The Walls of Jericho Falling Down
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Joshua 6:20
The passage
So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.
Joshua 6:20
About this plate
Two great slopes of broken masonry come down from the left and the right and meet near the bottom, and among the blocks the defenders are falling, some already crushed. In the narrow gap left between the two collapses, small and perfectly orderly, the priests walk forward with the ark and the trumpets raised.
The scale is the argument. The ruin fills nine tenths of the plate and the procession is the size of your thumb. Doré makes the point that the walls did not fall because of anything the small orderly people were physically doing, and he makes it by drawing them small and orderly.
Look at the stones. They are cut blocks, squared and dressed, tumbling with their edges still sharp. It is a picture of good engineering coming apart, which is more unsettling than rubble would have been.
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