Advent 3, Rahab
Lies, spies, and the bloody holy
Fellow Pilgrims,
Today brings the third in a series of Advent posts about the four women named in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew Chapter 1.
You can find my introduction to the series here. The first post, by Joy Moore on Ruth and Naomi, is here. The second post, by
on Bathsheba, is here. Today’s post is from me.During December, you can support Church Blogmatics and the amazing guest authors who are writing Advent posts and get a special 40% discount on a paid subscription. Free subscriptions are always available as well.
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“Rahab,” a digital collage by Beth Felker Jones. The collages in today’s post and the entire Advent series are available for purchase as digital downloads (hi-res, watermark free), and proceeds will be shared with the guest authors.
Lies, spies, and the bloody holy
I first met Rahab in church, of all places. I must have been about twelve years old, half listening, when I caught the pastor reference “even a prostitute.” I leaned over to my dad, said, “that’s not in the Bible,” and he flipped pages and handed me Joshua chapter 2.
I was hooked. Who knew such stuff was right here in the Holy Scriptures?
First, there were spies, checking out Jericho and spending the night in “the house of a prostitute whose name was Rahab” (vs. 1). What were they doing there?
WHAT WERE THEY DOING THERE?
The preacher hadn’t addressed that part.
WHAT WERE THEY DOING THERE?
The text doesn’t explain either, just takes us to the king of Jericho looking for the spies and ordering Rahab to hand them over. How did he know they were there? It seems someone besides me had taken note of who was going into her house that night.
Rahab tells a lie; she says the spies have already taken off into the dark night, and urges the king’s men to get going if they want to catch them.
Joshua’s men are upstairs, hiding on her roof, and Rahab wants something from them. (Seems like first they wanted something from her, or from her house. Way to turn those tables, Rahab. Pretty bold of you. I’m impressed.)
Maybe they’re a little shaky, hiding in the dark. Probably they didn’t expect Rahab of all people—a prostitute and a Gentile—to preach a sermon. But Rahab—of all people—delivers a theological treatise:
“…we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan, to Sihon and Og, whom you utterly destroyed. As soon as we heard it, 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” (verses 9-11).
She identifies God in the same way God repeatedly self-identifies in the scriptures, as the one who led Israel through the Red Sea. She knows God acts in history, and she wants to be under God’s protection.
She reminds the spies that she’s saved their lives, and she wants safety—for herself and her family—when their army invades the city. Joshua’s guys promise, and then the story gets adventuresome again, as Rahab takes advantage of her window on the outside of the city wall and helps the spies crawl down, on a rope. She adds good advice about how to avoid pursuit.
Rahab will tie a crimson cord to her window so Joshua’s army will know she is to be spared. After a lot of business with the ark, a mass circumcision, and the walls of Jericho tumbling down, the invaders take the city, keeping their promise to Rahab.
Then, she joins the people of Israel, stepping into the parade of Gentiles who would be grafted into God’s people (a parade that, if you, like me, are a Gentile Christian, includes us). The end of the story is almost from a fairy tale.
“…Her family has lived in Israel ever since. For she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho” (Joshua 6:25).
Now, that’s some weird stuff—spies, lies, and blood—and I felt delighted, conspiratorial, in possession of a dark secret the rest of the Sunday school kids weren’t in on, because we don’t talk about this stuff much in church.
Why are we shocked that Rahab stands in the line of Jesus, while we pass over Joshua’s men and their choice of lodging that night?
Why do we forget that the four women named in Jesus’s genealogy are all Gentiles, outsiders to Israel, grafted into the promise?
Why do we obsess about “the prostitute” and not about her faithfulness?
A number of Church Fathers are concerned with Rahab’s lie. Augustine, who always and in every case is against lying, takes this matter up in To Consentius, Against Lying. He explains [paragraph 33] that while Rahab’s “humanity and mercy” are to be applauded, her lie is not. He does think she can’t particularly be blamed for the lie, not yet being an Israelite, and in any case we cannot follow her as a model, given that we are not citizens of Jericho but “of that city which is above and free.”
