3. The sin was expiated. The " accursed thing " had brought upon the Israelites disaster and defeat. The accursed thing must therefore by Divine command be put away. And it was put away with unflinching rigour in the valley of Achor. A trying day it must have been for the Israelites when they were called upon to stone to death one of their own brethren. Some may have shrunk back from the performance of so stern and painful a duty. Others may have wished that the punishment might be commuted into another less severe. But no. The guilty person must be put to death. And, at whatever expense of feeling on their part, he must die by the hands of his brethren.
There is a terrible sweepingness, an unsparingness, which startles and astonishes us in the work of judgment executed by the Israelites at the command of Jehovah. " And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver, and the mantle, and the wedge of gold, and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had : and they brought them up unto the valley of 1 N. D. Hillis, Great Books as Life- Teachers, 108.
298 THE VALLEY OF ACHOR
Achor. And they burned them with fire, and stoned them with stones."
^| It does seem hard sometimes that the sons and daughters of Achan were made to share in the dreadful punishment of their father. And here it is by no means sufficient to say with a recent writer, who means at least to be religious, that the history before us only illustrates the sanguinary severity of Oriental nations, which has in all ages involved the children in the punish- ment of their father, for we cannot but remember that the Jews had received a law which has specially insisted on the sacredness of human life, and it is difficult to see how the slaughter in question was other than a high crime against the Sixth Command- ment, unless it could appeal to some independent principle, which justified and explained it. It is, indeed, more than probable that Achan's family were, to a certain extent, accomplices in his sin. They must have been privy to the concealment of the stolen spoil in the tent, and they knew what was involved in stealing and in concealing it. But, besides this, we cannot doubt that Achan and his family are here regarded as forming in some sense, a moral whole, and not simply as a set of individuals, each of whom was on his or her trial. Scripture does take these two views of human beings. Sometimes it treats us as each one entirely separate from all besides, both in probation and in judgment; and sometimes it merges the individual in a wider association of which he forms a part ; and whether it be the family, or the race, or the church, or humanity, it merges him in it so completely as to treat him as though he were merely a limb of the great whole to which he belongs ; and both of these views of men are true to, and they are based on, the nature of things, since man is by the terms of his creation at once a personal being complete in himself, and yet a part of a larger organism — the human family. On the first of these aspects the gospel, no doubt, specially insists, but it does not by any means ignore or dispense with the second. When the Apostle tells us that in Adam all die, and that by one man sin came into the world, and death by sin, he treats every descendant of Adam as part of a family which is united in its natural head, and which is fatally compromised by the acts of that head. This principle of the reality of a common nature which we all share explains our loss of righteousness in Adam ; but it tells to our advantage even more decisively, for it explains our recovery of righteousness in Christ. " In Christ shall all be made alive." " As by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous." x
1 H. P. Liddon.
HOSEA ii. 15 299
in.
The Valley of Hope.
The valley of Achor became a door of hope. It was in truth a terrific act of penal retribution by which Achan and his family met their death, and it requires an effort to ask ourselves how the spot which witnessed this scene of torture and of shame could be a door of hope. It was a door of hope for Israel, because Achan's sin, while undiscovered, had about it this terrible distinc- tion, that in an eminent degree it brought with it weakness and ruin to the public cause of Israel. Israel was not fully pure- hearted while the Babylonian robe which ought to have been burnt, and the gold and silver which ought to have been placed in the treasury of the Lord, were sacrilegiously hidden away in the earth beneath Achan's tent; and a serious effort, like the attack on Ai, revealed the presence of moral unsoundness some- where, which, so long as it festered at the heart of Israel, made further progress impossible. When Achan had been discovered and punished, Israel's weakness at once disappeared. The Lord turned from the fierceness of His anger, and Ai fell easily before the first assault.