Achan’s punishment is described as to [its] antecedents, as to the punishment itself, and as to [its] consequents. Those [antecedents] are in his leading-down to the place of execution, [his] escort, and [the] address [to him] (vv. 24, 25). The punishment is [in] verse 25. The consequents are either two — the ceasing of the divine wrath (v. 26), and the naming of that place (in the same verse) — or three, if there be added the heap of stones, piled up for an everlasting detestation and infamy. But concerning the punishment of Achan himself, three [things] are now to be explained. The first is, what the difficulties concerning it are. The second: what the opinions [are]. The third: which of all these [is] the best.
I: These are the difficulties. First: The Lord commanded (v. 15) that the sacrilegious [man] be burned. But here he is not said [to be] burned. For (v. 25) “all Israel stoned him.” But only his goods were consumed by fire (ibid.). Secondly: The Seventy, though in the same v. 15 they rendered “the sacrilege [is] to be burned,” afterward make no mention at all of a burning — not even in the case of Achan’s own goods. Thirdly: Josephus too mentions nothing, neither of the burning nor of the stoning. Fourthly: In the Hebrew text, word for word, that punishment is thus described, as Vatablus and Cajetan note: “And all Israel stoned him with a stone: and they burned them with stones. And they raised over him a great heap of stones, unto
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to this day.
II: From these words, moreover, seven opinions were born, of which the main heads [are], as it were, two. The one is, that Achan was not truly burned, but only stoned. So many authors seem to think, who assert [he was] stoned, and do not add [that he was] burned — as the Apostolic Constitutions (bk. 7, ch. 3), the Seventy themselves in this place, [and] St. Thomas (on 1 Macc., ch. 3, v. 5). But this very [opinion] is handed down with a fourfold diversity. For, first, Rashi says that nothing at all is to be had concerning his [Achan’s] burning. For the words by which that [burning] seems to be prescribed (v. 15), he thus expounds in the Hebrew: “And it shall be, [that] whatever shall be found in the anathema, [Israel] shall burn it itself with fire, and everything which is his.” But what was found was Achan’s tent. This, therefore, had to be burned, and all the [things] which pertained to it. So the Rabbi here [Rashi]. Secondly: Others [say] that a mention of burning is indeed had, but they explain [it] in three ways. First: that any punishment whatever is signified [by “burning”]; because all grief burns, as it were, the soul — for so [in] Deut. 4: “The Lord led you out of the iron furnace of Egypt,” that is, out of the most grave and most wretched servitude of Egypt. So St. Augustine (in question 9 on this book). Secondly: that sometimes not every punishment, but that [punishment] which purges us from sin, and consumes and destroys it as though a certain flame, is called “fire” — as [in] 1 Cor. 3, [and] Num. 31:23; and so Achan [was] “burned,” because purged from sin by stoning. So again St. Augustine: “Most rightly,” he says, “is it said that the stoning was a fire; elegantly is it recognized that that punishment purged the man, lest hereafter he perish by that sin. Which the vessels in Leviticus also signify, which are commanded to be purged by fire.” Thirdly: that Achan was to be burned, but by an everlasting fire, into which that unhappy [man] was cast down. So that those words about burning contain a prediction, [pointing] to the prophecy of what was to come. And therefore the Lord did not say “ye shall burn [him] with fire,” but “he shall be burned with fire”: because the Israelites were not going to burn Achan, but the Lord. So, in the same place, St. Augustine — concerning whom three [things] are to be observed. First: that he affirms none of these three [things] which have now been said, but only shows that any of these can be said. For since he follows the text of the 70 Interpreters, and these (as I said above) treated only in v. 15 of Achan being burned, and afterward rendered [it] only [as] “stoned,” it came to this, that he argued with himself thus: Either Joshua afterward changed the fire-punishment appointed by God for the sacrilegious [man] into stoning; or by “fire” he understood something other than we commonly [do]. But the former is not to be said. For a holy man would not have been disobedient to the Lord, and by his own judgment changed the Lord’s precept. Saul the King changed [a command] once afterward (1 Sam. 13) — but with how great crime, and [with] God’s wrath! The latter, therefore, is to be taken up; and then it must be inquired how the stoning which, according to the 70, Achan suffered, can be called “fire.” “Two causes,” says St. Augustine therefore, “occur to me — not that both hold, but that [it be] one of them, why he was not burned with all his [goods] by a visible fire.” Secondly: [It seems] that there is, in that same exposition of Augustine, a slip of memory [μνημονικὸν ἁμάρτημα, mnēmonikon hamartēma], while, instead of the cited [passage] of Numbers, he cited Leviticus in that place. Third: [It seems] that there lurks an error in Abulensis (q. 61), while those two latter explanations are attributed not to Augustine but to Adamantius [Origen] — as is plain from the words there adduced, which are nowhere in Origen, but are in Augustine himself, and likewise in the text and margin of question 73.
