say that’s all crazy.

I’m going to start with some Biblical archeologists. This first one is specifically making videos for homeschoolers. He’s got an entire series you can watch, it’s interesting how much Amazon really emphasizes purchasing the streaming option rather than the DVD now. It is HARD to get it to take you to a DVD, I guess blu-ray is what I should be saying.

This is a significantly longer version of this. This is the video to watch with your junior high or high school student who wants more information and wants to be able to answer people who are going to argue with them.

I’m also going to be upfront and say I have not watched all of this video as I’m updating this post in 2024. I have more things I want to do today than I have time, so I hope to come back and watch this later on, but for today, I have a more or less solid bit of information to give you, and you can take it from there.

And for those of you who do not agree with me that the Bible is history, here’s an argument against it. And I’m going to be totally honest here, I have not watched all of the video because I didn’t have time to watch it as I updated this post in 2024. But I like to when possible see what the other side says so I can refine what I believe and decide if they present good evidence.

Like I said, this is one of those areas where people argue a lot.

I mean A LOT.

Continuing your learning fun

Since our LEGO history Battle of Jericho hits a couple of topic areas, I’m gonna give you a smorgasbord of things you might check out.

• Design an Irrigation system
• Xerxes 1
• Cain and Abel take-home bag
• 12 spies bookmark craft
• Paul’s 1st missionary journey, sent from Antioch (another LEGO history lesson)