And the children of Israel smote them not. There is great difference of opinion among the commentators as to whether this oath were binding off the Israelites or not. This difference is to be found among Roman Catholics as well as Protestants, and Cornelius a Lapide gives the ingenious and subtle arguments used on both sides by the Jesuit commentators.
Many contend that as it was obtained by fraud, and especially by a representation that the Gibeonites did not belong to the tribes which Joshua was specially commanded to destroy (see Deuteronomy 20:10-18, with which compare the passages cited in note on Deuteronomy 20:7), it was null and void, ab initio.
But the Israelites had sworn by the sacred name of Jehovah to spare the Gibeonites. It would have been to degrade that sacred name, and possibly (verse 20) to bring trouble on themselves, to break that oath under any pretence whatever.
If they had been deceived the fault was their own. The Jehovah by whom they swore had provided them with a ready mode of detecting such deceit, had they chosen to use it. Calvin, though he thinks the princes of the congregation were unnecessarily scrupulous, remarks on the superiority of Israelitish to Roman morals.
It would have been easy enough for the congregation to argue, as the Romans did after the disaster at the Candine Forks, that the agreement was of no effect, because it was not made with the whole people.
Cicero, however, had no sympathy with such morality. He writes ('De Officiis,' 1.13), "Atque etiam si quid singuli temporibus adducti, hosti promiserunt, est in eo ipso tides conservanda." And not a few instances of similar perfidy since the promulgation of Christianity may lead us to the conclusion that the example of Israel trader Joshua is not yet superfluous.
As instances of such perfidy, we may adduce the battle of Varna, in 1444, in which Ladislaus, king of Hungary, was induced by the exhortations of Cardinal Julian to break the truce he bad entered into with Amurath, sultan of the Turks.
It is said in this case that Amurath, in his distress, invoked Jesus Christ to punish the perfidy of His disciples. Be that as it may, a signal defeat fitly rewarded their disregard of truth. Later instances may be drawn from the conflict between Spain and the Netherlands in the latter part of the sixteenth century, in which the Spaniards frequently and wantonly, in the supposed interests of religion, violated the articles of capitulation formally entered into with the insurgents.
These breakers of their plighted word also found that "wrath was upon them;" that God would not prosper the arms of those who, professedly for His sake, were false to their solemn obligations. Both the princes, in the narrative before us, in withstanding the wrath of the congregation, and the congregation in yielding to their representations, present a spectacle of moral principle which few nations have surpassed.
Cornelius a Lapide, after giving the opinions of others, as we have seen, and remarking on the opinion here followed as "probabilior," sums up in the following noble and manly words: "Disce hic quam sancte fides, praesertim jurata, sit servanda hosti, etiam impio et infideli.
Fide enim sublata, evertitur omnis hominum contractus et societas, quae fidei quasi basi innititur, ut homines jam non homines, sed leones, tygrides, et ferae esse videantur." Would that his Church had always acted upon these insatiable principles of justice and morality!
In after years a terrible famine visited the Israelites as a chastisement for the infringement of this agreement (see 2 Samuel 21:1-9). Murmured. Literally, were stubborn.