Stories I did not learn in Sunday School: Rahab

Time to awaken from my slumber and put words into ink. What will follow in the next few blogs are biblical stories that have largely been ignored or bowdlerized I suspect because we don’t know what to do with them.

As Jewish legend^[1] would have it, she was one of the 4 most beautiful women in the world and an innkeeper who ran her business with "benefits." With honorable mention in both biblical testaments she is is identified as a prostitute, or a harlot (KJV) as some translations prefer, someone with her ear to the ground and a convincing liar.  From the root meaning to be wide or broad, Rahab was her name, a name that was also a stand in for the great sea serpent Leviathan and for treacherous Egypt. (job 26:12, Isa. 30.1) So, we are forgiven if we are more than a little surprised when we trace her genealogy and discover Jesus himself is a descendant. (Matthew 1:4-6).

A brief recap: For forty years Israel has been encamped near the city of Jericho and from the perspective of Israel the gateway to the Promised land. Promised maybe but already occupied. Jericho a walled city of Canaanites stands in their path. Forty years earlier 12 spies were sent into Jericho to scout out the city and only two, Joshua and Caleb came back with a positive report. The other ten returned terrified. Now four decades later everyone then is dead except Joshua and Caleb. Now a new generation of Israelites are encamped and ironically they now inspire panic among the Canaanites. Joshua, Israel’s now defacto leader sends this time only 2 spies to scout out the city. As foreigners, the spies are not given a welcome package. Their presence is fraught with danger, so they hide out chez Rahab – in hindsight perhaps not one of the best places to hide. When the King of Jericho hears rumors that spies are in the land his first-place place of inquiry is Rahab’s “inn”, located on the wall of the city.  Rahab our antiheroine lies to the King and with a classic move of deception, says “they went that away." In the end her actions save her life and that of her family and in the newer testament she is acknowledged for her faith and cunning. (Hebrews 11:31, James 2:25).

There is no shortage of duplicity in this narrative. As a child I do not recall any flannelgraphs depicting these events. There was the story of marching around the city of Jericho 7 times with the walls of Jericho tumbling down but the only mention of Rahab was as an inn keeper and certainly no spies in the mold of James Bond. And as if to underscore our contemporary evangelical discomfort with this story I could not find anyone on a google search with the name Rahab. Her name is as popular as Judas. Yet the author to the book of James holds her up as a poster child for illustrating how faith and works function together by reminding audiences that Rahab the prostitute was justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road to safety. And the book of Hebrews includes her in its hallmark chapter 11 on exemplars of faith.

While today our scales of evangelical/pentecostal moral justice may be inclined to look the other way on some offenses, sexual transgressions are rarely one of them. Would a Rahab be welcome in our church? In fact, every time she appears in both testaments she is listed as a prostitute and there is no indication in any of the texts that she was a repentant prostitute or that she abandoned her “trade”. As for early Rabbinical commentaries they suggest that Rahab was in the business from the age of 10 until the age of 50 when she encountered the spies - a total of 40 years in which she had entertained every known head of state. The only thing that could have made this story more troubling would be if it revealed she was queer. But I digress.

To relieve this tension, some early church fathers suggested Rahab was only an inn keeper – not a prostitute herself – still a somewhat dubious distinction suggesting she just arranged any rendez-vous’. Working his allegorical magic 1^st century Clement of Rome suggested that the scarlet rope that Rahab hung out her window was a foreshadowing sign of Christ. “thus they made it manifest that redemption should flow through the blood of the Lord to all them that believe and hope in God. Ye see, beloved, that there was not only faith, but prophecy, in this woman.”

Not to be undone 2nd century church father Irenaeus: saw three spies in the narrative.

“Thus also did Rahab the harlot, while condemning herself, inasmuch as she was a Gentile, guilty of all sins, nevertheless receive the three spies, who were spying out all the land, and hid them at her home; [which three were] doubtless [a type of] the Father and the Son, together with the Holy Spirit. And when the entire city in which she lived fell to ruins at the sounding of the seven trumpets, Rahab the harlot was preserved, when all was over [in ultimis], together with all her house, through faith of the scarlet sign; as the Lord also declared to those who did not receive His advent,—the Pharisees, no doubt, nullify the sign of the scarlet thread, which meant the passover, and the redemption and exodus of the people from Egypt,—when He said, “The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before you.”

