Monday, June 3, 2024

Bartolomé De Las Casas on Rahab and the Question of Her Having Committed a Mortal Sin

  

. . .

 

[22] It is for just such a reason that the doctors of theology, posing the question of whether the harlot Rahab committed a mortal sin when she did the spies or scouts of the army of the children of Israel sent by Joshua into the promised land and thereby saved their lives, conclude that she was indeed a traitor who caused the ruin of her country and of her city of Jericho by acting contrary to the precepts of natural law, under which she was in duty bound to hand them over to the king or to the people or even to kill them herself, since they fully deserve to die in accordance with the spirit or the letter of the civil law in this regard, based as it is on the precepts of that same natural law, and that she would have committed a mortal sin had there been no other factors involved which might be produced in her defense; one of these being that she was moved and spired by the Lord and recognized with absolute clarity that the God of the Jews was all powerful and had resolved to deliver the land of the Canaanites up to the Jews, his people, and that, being so enlightened, she determined to assist and not to struggle against the will of God, and another that, since her city could not escape unharmed, she wished to save herself and her family from the death she believed to be imminent for all. All this is clear from the text of holy Scripture itself where we read, in Joshua 2, “I know that the Lord hath given you the land. . . . For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when ye came out of Egypt . . .” and then, later on, “for the Lord your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath,” and so on. Thus is it that readers may get some notion of the justifications that can be advanced for what the Christians did to the peoples with whom the island teemed at the time, and which we shall in due course recount. (Las Casas on Columbus: Background and The Second and Forth Voyages, ed. Nigel Griffin [Turnhout: Brepols, 1999], 137)

 

Blog Archive