“What did the oxen deserve — an animal without fraud and guile? / And what the sheep and birds? what the bees? what the horses? what the little asses? / What the garments, the doorposts? what the spices, balsams, [and] palms?”
These things — whether animals, or inanimate — all [deserved] nothing of punishment, since they committed no fault. Yet they are slaughtered, burned, and destroyed — because the impious had abused those creatures to the injury of the Creator; because by this abuse of the impious they had been made impure, as it were by a contagion; [because] these [were the things] in which, [God] being forsaken and despised, those same [impious] had set their happiness; and because, finally, these were their goods, wealth, and resources. It is added that, by the destruction of those things, the immense anger of God against the impious is set the more before the eyes of all mortals, and a greater terror is cast in, for shuddering at and fleeing all crimes. And this too has appeared from almost all the places cited before. Otherwise the Israelites would more gladly have carried off the rich booty from these [things], [and] would more gladly have spared the buildings, as [being] now as it were their own — as Croesus warned Cyrus, when Sardis was captured (in Herodotus, book 1): “For no one lays waste his own,” says Seneca (Thebais 4). And in Livy, book 32, Quinctius earnestly warns his soldiers to have regard, as [for a place] now of their own dominion, for that which they held: the Lacedaemonians, indeed, did not demolish the villas of the Messenians, nor cut down [their] trees, since they now reckoned it [as] their own field. And in these buildings it is easily understood that there were magnificent palaces of the King, magnificent shrines and groves of the gods. All things, sacred and profane, sank down in the fire. Whence it seems to me that God willed also all these things to be laid waste, destroyed, and burned, in order to accustom the Israelites to cast a bridle upon their desires, to set a measure to avarice, to keep their hands abstinent [from plunder], and to establish their obedience, abstinence, and virtue as an example to all posterity.