'But the children of Israel committed a trespass in the accursed thing:
for Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the
tribe of Judah, took of the accursed thing: and the anger of the Lord
was kindled against the children of Israel. 2. And Joshua sent men from
Jericho to Ai, which is beside Beth-aven, on the east side of Beth-ei,
and spake unto them, saying, Go up and view the country. And the men
went up and viewed Ai. 3. And they returned to Joshua, and said unto
him, Let not all the people go up; but let about two or three thousand
men go up and smite Ai; and make not all the people to labour thither;
for they are but few. 4. So there went up thither of the people about
three thousand men: and they fled before the men of Ai. 5. And the men
of Ai smote of them about thirty and six men: for they chased them from
before the Irate even unto Shebarim, and smote them in the going down;
wherefore the hearts of the people melted, and became as water. 6. And
Joshua rent his clothes, and fell to the earth upon his face before the
ark of the Lord until the eventide, he and the elders of Israel, and
put dust upon their heads. 7. And Joshua said, Alas, O Lord God,
wherefore hast Thou at all brought this people over Jordan, to deliver
us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us? would to God we had
been content, and dwelt on the other side Jordan! 8. O Lord, what shall
I say, when Israel turneth their backs before their enemies! 9. For the
Canaanites, and all the inhabitants of the land shall hear of it, and
shall environ us round, and cut off our name from the earth: and what
wilt Thou do unto Thy great name? 10. And the Lord said unto Joshua,
Get thee up; wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face? 11. Israel hath
sinned, and they have also trangressed My covenant which I commanded
them: for they have even taken of the accursed thing, and have also
stolen, and dissembled also, and they have put it even among their own
stuff. 12. Therefore the children of Israel could not stand before
their enemies, but turned their backs before their enemies, because
they were accursed; neither will I be with you any more, except ye
destroy the accursed from among you.'--JOSHUA vii. 1-12.
This passage naturally parts itself into--1. The hidden sin (v. 1); 2.
The repulse by which it is punished (vs. 2-5); 3. The prayer of
remonstrance (vs. 6-9); and 4. The answer revealing the cause (vs.
10-12). We may briefly note the salient points in these four divisions,
and then consider the general lessons of the whole.
I. Observe, then, that the sin is laid at the doors of the whole
nation, while yet it was the secret act of one man. That Is a strange
'for' in verse 1--the people did it; 'for' Achan did it. Observe, too,
with what bitter particularity his descent is counted back through
three generations, as if to diffuse the shame and guilt over a wide
area, and to blacken the ancestors of the culprit. Note also the
description of the sin. Its details are not given, but its inmost
nature is. The specification of the 'Babylonish garment,' the 'shekels
of silver,' and the 'wedge of gold,' is reserved for the sinner's own
confession; but the blackness of the deed is set forth in its principle
in verse 1. It was a 'breach of trust,' for so the phrase 'committed a
trespass' might be rendered. The expression is frequent in the
Pentateuch to describe Israel's treacherous departure from God, and has
this full meaning here. The sphere in which Achan's treason was
evidenced was 'in the devoted thing.' The spoil of Jericho was set
aside for Jehovah, and to appropriate any part of it was sacrilege. His
sin, then, was double, being at once covetousness and robbing God.
Achan, at the beginning of Israel's warfare for Canaan, and Ananias, at
the beginning of the Church's conquest of the world, are brothers alike
in guilt and in doom. Note the wide sweep of 'the anger of the Lord,'
involving in its range not only the one transgressor, but the whole
people.
II. All unconscious of the sin, and flushed with victory, Joshua let no
grass grow under his feet, but was prepared to push his advantage to
the utmost with soldierly promptitude. The commander's faith and
courage were contagious, and the spies came back from their perilous
reconnaissance of Ai with the advice that a small detachment was enough
for its reduction. They had not spied the mound in the middle of
Achan's tent, or their note would have been changed. Three thousand, or
three hundred, would have been enough, if God had been with them. The
whole army would not have been enough since He was not. The site of Ai
seems to have been satisfactorily identified on a small plateau among
the intricate network of wild wadys and bare hills that rise behind
Jericho. The valley to the north, the place where the ambush lay at the
successful assault, and a great mound, still bearing the name 'Et Tel'
(the heap), are all there. The attacking force does not seem to have
been commanded by Joshua. The ark stayed at Gilgal, The contempt for
the resistance likely to be met makes the panic which ensued the more
remarkable. What turned the hearts of the confident assailants to
water? There was no serious fighting, or the slaughter would have been
more than thirty-six. 'There went up ... about three thousand and
they'--did what? fought and conquered? Alas, no, but 'they fled before
the men of Ai,' rushing in wild terror down the steep pass which they
had so confidently breasted in the morning, till the pursuers caught
them up at some 'quarries,' where, perhaps, the ground was difficult,
and there slew the few who fell, while the remainder got away by
swiftness of foot, and brought back their terror and their shame to the
camp. As the disordered fugitives poured in, they infected the whole
with their panic. Such unwieldy undisciplined hosts are peculiarly
liable to such contagious terror, and we find many instances in
Scripture and elsewhere of the utter disorganisation which ensues. The
whole conquest hung in the balance. A little more and the army would be
a mob; and the mob would break into twos and threes, which would get
short shrift from the Amorites.
