This is all very mysterious until we read on. The city was destroyed and the population massacred, but Rahab the harlot, her father and mother and brethren, were spared "because she hid the messengers, which Joshua sent to spy on Jericho."

Even across the centuries, it looks very much as if the spies did more than spy. It looks as if they also managed to undermine a good section of the wall so that the children of Israel could swiftly go "up into the city."

Sabotage, as we shall see, involves some physical act of destruction, done with an element of deception and with the purpose of weakening or humiliating the enemy or enemy-to-be. (The verb sabotage now means to wreck or undermine anything from a trestle to a tea party to a football team "sabotaged" by the clever play of a rival quarterback.)

In almost every war in history there has been some act of sabotage or attempted sabotage, by sea and land.

Midget submarines have for a surprising length of time been a favorite means of delivery of bomb or mine. As far back as 1776, David Bushnell scored several near-misses against a British ship of the line in New York harbor. His craft: an ingenious pedal-driven submersible, strictly homemade.
Ashore, one of the favorite targets of sabotage has been the railway train. In one famous episode the tables were turned and a train was the intended means of delivery. On April 12, 1862, the crew of a small Confederate locomotive called The General, hauling three box cars, stopped for breakfast at the Kennesaw, Georgia, railway station. A Union spy named James Andrews and nineteen Union soldiers who had infiltrated deep into enemy territory commandeered the locomotive. They headed for Chattanooga, which was under Union siege. Their object was to burn and blow up bridges as they went along, thus cutting off the Tennessee city from any possible Confederate relief by rail. The legitimate crew, quickly firing up another locomotive, gave chase. At last The General ran out of fuel and steam. Andrews and his troopers took to the woods. Within a week all were rounded up. Andrews and seven of the men were executed, the usual harsh fate for the failed saboteur.

Sabotage as a form of human endeavor had no name until the l9th century. One day, it seems, an angry French worker threw his wooden shoe or sabot into a steam-driven engine and it came to a hissing, grinding halt. So the word sabotage was born, the taking of destructive action with a wooden shoe.

This may be folklore only. There is another explanation from a later date. In 19IO French railway workers were staging a massive strike. One of their favorite methods of protest was to tear up the cross ties supporting the rails. These wooded supports were also called sabots, and still are.

The word sabotage has, in the stormy course of the present century, been expanded to include a whole range of devious and destructive activities. From the year 1910 when the French workers tore up the cross ties until the Russian Revolution seven years later, the International Workers of the World (IWW) recognized sabotage as a legitimate form of slowdown. Then the violence of the upheaval against tsarist rule caused it to be outlawed as a weapon of labor protest.