Why was the road from Jerusalem to Jericho dangerous?

“Going down” is exact

A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

Jerusalem sits about 750 meters above sea level on the spine of the Judean hills. Jericho lies about 250 meters below sea level in the Jordan valley. So the Bible always goes up to Jerusalem and down from it. Luke’s priest is “going down that way” (10:31), away from the Temple, and when Jesus leaves Jericho he goes on ahead, “going up to Jerusalem” (19:28). Josephus put the distance at 150 stadia, about 27 kilometers, through country he called desert and stony (Jewish War 4.474).

Desert within the hour

Leaving the city, the road crossed the Mount of Olives and passed Bethany, the village of Lazarus. A few kilometers on, the green ends. East of the watershed the hills sit in a rain shadow: bare chalk slopes, deep ravines, almost no springs and no villages until the oasis of Jericho. A walker carrying goods or money spent most of a day in that emptiness, with no one to hear a shout.

The road wound along ridges above canyons like the Wadi Qelt, whose springs Herod tapped with aqueducts for his winter palaces at Jericho. Caves and side gullies made perfect cover. A gang could watch a traveler for an hour from above, strike at a bend and be gone.

Joshua names a pass on this route, “the ascent of Adummim,” on the border between Judah and Benjamin (Joshua 15:7; 18:17). Adummim means “red ones,” probably for the reddish rock. Jerome, who lived in nearby Bethlehem around 400, explained the name more darkly: the place of blood, he wrote, for the blood robbers so often shed there (Letter 108).

Who the robbers were

Luke’s word is lēstai, bandits. John uses it for Barabbas (John 18:40), Mark for the two men crucified with Jesus (Mark 15:27). In Josephus it covers highwaymen and armed rebels alike. The desert had sheltered outlaws since David gathered a band of men in distress and in debt (1 Samuel 22:2). And there was money on the move: Jericho was a rich oasis of date palms and balsam on the trade road from the east.

A road with a past

Jesus’s listeners knew this descent from their Scriptures. David fled down it from Absalom while Shimei threw stones at him (2 Samuel 16:5–14), and one old story may even lie behind the parable.

carried all the feeble of them on donkeys, and brought them to Jericho, the city of palm trees, to their brothers. Then they returned to Samaria.

In that episode, men of the northern kingdom, whose capital was Samaria, clothe and feed captives taken from Judah, anoint them and lead them to Jericho. Some scholars think Jesus had it in mind when he made a Samaritan the one who stops. Why that choice stung is told in why Jews and Samaritans hated each other.

The road today

Pilgrims are shown a roadside khan as the inn of the parable, now a museum of mosaics. Martin Luther King Jr. drove the old road with his wife, and on April 3, 1968, the night before he was killed, he told a crowd in Memphis he could see why Jesus chose it: a winding road made for ambush. The priest and the Levite, he said, asked what would happen to them if they stopped. The Samaritan asked what would happen to the man if he didn’t.