Ill. Mark, then, Joshua's action in the crisis. He does not try to
encourage the people, but turns from them to God. The spectacle of the
leader and the elders prone before the ark, with rent garments and
dust-bestrewn hair, in sign of mourning, would not be likely to hearten
the alarmed people; but the defeat had clearly shown that something had
disturbed the relation to God, and the first necessity was to know what
it was. Joshua's prayer is perplexed, and not free from a wistful,
backward look, nor from regard to his own reputation; but the soul of
it is an earnest desire to know the 'wherefore' of this disaster. It
traces the defeat to God, and means really, 'Show me wherefore Thou
contendest with me.' No doubt it runs perilously near to repeating the
old complaints at Kadesh and elsewhere, which are almost verbally
reproduced in its first words. But the same things said by different
people are not the same; and Joshua's question is the voice of a faith
struggling to find footing, and his backward look is not because he
doubts God's power to help, or hankers after Egypt, but because he sees
that, for some unknown reason, they have lost the divine protection.
His reference to himself betrays the crushing weight of responsibility
which he felt, and comes not from carefulness for his own good fame so
much as from his dread of being unable to vindicate himself, if the
people should turn on him as the author of their misfortunes. His fear
of the news of the check at Ai emboldening not only the neighbouring
Amorites (highlanders) of the western Palestine, but the remoter
Canaanites (lowlanders) of the coast, to make a combined attack, and
sweep Israel out of existence, was a perfectly reasonable forecast of
what would follow. The naive simplicity of the appeal to God, 'What
wilt Thou do for Thy great name?' becomes the soldier, whose words went
the shortest way to their aim, as his spear did. We cannot fancy this
prayer coming from Moses; but, for all that, it has the ring of faith
in it, and beneath its blunt, simple words throbs a true heart.
IV. The answer sounds strange at first. God almost rebukes him for
praying. He gives Joshua back his own 'wherefore' in the question that
sounds so harsh, 'Wherefore art thou thus fallen upon thy face?' but
the harshness is only apparent, and serves to point the lesson that
follows, that the cause of the disaster is with Israel, not with God,
and that therefore the remedy is not in prayer, but in active steps to
cast out 'the unclean thing.' The prayer had asked two things,--the
disclosure of the cause of God's having left them, and His return. The
answer lays bare the cause, and therein shows the conditions of His
return. Note the indignant accumulation of verbs in verse 11,
describing the sin in all its aspects. The first three of the six point
out its heinousness in reference to God, as sin, as a breach of
covenant, and as an appropriation of what was specially His. The second
three describe it in terms of ordinary morality, as theft, lying, and
concealment; so many black sides has one sin when God's eye scrutinises
it. Note, too, the attribution of the sin to the whole people, the
emphatic reduplication of the shameful picture of their defeat, the
singular transference to them of the properties of 'the devoted thing'
which Achan has taken, and the plain, stringent conditions of God's
return. Joshua's prayer is answered. He knows now why little Ai has
beaten them back. He asked, 'What shall I say?' He has got something of
grave import to say. So far this passage carries us, leaving the
pitiful last hour of the wretched troubler of Israel untouched. What
lessons are taught here?
