Torn down and prostrate were the walls of Jericho; men, women, boys, and infants all slain; the gates, roofs, and all the houses consumed by flames. Nothing seemed able to be added further, unless something more should be decreed for the time to come. And indeed it was decreed by Joshua, with a grave curse, that no one should dare to rebuild it. For so [says] v. 26: At that time Joshua adjured [them], saying: Cursed [be] the man before the Lord who shall raise up and build the city of Jericho. In his firstborn may he lay its foundations, and in the youngest of his children may he set up its gates. That is: whoever should ever attempt to rebuild this destroyed city, let God punish him — and with this penalty, indeed: that all his children die, and no posterity survive to him. Let the first, or greatest, of the children perish in the first work of rebuilding — in the very foundation, I say; in the several subsequent parts, the others; but in the last [part], that is, in the setting up of the gates, the last, or youngest-born. And in these words of the text, it is to be noted, first, that what our [Vulgate] renders imprecari [to imprecate a curse], the Septuagint renders ὁρκίζειν [horkizein, “to put under oath, to adjure”], as it were “to adjure”; and the force of both is the same. And the Hebrew word means “to swear, to adjure, and to imprecate curses,” as at Num. ch. 5, vv. 19 and 21, and, according to some, Ps. 10, v. 9 [so printed; the verse quoted, “they that praised me swore against me,” is Ps. 101:9 Vulg. / 102:8 Heb.]. For where our [Vulgate] says, Those who praised me swore against me, those [others] say, “Those who praised me — they imprecated curses upon me,
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and detested [me] as one hateful to God,” as Masius notes. And by these [things] Abulensis is disproved, when after q. 60 he says these [words] are uttered in the manner of a pronouncing [i.e. merely a prediction], and repeats [it] at qq. 68, 69. Secondly: “Cursed before the Lord” — that is, exceedingly and truly detestable; since what is such before God is truly always such. For He cannot be deceived, nor mistaken, after the manner of a man, to whom sometimes that seems evil which is good, and the contrary. Thirdly: for “who shall raise up,” in the Hebrew of today it is “who shall arise”; and so Masius renders and expounds it, “Who shall be born,” or “who shall one day be.” But although, as to the sense, it matters little in which way we read [it], yet our reading is the better. First: because the Seventy [LXX] omitted that word for this reason — that the same seemed to be sufficiently expressed by the following word, and they rendered only οἰκοδομήσει [oikodomēsei, “he will build”]. Secondly: because Josephus looks to that verb of “raising up,” as if it had been also in the Hebrew, when (bk. 5, ch. 1) he uses ἐγείρειν [egeirein, “to raise up”], saying εἴ τις πορθηθεῖσαν ἐγείρειν ἐθελήσειεν [ei tis porthētheisan egeirein ethelēseien, “if anyone should wish to raise up [the city] that had been sacked”]. Thirdly: because it is not infrequent in the Hebrew text that the letter vau [ו] is put for iod [י], whose likeness is very great — as St. Jerome long since noted, on Isaiah ch. 10; and all know [it] who have touched these things even with the tips of their lips. And in this very history there is read Segib in the Hebrew for Segub (1 Kings 16:34); [and] 1 Sam. 18:6, Iaschir for Iaschur — so that there is no doubt that in this place it ought to be read בְּיָקִים [iakim], not בְּיָקוּם [iakoum]. Finally, it is to be noted that after that imprecation the Seventy [LXX] appended its outcome — taken, namely, from that sixteenth chapter of 1 Kings, of which afterward. For sometimes the Seventy themselves do this, for the sake of explanation, [so] that they insert some things — as at Exod. 2:22, concerning Eliezer, Moses’s son, from ch. 18:4.