The BAN — a thing DEVOTED to God by being placed utterly beyond human use, which in war meant destroyed rather than plundered. From CHARAM, to shut off, seal away, consecrate irreversibly (the same root gives Arabic HARAM, 'forbidden/sacred'). Leviticus 27:28-29 (already on these pages) is the word's actual source law, before any conquest narrative puts it into practice: no devoted thing, whether property, animal, or person, may be sold or redeemed, ever — and a person placed under the ban is not ransomable, full stop, but put to death. It is the hardest concept in the conquest narratives: certain enemy cities are put under the CHEREM, their goods and often their people not taken as spoil but wiped out as an offering God alone owns. Judges 1:17 has Judah and Simeon 'put Zephath to the ban' and rename it HORMAH — 'Destruction,' the same root — freezing the act into the map. ⚠️ This translation neither softens the word nor explains it away: it renders it as what it is and leaves the moral weight of it in the note, the same posture it takes on the numbers of the exodus and the flood. ⚠️ Jeremiah 25:9 turns the word outward: 'I will devote them to destruction' (vahacharamtim) is Jehovah applying the identical ban, generations later, not to a Canaanite city but to the surrounding nations -- Judah included -- through Nebuchadrezzar's own army. A category this book had until then reserved for conquest becomes, in the mouth of the same God, a sentence on his own covenant people. ⚠️ And the Bible gives TWO occasions for the place-name this root mints. Numbers 21:3, now on these pages, has the whole nation vow the ban on the cities of the Canaanite king of Arad and name the place Chormah on the spot, in the fortieth year; Judges 1:17 has two tribes do it to a town called Zephath, later. Same root, same name, different tellings, and this translation does not choose between them. ⭐ What Numbers 21 adds is the whole sequence inside three verses — ve-hacharamti (the vow), va-yachrem (the act), Chormah (the name) — so the word can be watched turning into a place. ⚠ It also lands on a place that already had a bitter history: at Numbers 14:45 the previous generation was beaten back ‘as far as Hormah’. ⭐⭐ Deuteronomy 7:2 is the command itself, and that chapter does something no other passage does with the word: it turns it around. The seven nations are cherem at v2; at v26 a piece of silver prised off an idol and carried indoors makes the ISRAELITE HOUSEHOLDER cherem, ‘devoted to destruction like it’. The category is not ethnic and never was — it is contagious, and the last thing that chapter does is show it spreading the wrong way. ⚠ A further checkable fact about it: it is a rewrite of Exodus 34:11-16 and Exodus 23:32-33, and the root ch-r-m stands in neither of those, nor anywhere else in Exodus except the unrelated 22:19. The ban is Deuteronomy’s own addition to the material it inherited — and in Deuteronomy it is CARRIED OUT before it is commanded, at 2:34 and 3:6, both already on these pages. ⭐ Deuteronomy 13:16-18 does the thing the word was least built for: it turns the ban on a town OF ISRAEL. The vocabulary is identical to 7:2's command against the nations of the land — nothing is said about the town having become Canaanite, the law simply reaches for the Canaanite word — and the chapter adds a clause that fits no other occurrence: nothing of it may cling to your hand. → first discussed at Judges 1:17