So the people shouted, and priests blew the trumpets; and when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, the people shouted with a great shout and the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight ahead, and they took the city.Back the engineering side of my brain.
The walls fell flat. That's, of course, miraculous, but the significance is probably missed by most people. When a wall is normally destroyed during a siege, it's basically crumbled to destruction. It's taken apart, piece by piece, until there's not enough left to hold together. That didn't happen here. Instead, the wall came down as a unit, in one piece. The only breaks were probably at joins between sections, vertically split, to allow for it to come apart in collapse. It might be better to say it was knocked over, rather than fell down.
Also, the men were able to walk in, each going straight ahead. Again, that's not normal. When a wall is breached, only a small part is clear. The men must all funnel through that breach, causing a bottleneck where the defenders can still rally a defense. As anyone out there who has seen The Two Towers should realize, a breach can still be fought for. However, in this case, there was no breach. There was just no wall left. The defenders had no bottleneck to try to hold, they just had no wall left, and it would have suddenly looked much like our modern cities. With each man able to walk straight ahead, you're fighting an open-field battle, which means the larger force is almost certain to win. Since it says the walls fell down flat, it's even possible the stones of the wall embedded themselves into the ground so that the Israelites didn't even have to climb up and over them to go in.
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