. . .
[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)
