Commentaria in Josue
24. TO THE VALLEY OF ACHOR,—which namely a little after was called “Achor,” that is, of trouble, because Achan the troubler of Israel was there cast out of life, as is clear from the last verse.
25. BECAUSE THOU HAST TROUBLED US, THE LORD TROUBLE (Hebrew yaakhrekha, that is, expel, cast out) THEE from life, that is, punish thee as guilty, stone and burn thee. Josue speaks as a judge pronouncing sentence on Achan guilty and confessed, not as imprecating destruction. Hence he seems to limit it to death of the present life, that he may avoid the eternal in gehenna.
AND ALL ISRAEL STONED HIM.—You will ask, how did the Hebrews stone the sacrilegious Achan, when God in verse 15 commanded him to be burnt with fire as an anathema? St. Augustine here, Question ix, understands by fire stoning, because by it, as by fire, all the guilt of sacrilege would be expiated. “Two reasons,” he says, “occur to me, for one of which Josue did not burn this Achan.
For either he truly repented, and so was not worthy of the fire of gehenna, and therefore Jesus did not wish to burn him with fire; or he did not truly repent, and so was to be tormented with eternal fire. Therefore Josue reserved that punishment of fire to the Lord, and himself inflicted another, namely stoning.”
But an easier and plainer answer is that Achan was both stoned and burnt. For while that pyre was being built by God’s command, kindled and mounted, the people, indignant at the crime and the criminal, and eager to appease the Godhead, that they might drive from themselves Achan as an offscouring and the common bane of Israel, could not restrain their hands from stones, but stoned him as sacrilegious and devoted to anathema: then they delivered the stoned man to the fire (though our Serarius thinks Achan was first burned alive, then his ashes buried under stones). Hence follows:
AND ALL THAT WERE HIS WERE CONSUMED WITH FIRE.—“All,” namely oxen, sheep, asses, tent, furniture, nay sons and daughters: for he named all these in verse 24. Hence it is clear that with Achan his sons and daughters also, and his wife too (though Abulensis denies it: for she with her husband is counted one flesh and one person; so it was done to the wives of Core, Dathan and Abiron, Numbers xvi, 27) were burnt. For Achan was an anathema of Israel, which was to perish whole with all his.
So Abulensis here, Question lxviii, though he thinks they were not burnt but buried under stones.
You will say: By what right, the father sinning, are the sons and daughters punished with him? For God, Ezechiel xviii, ordained: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.” I answer, it is probable that the elder sons and daughters of Achan consented to and co-operated in their father’s theft, by hiding the things taken by the theft out of covetousness and avarice. So Procopius. If any of his sons and daughters were little ones and infants, and so free and innocent of the theft, yet these also were justly ordered by God to be slain with the guilty father, because God is absolute Lord of life and death of all, even of the innocent, and on account of original guilt at least all, even infants, are bound to the guilt and debt of death, which God may exact whenever and however (that is, by whatever kind of death) he will; so then here too God condemned the sons of Achan, not privy to their father’s crime, to the same penalty as the father, that the father’s punishment might be the heavier as he saw his own infants also punished with him on account of his fault; and that by such a punishment and such an anathema the whole camp might be struck with the fear of God, lest anyone hereafter dare attempt the like. See Deuteronomy xiii, 15, where the whole city is commanded to be destroyed, and an anathema established, from which idolaters have gone out saying and teaching: “Let us serve strange gods.” So in Numbers.
In 2 Kings xxi, the grandsons of Saul were crucified alive for his crime.
Moreover Abulensis notes, Question xxxi, that God nowhere commands sons to be slain for the guilt of their parents after the parents’ death, but while they are still living, that the living parents may feel and grieve at the slaughter of their sons, and so be punished in their sons. “Only,” says Abulensis, “are the sins of the fathers punished in the sons while they live; but after the death of the fathers whatever befalls the sons is no longer for the sins of the fathers, but for their own, because the father could not be punished in the sons after death, since he does not know their penalty, not knowing whether they are noble or ignoble, as is said in Job xiv, 21, of the dead man: ‘Whether his children come to honour or dishonour, he shall not understand.’”
Morally, learn here how grave and foul sin is, and how it offends the eyes of God, since it had to be expiated by the death even of the innocent, and by death by fire: for it is probable that they were all not first strangled, but burnt alive.
