Accursed. Rather, devotea, ἀναθεμα LXX. The original meaning of this word is derived from הרם to "shut up." Hence it originally means "a net." With this we may compare the well known Eastern word harem, meaning the enclosed apartments reserved for the women of the family.
Hence it comes to mean under a ban, devoted, generally to utter destruction under the pressure of a vow to God, as in Numbers 21:2, or in consequence of His command (see Le 27:29; Deuteronomy 13:15 (Hebrew 16); 1 Kings 20:42, "the man of my devoting," חֶרְמִי, etc).
But in Le 27:21, Numbers 18:14, the חֵרֵם as devoted to the Lord, became the property of the priest. This ban was the most solemn and tremendous religious sentence, the absolute and final excommunication of the old law.
The sin of Saul (1 Samuel 15:1-35) was the sparing of anything whatever in the city which had been laid under the ban—a ban which Saul had been specially commanded to execute (1 Samuel 15:3) according to the principles laid down in Deuteronomy 13:1-18.
When Keil, however, states that the ban "could never be pronounced upon things and property alone, but only upon open idolaters, either with or without their possessions," he appears to have overlooked Le Deuteronomy 27:16-21, where a man may devote irredeemably to God property of his own.
In his subsequent work, however, Keil qualifies this assertion by a consideration of this very passage. Idolatrous worship was the one thing which justified the Israelites in laying one of their own cities under the ban (see Deuteronomy 13:12 18, above cited).
But (Deuteronomy 7:2) it had been pronounced against the Canaanites. Property, how. ever, save in the case of Jericho, seems to have been exempted from the ban (see Joshua 8:2). Even at Jericho the silver and the gold, the brass and the iron, were placed in the treasury of the Lord (Joshua 5:1-15 :19, 24).
"Why," says Theodoret, "was the city thus devoted? It was devoted on the same principle which offered the first fruits to God, since it was the first fruits of their conquests." Because she hid.