Karmi

כרמי


Genesis 46:9 names him as the youngest son of Re'u-Ven (cf Exodus 6:14 and Numbers 26:6).

Joshua 7:1 has Achan (עכן) ben Karmi as one of those who disobeyed orders at Yericho (Jericho) by "taking of the accursed thing", which coincidentally is a Cherem (חֵרֶם) in the Yehudit text, and is therefore a problem, because we think we know what a Cherem is (excommunication, or at the very least ostracism), and this cannot be it.

The name Karmi means a "vine-dresser", from the root Kerem (כרם) = "a vineyard"; Mount Carmel in the tribe of Asher takes its meaning from the same root, and generally any place cultivated with fruit trees or as a garden may be called a Carmel, or more correctly a Karm-El, a vineyard dedicated to the god El. The "Geresh Karm-El" (גרש כרמל) were the first fruits offered on the altar - cf Leviticus 2:14 and 23:14.

Karam (כרם) also means "noble" or "of generous nature", probably from what I call "inverse etymology", the giving of a meaning to a name because of some incident or personality; thus, why do we "boycott" certain things? because someone named Captain Boycott once carried out that action, and his name became attached. Similarly the flowers "fuchsia" and "bougainvillea" and "poinsettia", the concept of "maneuvering", the "algorithms" that computers use to allow you to web-surf and find the sources of each of these; and many more. The technical term is "eponym".

What then was the accursed thing that Achan took? See Drummond for the zodiacal details (and take them, given that we are at Yericho, with a large pinch of Dead Sea salt). Much better, I believe, to think of the word Cherem as a Yehudit equivalent of the word fatwa, and then think Salman Rushdie. Most Brits today, if you say fatwa, think it means a death sentence, because that was the fatwa issued against Rushdie when he published "The Satanic Verses"; but a fatwa is simply a legal decision by a Moslem cleric or religious court (at the United States Supreme Court it is called "an opinion"), which happened in that instance to be a death sentence for blasphemy and apostasy. The likelihood in the case of Achan is that a Cherem had been pronounced before the taking of Yericho, and that Achan broke that Cherem. From the text we can deduce that the Cherem would have been a prohibition against eating food, or perhaps taking booty, in other words some specific that had been prohibited by being declared "accursed", and Achan "took of the Cherem".

Cf 1 Samuel 14, where a similar Cherem is pronounced, officially by Sha'ul, though he brought the Ark for the purpose, so presumably it was a priest who issued the Cherem formally: 

"'Cursed be anyone who eats food before evening comes, before I have avenged myself on my enemies!' So none of the troops tasted food". (verse 24)

But Yehonatan (Jonathan) was away on a separate raid at the time, and therefore did not know about the Cherem; when he found some wild honey, and dipped his sword-handle, and enjoyed it...and the complexities of what followed you can read for yourself, verse 28 onwards.

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