The other division of opinions [holds that] Achan was afflicted with both punishments, of burning and of stoning — but in two [different] ways. First: [that he was afflicted with] both at once while alive — so that, while he was set upon his pyre and the fire was [applied], and the wretch was now burning, upon him at once a shower of stones was poured out by the surrounding people. So Cajetan, and perhaps R. Eliezer (ch. 38) and the book Tanchuma, of which afterward. And likewise Masius once [says]: “Meanwhile,” he says, “while Achan is led down, while the pyre is built, kindled, [and] mounted, the people, eager to appease the Divinity, did not restrain their hands from throwing stones — as happens, while each strives to seem most vigorous in [averting] a public ruin, which is to be repelled.” But [an opinion] diverse from and discrepant with these authors, [and] threefold, is brought forward as its ground. The first: For Cajetan judges it was done for the sake of mitigating the punishment, that he who had frankly confessed his sin might be less tortured by fire. The second [reason]: Tanchuma [says it was] for the sake of augmenting the punishment — [so] that, because he had violated the Sabbath, he should be stoned; because [he was] sacrilegious, he should be burned. Thirdly: Masius ascribes the whole [thing] to the rashness and fury of the crowd, [and] to [its] impatience of delay. Secondly: Both [say] he was afflicted with a punishment, but the one [punishment] while alive, the other [when] dead. But which [did he suffer] alive, and [was] first afflicted [with]? Masius doubts. For at first: “It is truer,” he says, “and I think simpler, that Achan, with all his goods and [his] children, was indeed burned by God’s commands.” But afterward: “yet perhaps that opinion would not be absurd, if we should say the burning commanded by God looks to the corpses.” But Abulensis (qq. 55 and 65) constantly and clearly says [he was] first stoned, and his corpse afterward burned, and covered with stones; and this Vatablus, Junius, Tremellius, [and] Calvin express in their [own] text. These [are] the opinions concerning Achan’s death.
III: But among them, that seems to me the truest which [holds that] Achan [was] first indeed burned alive, then indeed overwhelmed with stones — [the Israelites] detesting the wicked [man] as though [he were] ashes. For, first, God had commanded (v. 15) that the sacrilegious [man] be burned. Therefore, if [he] was not burned alive, either God changed this sentence of his, or Joshua did not obey it, or understood it otherwise. Not the first, because God is not inconstant, nor does he change a pronounced sentence, unless some condition be understood — [which] being posited, there would be another judgment, as sometimes happens in a threatening prophecy: for example, if that [sentence] which Jonah announced to the Ninevites, of [their] impending destruction after forty days [were changed] — but here [it is] an absolute sentence, not a prophecy. Not the second, on account of the highest reverence of Joshua himself toward God, of which above: and because, surely, if he had failed in anything of the [things] which God had commanded, he would not have borne [it] unpunished — just as not only Saul, cited above, [did not], but neither [did] Moses and Aaron (Num. 20:12), [and] Deut. 1:37. Not the third, because in a historical matter, when it is seriously commanded by the Lord what is to be done, the words are not to be taken in some I-know-not-what metaphorical or allegorical sense, but properly,
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or in that way in which they are commonly wont to be used. Otherwise all servants could play with their masters’ commands, after the fashion of a certain Aesop. When, therefore, the Lord describes the whole method of the lot article by article, and adds the punishment of the detected sacrilege, one must not go off to I-know-not-what tropes, but do what the words properly describe. And truly [it] is wont so to be done in all the sentences of Judges too. For who would bear him who should interpret [as one] to be chastised with a sharp rebuke [the man] whom the Judge has pronounced [is] to be struck with the sword? — because the “tongue” is sometimes called “a sharp sword” (Ps. 56:5, Ps. 63:4), and “a sword [is] in the lips of some” (Ps. 58:8). But again, when this punishment is appointed against someone, that he be burned, it is understood of him [being] alive, unless from some clause, particle, or usage of the sentence something milder be gathered — as Corsetus shows [in his note] on Covarruvias (bk. 2 Various Resolutions, ch. 10). Secondly: In verse 25 not only the punishment, but also the order of the punishment is described. For when [something] is treated of others than Achan, it is said first, “they burned them [ipsos],” or “them [neuter]”; then, “they overwhelmed them,” or “them, with stones.” Therefore the same punishment, and the same order, is to be understood in [the case of] Achan. For [that he] was burned is not [expressly] said in a marked way, but from the precept of the Lord previously laid down it is sufficiently given to be understood — from