26. And Joshua adjured them, etc This adjuration, then, was not merely to have effect for one day, but to warn posterity through all ages that that city had been taken only by divine power. He wished, therefore, that the ruins and devastation should exist for ever as a kind of trophy; because the rebuilding of it would have been equivalent to an erasure effacing the miracle. In order, therefore, that the desolate appearance of the place might keep the remembrance of the divine power and favor alive among posterity, Joshua pronounces a heavy curse upon any one who should again build the ruined city. From this passage we gather that the natural torpidity of men requires the aid of stimulants to prevent them from burying the divine favors in oblivion; and hence this spectacle, wherein the divine agency was made conspicuous to the people, was a kind of indirect censure of their ingratitude.
The substance of the imprecation is, that if any one ever attempt to rebuild Jericho he may be made sensible by the unpropitious and mournful result that he had done a cursed and abominable work. For to lay the foundations in his first-born, were just as if he were to cast forth his son to perish, crushed and buried beneath the mass of stones; and to set up the gates in his younger son, is the same thing as to plan an edifice which could not be erected without causing the death of a son. Thus he who should dare to make the insane attempt is condemned in his own offspring. Nor did Joshua utter this curse at his own suggestion; he was only the herald of celestial vengeance.
This makes it the more monstrous that among the people of God a man should have been found, whom that fearful curse, couched in formal terms, could not restrain from sacrilegious temerity. In the time of Ahab (Genesis 16:34) arose Hiel, a citizen of Bethel, who dared, as it were avowedly, to challenge God in this matter; but the Sacred History at the same time testifies, that the denunciation which God had pronounced by the mouth of Joshua did not fail of its effect; for Hiel founded the new Jericho in Abiram his first-born, and set up its gates in his younger son Segub, and thus learned in the destruction of his offspring what it is to attempt anything against the will and in opposition to the command of God. (68)
(68) This rebuilding by Hiel on the very site of the ancient city, took place, according to the ordinary chronology, 520 years after Joshua pronounced the curse. It would seem, however, that another Jericho had been built at a much earlier period, not actually on the former site which, while the memory of the curse remained, was probably avoided, but at no great distance from it. Of this fact, the mention made of Jericho in Joshua 18:21, as one of the cities of Benjamin, is not decisive, because it may have been intended to indicate merely a locality, and not an actually existing city, nor is it absolutely certain that the “city of palm trees” which Eglor captured, (Jude 3:13) was a rebuilt Jericho, though by that name Jericho was generally known. Its existence, however, at least a century before Hiel, is clearly established by the directions given to David’s ambassadors, after their insulting treatment by the king of Ammon, “to tarry at Jericho.” (2 Samuel 10:5) It may be worth while briefly to glance at the subsequent history of Hiel’s sacrilegious city. As if the penalty of rebuilding had been fully paid by the exemplary punishment inflicted on the founder, the curse appears to have been withdrawn, and in the course of about twenty years we learn that it had not only been selected as a school of the prophets, (Genesis 2:5,) but received a very important addition to its other attractions as a residence by the miraculous cure of its waters by Elisha. (Genesis 2:18.) Its inhabitants, on the return from the Babylonish captivity, are mentioned as having assisted in rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. (Nehemiah 3:2) At a later period Jericho was fortified by the Syrian general Bacchides, or rather received from him additions to its previously existing fortifications, (Genesis 9:50) but does not seem to have acquired very much importance till the time of Herod the Great, who, after capturing and sacking it, rebuilt it in a much more magnificent form, and erected in it a splendid palace, where he often resided and ultimately died. It also became a favorite residence of his son but by the display of his miraculous agency. It appears in the latter period of the Roman empire to have ranked as one of the chief cities of Palestine. The general devastation of the country on the dissolution of that empire effected its final ruin, and its site is now only doubtfully represented by a miserable village called Riha, containing from 200 to 300 souls. — Ed.