Hear St. Augustine, Question viii, weighing here the deep judgments of God, and assigning three causes of this punishment. The first is: “For nothing else, so far as concerns the administration of the whole world, befalls mortals when they die who must some day die; and yet among those who fear such things discipline is established, that each care not for himself alone in the people, but that they bestow diligence on one another, and as of one body and one man, the members be solicitous for one another.” And after some interjections he assigns the second cause: “At the same time it is also shown how great a connexion there is in the society of the people, that they be reckoned not each in himself, but also as parts in the whole; through the sin of one, therefore, and the death of a few, the whole people was admonished, as in a whole body, to seek what has been lost.” Lastly he adds the third: “At the same time it was also signified how much evil would be done if that whole congregation had sinned, when not even one could be so judged that the rest could be secure from him.” Then Augustine adds that this is not lawful for Josue, or for another man as judge, but for God alone, “who is able even after death, what man cannot, to free or destroy”; yet that God destroys no one after death for the father’s guilt, but only for his own.
Morally, learn here how sharply God is wont to avenge sacrileges. So Heliodorus, trying to carry off the money of the temple, scourged by Angels, scarcely by the prayers of Onias the Pontiff escaped death, 2 Machabees iii, 26. Read the horrid death of the sacrilegious Antiochus Epiphanes, 2 Machabees chapter ix, verse 5 and following.
In Numbers chapter xxxi, verse 17, God commands all the Madianites, males, even little ones, to be slain, because they had impelled the Hebrews to the worship of Beelphegor. Leo, son of Constantine Copronymus, was a religious and pious Emperor from the beginning; but when he had worn the crown given to the Church by Mauritius, struck with the disease of carbuncle, he died at last of burning fever, as Zonaras, tom. iii, and Glycas, part iv of the Annals testify.
Peter, king of Aragon, invading the Church of Tarragona, was struck on the face by St. Thecla its protectress appearing to him, and gradually wasted away, and dying, penitent for his deed, ordered the Bishop of Tarragona to be restored to his former possessions. So has the Life of St. Thecla, and Hieronymus Surita, book x of the Annals, chapter xxxix.
The Prince of Capua, plunderer of the goods of the Church of the monastery of Monte Cassino, in the year of the Lord 1078, was struck with blindness, as Leo of Ostia narrates, book iii of the History of Monte Cassino, chapter xlv.
Julian, uncle of the Emperor Julian the Apostate, with his treasurers Felix and Elpidius, struck by unheard-of deadly diseases, perished most miserably for plundering the great temple of Antioch, as Nicephorus narrates, book x, chapter xx.
More horrible is what Baronius narrates from Blessed Peter Damian, tom. xi, at the year of Christ 1055, that a certain count of Germany, for occupying and scattering the goods of the Church, was damned to hell with his heirs, and there burns in crackling flames.
Moreover guilty of the same anathema and sacrilege are Religious who against the vow of poverty filch goods common to the monastery, and appropriate them to themselves: for it is not lawful for a Religious to have anything of his own, and such are to be exterminated as anathemas. So St. Peter punished Ananias and Sapphira with death, because against their vow they had kept back part of the price of the field sold, Acts v. St. Jerome, epistle 92 to Eustochium, narrates that a certain monk dying left a hundred solidi, which he had earned by weaving linen, which Macarius, Pambo and Isidore, and the other elders decreed should be buried with him, saying: “Thy money be with thee unto perdition.” Whence so great a terror, he says, seized all through the whole of Egypt, that to have left one solidus was a crime. St. Gregory, book iv Dialogues, narrates that, when he was Abbot, the monk Copiosus, who had hidden three gold pieces, dying was visited by none, but he had ordered all to avoid him, and the dead man to be buried in a dunghill, and all to cry out to him: “Thy money be with thee unto perdition.” The author of the sermons to the Brothers in the Desert, among those of St. Augustine, tom. x, sermon 5, ordered the monk Januarius, with the hundred and eleven sicles which he had hidden in his cell, to be buried, and all, weeping, to thunder at him: “Thy money be with thee unto perdition.” See more in our James Alvarez, tract On Poverty, book v, part 1, chapter v.
26. AND THEY GATHERED TOGETHER OVER HIM A GREAT HEAP OF STONES.—This stoning is other than that of verse 25; for that was done while Achan was alive, this when he was dead: namely that by it a heap of stones might be raised, as a perpetual monument of the former stoning and of the sacrilege avenged.