A lesson for the ages, from 17th-century England to the 20th-century US and Israel.

Achan sinned in a moment of weakness. Apparently acting alone, he plundered gold, silver, and a Babylonian robe in the heat of the battle for Jericho, stashing these treasures in his tent. However, his personal sin brought tragic consequences for his whole nation. The Israelites were subsequently routed in the battle of Ai, losing 36 soldiers and their sense of invincibility.

The example of Achan showed later generations the great moral danger of plundering during wartime, exploiting political violence for personal gain. As related by journalist Tzvi Lavi, during the Six-Day War in 1967, a commander of a unit of Israeli paratrooper reservists named Chaim Tzippori reportedly gathered his soldiers next to the ancient city of Jericho, took out a Tanakh and read from the story of Achan. Tzippori then instructed the soldiers to place any plunder they seized on the ground in front of him, or else risk a military tribunal. An astonishing amount of plundered property gathered before Tzippori.

Achan has also been wielded symbolically to condemn wars instigated for national enrichment. In a 1656 political scandal explored by historian Blair Worden, the ruler of the English Commonwealth, “Lord Protector” Oliver Cromwell was publicly compared to Achan. Following an embarrassing military defeat at the hands of the Spanish military on the island of Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic), English Puritans including Cromwell and his detractors cast about to identify the sin for which England was punished. Cromwell critic Sir Henry Vane invoked the Achan story and charged that the defeat—their modern-day Ai—arose from the “self-interest and private gain” that drove Cromwell to seize power in the aftermath of the English Civil Wars. Cromwell’s public response did not even deny the accusation.

Similarly, in the height of the second U.S. war in Iraq, amid popular speculation that President George W. Bush pursued conflict with Saddam Hussein to benefit financially from Iraqi oil, an Achan charge was made on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. On the morning of July 9, 2003, the elected House chaplain, a Catholic priest named Daniel P. Coughlin, delivered a prayer invoking the lessons of “the conquest of Jericho and the sin of Achan,” and expressing hope that, “we, as individual citizens or in any corporate way, never excuse ourselves from honesty and integrity” in the ongoing war. Coughlin’s veiled indictment went virtually unnoticed.