which, as [was] said a little before, [one] could not depart — and only this is added here which, besides that which had before been expressly said, was superadded: namely, the stoning. But because concerning the burning of all [the things] which were Achan’s it had before been prescribed together with Achan, [the text] subjoins generally, as much concerning the punishment as concerning the order: “and they burned them or them: and with stones they overwhelmed them or them.” Then [the text] returns to the very author of the crime, explaining that, besides the common [treatment] both to him and to others — [namely] the burning and the throwing of stones — there was something proper to him: the piling-up of a great heap of stones, of which afterward. Thirdly: When God first brings [in] some law, he is wont to punish its violation quite severely. But this [was] the first of all laws concerning the anathema promulgated in the land of Israel. Fourthly: “It was customary,” says Masius, “to expiate sacrileges by fire: nor could an anathema altogether be more [thoroughly] abolished, so to speak, than if, going off into flame and smoke, it were dissipated and vanished.” But Anathema were not only inanimate things, or brute animals, but the very men who had criminally and impiously taken or profaned something sacred, or who were devoted to God, sacred, and detestable, as was said in chapter 6, question 33. Fifthly: If we inspect all the other opinions before recounted, they have either many discordant [points], or certainly more scruples than this [opinion] of mine. For the first [opinion] openly does violence to the text. For since the lot is said to have “apprehended” the tribe, the clan, the house, [and] finally “apprehends” him who [was] the source [culprit], and it is at once added, “And it shall be, [that he who is] found in the anathema shall be burned.” And it is plain from what is subjoined, “and everything which is his” — namely, [the goods] of the [man] found — because he violated the pact of the Lord, namely the same [man] found. “And he has done a work of folly in Israel.” But if it should please [one] to play, or rather to rave, with that Rabbi [Rashi], would it not be permitted, in the Hebrew, to say [that] the niphal verb “yissareph” [iffareph, “he/it shall be burned”] does not admit an accusative after it? And that therefore [it is] rather to be rendered, “his mattock [ligo] shall be burned, and everything which is his”? For because he dug the earth with a mattock, and buried the plundered riches — the sense would be [that] this mattock, this instrument of the crime, and all the other [things] of the same Achan, were to be burned; and instead of “otho” [him/it] we should read, with those very same Hebrew letters, “utho,” which is “his mattock,” as [in] 1 Sam. 13:19. But the other reading of the sentence would say only generally that the sacrilegious [man] is to be afflicted with punishment; but would not define what that [punishment] ought to be. But so, in every matter, it would be permitted to take the genus for the species. But the third and fourth [opinions], because [they are] metaphorical, are already rejected by the first argument, and are rejected by many [arguments] from Abulensis (qq. 61, 62, 63, 64). The fifth [opinion]: That [Achan], alive, should at once be burned [and] at once assailed with stones, [is] unheard-of. For one stone conveniently driven into him would have freed him from the greater trouble of the fire, and he himself, [when] hit by the throw of several stones, would have smothered the flame. But if, half-scorched, he had afterward been exposed to the stones, or half-stoned, [and then] afterward dragged to the fire, both would have had to be done with great effort and a careful hand — which neither the reckoning of the desired time and speed, nor indeed the text, seems to bear, [the text] which relates that not a half-dead [man], but a whole and “sacred” [devoted] one, was to be burned, [and] relates the whole [man] also [as] stoned. The sixth [opinion]: But I do not believe [he was] stoned before [being] scorched, because it is both against the order of the text, and against the reasons above adduced. To which I add: if the stones had preceded the burning, it would have come to pass that, by an adventitious punishment, the culprit would be snatched from his own chief [punishment] — by an accessory [punishment] from that which [God] had distinctly decreed and commanded. But in my seventh [opinion] there is only this much of difficulty, [that it is] not expressly asserted in the text that Achan was cremated. But that kind of brevity, and silence, is most frequent in the scriptures; and it is so much the less to be disapproved, the more easily the thing which is passed over in silence can be understood from the antecedents or consequents — as [in] Gen. ch. 3, v. 8, where in the Hebrew that [phrase] is passed over in silence, “Let us go out of doors.” But Rabbi Eliezer, in the cited chapter 38: “Why,” he says, “the burning and the stoning? The stoning, because the sons of Achan knew that matter and did not indicate [it]: the burning, because on account of them 36 [men] had died.”