Week 11 Joshua 6-7
When I finished the Achan story I came away with three questions.
The first was: how could Achan have been so idiotic? He had clearly witnessed miraculous events in Israel. He knew the Lord knew everything. He had heard Joshua explicitly & publicly say ‘don’t steal anything from Jericho’. But he stole some loot. Why would he do that?
The second question was: what did he do after he got caught? Well…he admitted his guilt: I have sinned against the Lord God of Israel. This sounds quite a bit like repentance to me. But it didn’t save him. Maybe he was just admitting his theft since he’d been caught red-handed. So was it fake-repentance? But what if it was real & heart-felt & genuine? Would it have changed things?
The third question was about the execution: who all was executed? Achan and his family were taken to the valley of Achor. One bible that I read says: the Israelites stoned Achan and his family. Another version says: then all Israel stoned him. Another version: all Israel stoned them (but in the margin it says that “them” literally means “him”). So who was executed? Just Achan…or his entire family?
My (hesitant) answers to the questions are:
1) Achan was a person. Doing something crazy & inexplicable wasn’t strange
2) If Achan had genuinely repented it could have changed things
3) If the family colluded then they were guilty…but not otherwise.
But really…I’m pretty much just guessing.
Note: quotes from Joshua 7:20 (NLT) & 7:25 (NLT NIV NASB)