No, we are not sure what to make of this salacious tale that provokes our Christian moral sensibilities.

There are however, at a minimum a few things we can note.

1. Rahab was a survivor.

Survivors have two prominent characteristics: They are shrewd, and they know how to act expediently. They do what is necessary to survive. Rahab had heard of the exploits of Israel, how they escaped Egypt and how they defeated two Kings of the Amorites. (Joshua 2:9-11) And given the strategic location of Jericho, it was only a matter of time before Israel camped outside of Jericho would come crashing at their door. Speaking for Rahab the narrator writes, “As soon as we heard it (the advance of the Israelites) , our hearts melted, and there was no courage left in any of us because of you. The Lord your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below.”

Not only had Rahab heard the stories, but she was also convinced of their truthfulness. So she planned in advance her strategy. This was not a case of God using someone unwittingly for God’s plans, Rahab was stealth in her assistance of the spies. There was shrewdness involved in her actions. But she will help the spies only if they preserve both her and her family.

It is a well-established trope in evangelical circles that there are no grandchildren in the Kingdom of God. In other words, we are all responsible for making our own decision of faith. But here in this story that maxim is turned upside down. At face value maybe there are children in the Kingdom of God based on the actions of others on their behalf. Now the family must still want to come into the home of Rahab, but their salvation is still contingent on the prior action of Rahab.

2. She didn’t play well by the rules.

Again, missing in this story is any conventional talk about repentance. She assessed the risk and chose to avoid the oncoming destruction. Rahab does what she needs to do if you do not want to die. To be sure her actions were expedient, but in the end perhaps all salvation is expedient.

She acted on the right side of history and was rewarded with a new life in Israel, by implication a new husband and a family maybe unmatched in all of human history.

Now comes the tricky part. What is the author trying to communicate to us the reader by telling this story. A tricky question that is perhaps impossible to answer. I think we are safe to assume that the story is not intended to promote prostitution as an honorable profession and a pathway to salvation. But at a minimum it does suggest that the story of salvation in God’s economy is far more complex than we have traditionally been led to believe. 

So, what meaneth this? A rule of thumb in my bible college hermeneutics was to start with what the author intended. In this story a somewhat fruitless task given the author is unknown. And of course, we do not know if the author of the book of Joshua would have agreed with the assessment of the writers of Hebrews and James who extoled Rahab for her exemplar faith and notably attached no moral judgement on her as a prostitute. But neither do they mask that she was a prostitute. And it is also notable in Hebrews the only other woman commended for her faith is Sarah the wife of Abraham, all other exemplars are men.  

Recent advances in language theory can be helpful at this point. We typically think of language first and foremost as transferring information. Sometimes it is descriptive and sometimes it is proscriptive. When it is proscriptive it tells us what we need to do. But in this instance the author is not making a case for prostitution nor are we being asked to hang a red thread from our window in times of desperation. And if it is just descriptive why include in the story that she is a prostitute.  In fact, every time her name occurs in biblical text it is Rahab the prostitute.

But there is another way of reading text that linguists have identified as “speech act”. Rather than asking what is the meaning behind a text, sometimes the most appropriate question readers should be asking is what does the text do?^[2] In other words what is the impact on the reader? In this case, the text invariably messes with our preconceived church inspired ideals of who is in and who is out. It leaves me questioning the rigidity of boundaries that have been part of my Christian background, whether the boundaries are moral or of national interest.  And it challenges us in thinking about our treatment and the place of the alien, the stranger. What does the text do? A new generation of Israelites is on the brink of entering the Promised Land after a 80 year sojourn and the first order of business is God redrawing the boundaries of where God’s people can be found.

Next Blog: Hobab

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^[1] When helpful much of the material I will use in these musings is imported from ancient Jewish midrash or the Talmud. Think of Jewish midrash as reading the white letters of the biblical text – the stuff between the lines.

^[2] For a detailed description of Speech Act see J.L. Austin, How to do things with Words. (Harvard University Press, 1975). For a Christian understanding of Speech Act and the Bible see After Pentecost: Language and Biblical Interpretation, Vol.2 eds. Craig Bartholomew, Colin Greene, Karl Moller, (Zondervan: 2001).