Accursing

The English is Italic, The Hebrew transliteration is bold, and the translation of the Hebrew is in plain text. I wanted to know how something becomes accursed -- from the way the Hebrew word defines it, the objects are accursed because of what happened to them -- they were used by a culture that did not obey the Old Testament god. And in taking them, the Israelites would become accursed. The objects, however, did not do anything. They were part of a culture which did. The actions of that culture made them accursed. Those actions were deemed accursed by the culture -- Joshua's -- which was victorious. No one will ever know what the People of Ai had to say for themselves about it. We have to take Joshua's word and the way it was transcribed in the most popular version of the Old Testament story. I've always found him fair, but that may purely be because he came after the ever-popular Moses, and after two grades of a man I ridiculously imagined in the shape of a Protestant from Northfield, Illinois who now runs the NRA, I was ready for someone I could picture as a conventional teenager with an open mind and new ideas. I mean, young "let my people go" Charleton was ok for fourth grade me. By sixth grade, I was ready for someone who could write Supreme Court amendments, especially as we were reading Brown v. Board of Ed in Secular Studies. Sadly, I don't remember much about him beyond occasional stories, but this was a very important one. The accursed things were certainly accursed, but by what was done, not by birth.

Something becomes accursed when it is badly used. Someone becomes accursed, if people do, in a similar fashion. In an age when we no longer have the benefits of splitting oceans and must rely on science and negotiations and poetry, perhaps we can un-accurse things by re-using them well. We don't have endless supplies of things the way we used to -- no children of gods come down and multiply fishes. We've run out of favors from all manner of gods and goddesses, or they've decided it's time for us to grow up. Isn't that why we were given the abilities to write poetry, music, theater, do science, negotiate, create minor energies, etc.? So that they could go on and travel and do other things and not expend their energies, much needed to sustain us, so we could sustain ourselves?

So let us stop accursing -- and start re-claiming. The trick is how to cleanse someone who has been so badly used, or something, etc. But, certainly there are enough of us to solve this. My cats would say, by golly, just start washing!

Translation:
http://scripturetext.com/joshua/6-18.htm

Joshua 6:18


And ye in any wise raq (rak)leanness, i.e. (figuratively) limitation; only adverbial, merely, or conjunctional, although
keep yourselves from shamar (shaw-mar')to hedge about (as with thorns), i.e. guard; generally, to protect, attend to, etc. yourselves from
the accursed thing cherem (khay'-rem)physical (as shutting in) a net (either literally or figuratively); usually a doomed object; abstr. Extermination

lest ye make yourselves accursed charam (khaw-ram')to seclude; specifically (by a ban) to devote to religious uses (especially destruction); physical and reflexive, to be blunt as to the nose
when ye take laqach (law-kakh')to take (in the widest variety of applications)

of the accursed thing cherem (khay'-rem)physical (as shutting in) a net (either literally or figuratively); usually a doomed object; abstr. Extermination

and make suwm (soom)to put (used in a great variety of applications, literal, figurative, inferentially, and elliptically)wholly, work.

the camp machaneh (makh-an-eh')an encampment (of travellers or troops); hence, an army, whether literal (of soldiers) or figurative (of dancers, angels, cattle, locusts, stars; or even the sacred courts)
of Israel