Question LVI. Whether, if anyone should raise up on the same site another city under another name, he would be held by the same imprecation?

He would be held. Because this same thing would in fact be to rebuild Jericho. For Joshua — or rather God — is concerned not so much about the name as about the reality. And even if another name were imposed on the city by the builder, there would nevertheless not be lacking those who would use that ancient appellation of Jericho. See Boethius’s Geometry, fol. 1229. The Rabbis cite another reason in their Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin, ch. 11, because the Hebrew text speaks thus, with several [definite] articles, “Whoever shall build this city, this Jericho” — [taking] the sense to be: “Neither let anyone restore this city under another name imposed on it, nor build another city under this very name.” But to me this seems more ingenious than true. For that multiplication of the articles (if indeed they are so to be called in Hebrew) seems to signify only that sense which the Greek and the Latin express: as if it were, “Whoever shall build this city — this, I say, Jericho,” or “this [city] which is called Jericho.” For also in the ancient formulas of the Romans — by which they either declared war on certain enemies, or called forth the gods from their cities [evocatio], or made treaties with them, or did something similar — we see all things wonderfully defined and precisely circumscribed.