First, God's soldiers must be pure. The conditions of God's help are
the same to-day as when that panic-stricken crowd ignominiously fled
down the rocky pass, foiled before an insignificant fortress, because
sin clave to them, and God was gone from them. The age of miracles may
have ceased, but the law of the divine intervention which governed the
miracles has not ceased. It is true to-day, and will always be true,
that the victories of the Church are won by its holiness far more than
by any gifts or powers of mind, culture, wealth, eloquence, or the
like. Its conquests are the conquests of an indwelling God, and He
cannot share His temples with idols. When God is with us, Jericho is
not too strong to be captured; when He is driven from us by our own
sin, Ai is not too weak to defeat us. A shattered wall keeps us out, if
we fight in our own strength. Fortifications that reach to heaven fall
flat before us when God is at our side. If Christian effort seems ever
fruitless, the first thing to do is to look for the 'Babylonish
garment' and the glittering shekels hidden in our tents. Nine times out
of ten we shall find the cause in our own spiritual deficiencies. Our
success depends on God's presence, and God's presence depends on our
keeping His dwelling-place holy. When the Church is 'fair as the moon,'
reflecting in silvery whiteness the ardours of the sun which gives her
all her light, and without such spots as dim the moon's brightness, she
will be 'terrible as an army with banners.' This page of Old Testament
history has a living application to the many efforts and few victories
of the churches of to-day, which seem scarce able to hold their own
amid the natural increase of population in so-called Christian lands,
and are so often apparently repulsed when they go up to attack the
outlying heathenism.
'His strength was as the strength of ten,
Because his heart was pure,'
is true of the Christian soldier.
Again, we learn the power of one man to infect a whole community and to
inflict disaster on it. One sick sheep taints a flock. The effects of
the individual's sin are not confined to the doer. We have got a fine
new modern word to express this solemn law, and we talk now of
'solidarity,' which sounds very learned and 'advanced.' But it means
just what we see in this story; Achan was the sinner, all Israel
suffered. We are knit together by a mystical but real bond, so that 'no
man,' be he good or bad, 'liveth to himself,' and no man's sin
terminates in himself. We see the working of that unity in families,
communities, churches, nations. Men are not merely aggregated together
like a pile of cannon balls, but are knit together like the myriad
lives in a coral rock. Put a drop of poison anywhere, and it runs by a
thousand branching veins through the mass, and tints and taints it all.
No man can tell how far the blight of his secret sins may reach, nor
how wide the blessing of his modest goodness may extend. We should seek
to cultivate the sense of being members of a great whole, and to ponder
our individual responsibility for the moral and religious health of the
church, the city, the nation. We are not without danger from an
exaggerated individualism, and we need to realise more constantly and
strongly that we are but threads in a great network, endowed with
mysterious vitality and power of transmitting electric impulses, both
of good and evil.
Again, we have one more illustration in this story of the well-worn
lesson,--never too threadbare to be repeated, until it is habitually
realised,--that God's eye sees the hidden sins. Nobody saw Achan carry
the spoil to his tent, or dig the hole to hide it. His friends walked
across the floor without suspicion of what was beneath. No doubt, he
held his place in his tribe as an honourable man, and his conscience
traced no connection between that recently disturbed patch on the floor
and the helter-skelter flight from Ai; but when the lot began to be
cast, he would have his own thought, and when the tribe of Judah was
taken, some creeping fear would begin to coil round his heart, which
tightened its folds, and hissed more loudly, as each step in the lot
brought discovery nearer home; and when, at last, his own name fell
from the vase, how terribly the thought would glare in on him,--'And
God knew it all the while, and I fancied I had covered it all up so
safely.' It is an awful thing to hear the bloodhounds following up the
scent which leads them straight to our lurking-place. God's judgments
may be long in being put on our tracks, but, once loose, they are sure
of scent, and cannot be baffled. It is an old, old thought, 'Thou God
seest me'; but kept well in mind, it would save from many a sin, and
make sunshine in many a shady place.
Again, we have in Achan a lesson which the professing Christians of
great commercial nations, like England, sorely need. I have already
pointed out the singular parallel between him and Ananias and Sapphira.
Covetousness was the sin of all three. It is the sin of the Church
to-day. The whole atmosphere in which some of us live is charged with
the subtle poison of it. Men are estimated by their wealth. The great
aim of life is to get money, or to keep it, or to gain influence and
notoriety by spending it. Did anybody ever hear of church discipline
being exercised on men who committed Achan's sin? _He_ was stoned to
death, but we set _our_ Achans in high places in the Church. Perhaps if
we went and fell on our faces before the ark when we are beaten, we
should be directed to some tent where a very 'influential member' of
Israel lived, and should find that to put an end to his ecclesiastical
life had a wonderful effect in bringing back courage to the army, and
leading to more unmingled dependence on God. Covetousness was stoned to
death in Israel, and struck with sudden destruction in the Apostolic
Church. It has been reserved for the modern Church to tolerate and
almost to canonise it; and yet we wonder how it comes that we are so
often foiled before some little Ai, and so seldom see any walls falling
by our assault. Let us listen to that stern sentence, 'I will not be
with you any more, except ye destroy the devoted thing from among you.'