It happened, when Israel had made an end of killing all the inhabitants of Ai in the field, in the wilderness in which they pursued them, and they were all fallen by the edge of the sword, until they were consumed, that all Israel returned to Ai, and struck it with the edge of the sword.
Another interesting thing here is that the king of Ai's body was taken down at sunset, exactly in compliance with the Mosaic instructions in  Deuteronomy 21:22,23.  In fact, all of Joshua shows this constant reflection of the Deuteronomic laws and of the commandments of Moses, which Joshua carefully honored at all times.  All efforts of Biblical critics to make a portion of Joshua "the original Deuteronomy" are contradicted and made to be, in fact ridiculous, by this constant reflection of the previous Biblical books in the pages of Joshua.  Woudstra dealt with the critical postulations that would make the narratives of Joshua out to be "etiological," meaning simply that the stories were invented by some subsequent generation in order to explain the monuments, such as the cairn of stones raised over the bodies of Achan and of the king of Ai.  We agree with the firm way in which Woudstra contradicted such false notions: