When Achan took the banned spoil from Jericho, the book of Joshua describes his crime with a strange fivefold repetition. They have transgressed my covenant which I commanded them; they have even taken of the accursed thing, and have also stolen, and dissembled also, and have also put it among their own stuff (Joshua 7:11). Five times the word also. The sages of the Talmud noticed.
Rav Illa, speaking in the name of Rav Yehudah ben Mispartha, taught that the fivefold also is not decorative. Each also points to one of the Five Books of Moses. Achan's theft was not a single sin but a fivefold one. In taking the banned cloak and the silver and the gold, he had transgressed against Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy at once. The whole Chumash was bruised by what one man did in the tent of one looted city.
The same Rabbi pressed even further. Achan had also obliterated the sign of the covenant in his own flesh, the mark of circumcision. He reasoned from the language itself. Of Achan it is written, they have transgressed my covenant, and of circumcision it is written, he has broken my covenant (Genesis 17:14). The shared phrase joins the two. Whoever steals from the herem has also erased the mark of Abraham.
This passage from Sanhedrin 44a, preserved in Harris's 1901 anthology of Hebraic Literature, teaches that sin is rarely contained. A single hidden act, small enough to hide under a tent floor, can ripple outward until the whole Torah and the covenant itself are implicated.