How Many Shofars Does It Take …
… to make the walls come tumbling down?
October 07, 2010
Jean Fouquet’s The Taking of Jericho.(Wikipedia)
Could the walls of Jericho have been destroyed by the force of seven shofars blowing (along with thousands of people shouting), as the Book of Joshua has it? This absurdly entertaining podcast takes that question as literally as possible, discussing Bronze Age walls; how many decibels toppling them would require (at least 177); what 10 talented shofar-blowers playing together sound like (this is the advantage of the podcast form!); how many shofar-blowers could create 177 decibels (407,380, at a minimum); at what decibel-level air essentially turns to plasma (160) … look, it can’t be done.
And then the expert explaining all of this, David Lubman, manages to come up with an insanely plausible explanation for how the story came about (which I refuse to spoil), thereby reminding us that engineers are the cleverest folks around. And the most realistic: “But of course,” Lubman adds, “if it was a miracle, all bets were off.”
The Walls of Jericho [Radiolab]
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.
