971. Samaritans did not have a great reputation among Jews. They were not good neighbors. The Jews and Samaritans had a long and unhappy history. The Samaritans had first come into the land when Assyrians conquered Israel. An offshoot sect, they followed the Books of Moses but did not treat the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures as sacred. As a result bad blood grew between the groups.
972. As archaeologists excavated the mound of the ancient city of Jericho (about a mile or so northwest of the modern city), they found not one ancient city but instead successive cities, each built atop the ruins of the previous ones. Jericho is the oldest known city in the world. Above the first signs of human habitation, five cities were built in antiquity-and the fourth of these appears to be the one that was conquered by Joshua.
973. Double walls nearly thirty feet high, with each wall about six feet thick, were discovered by archaeologists at the Jericho site. It is clear that this city had a violent end. Sections of the wall crumbled, and there is evidence of fire so intense that it burned bricks and cracked stones.
974. Shibboleth. Jephthah's men fought and defeated the tribesmen of Ephraim (another Israelite tribe who did not help Jephthah in his battle with the Ammonites). If an Ephraimite tried to cross the Jordan, Jephthah's men would ask him to say "Shibboleth," a word that means either "ear of corn" or "flood torrent." But due to regional dialects, these men couldn't pronounce the "sh" sound, and said "sibboleth" instead. Forty-two thousand men with this speech deficiency died at the Jordan. A contemporary story is told from World War II in which Dutch resistance fighters were able to cull out Nazi infiltrators who couldn't pronounce a particular Dutch name. "Shibboleth" has since come to mean a word or catchphrase that is distinctive to one group.
975. Hammurabi (meaning "westerner") was am Ammorite who conquered several Sumerian cities and developed a small empire, making him the first king to elevate Babylon from a small town to a major power. Some scholars believe that Hammurabi-generally dated as king of Babylon from 1792-1750 B.C.-might be the mysterious King Amraphel, king of Shinar, mentioned in Genesis 14.