I was feeling a bit grumpy with my friend Augustine, about this, until I happened to be reading Howard Thurman (Jesus and the Disinherited) this week, in preparation for a class I’ll teach in January on the image of God and theodicy. Thurman opposes deception in favor of what he calls “sincerity,” and he offers a stunning plea for sincerity for all humans, especially those Thurman identifies as the “disinherited.” Says Thurman:
…in the presence of an overwhelming sincerity on the part of the disinherited, the dominant themselves are caught with no defense, with the edge taken away from the sense of prerogative and from the status upon which the impregnability of their position rests. They are thrown back upon themselves for their rating.
Thurman envisages a world in which the disinherited, empowered in identity as children of God, no longer offer “hypocrisy” and lies as “tribute” to the “dominant group.”
I’m not certain how this applies to Rahab, but I found it deeply provocative and moving. In any case, the author of Hebrews seems to disagree with Augustine’s assessment of Rahab, making of her a paradigm of faith:
“By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had received the spies in peace (11:31).”
James gives the story his own characteristic emphasis;
“… was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead. (James 2:25-26).
In the Scottish Journal of Theology, John Goldingay writes of how our readings of Rahab reveal who we are more than she is.1 This is true of our readings of many things, but perhaps it’s especially true when we’re reading about shady women, outsiders and foreigners.
But there Rahab is—beside Ruth and and Bathsheba and Tamar—right there in the Holy Scriptures, right there in the family of God. These women do not threaten God’s holiness.
In a poem published at Ekstasis (do go and read the whole thing!), Grace Teter writes of an encounter in which someone took her name—Grace—as sure evidence that her mother “loves Jesus.” And yet, per the poem’s title, “There are no children named Rahab.”
Teter continues:
Her name is absent from the lips of mothers as they call for their children. Her significance abandoned by the speakers from the pulpit. Her occupation admonished by the members of the pew.
Teter’s poem sings the goodness of God to the broken, to Rahab and to us.
Many in the Christian tradition have found a symbol in the signal Rahab hangs at her window.
A scarlet cord.
A crimson cord.
The color of blood.
Signaling back to the blood on the doors of the people of Israel, so that death might pass them over.
Signaling forward to the blood of Jesus, Rahab’s redemption and ours. Jesus brings us Rahab, and Rahab brings us Jesus. Like Joshua’s spies, Jesus would walk through prostitute’s doors. Unlike those spies, we know full well what he was doing there. He was inviting us all—Jew and Gentile, male and female, respectable or prostitute—into the family of God.
All that blood and mess does not threaten the holy. The holy enters into it in a manger in Bethlehem.
Thomas Merton also takes Rahab up in poetry, and he grabs onto that crimson cord:
Now the lean children of the God of armies (Their feet command the quaking earth.) Rise in the desert, and divide old Jordan To crown this city with a ring of drums. (But see this signal, like a crimson scar Bleeding on Rahab’s window-sill, Spelling her safety with the red of our Redemption.) The trumpets scare the valley with their sudden anger, And thunderheads lean down to understand the nodding ark, While Joshua’s friend, the frowning sun, Rises to burn the drunken houses with his look. (But far more red upon the wall Is Rahab’s rescue than his scarlet threat.) The clarions bind the bastions with their silver treble, Shiver the city with their golden shout: (Wells dry up, and stars fly back, The eyes of Jericho go out,) The drums around the reeling ark Shatter the ramparts with a ring of thunder. The kings that sat On gilded chairs, The princes and the great Are dead. Only a harlot and her fearful kindred Fly like sparrows from that sudden grin of fire. It is the flowers that will one day rise from Rahab’s earth, That have redeemed them from the hell of Jericho. A rod will grow From Jesse’s tree, Among her sons, the lords of Bethlehem, And flower into Paradise. Look at the gentle irises admiring one another by the water, Under the leafy shadows of the Virgin’s mercy, And all the primroses and laughing flags Bowing before Our Lady Mary in the Eden of her intercession, And praising her, because they see the generations Fly like a hundred thousand swallows into heaven, Out of the jaws of Jerich, Because it was the Son of God Whose crimson signal wounded Rahab’s wall, Uttered our rescue in a figure of His Blood.
The collages in today’s post and the entire Advent series are available for purchase as digital downloads (hi-res, watermark free), and proceeds will be shared with guest authors.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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John Goldingay, "Reading Rahab: How Criticism Serves itself Or Eats itself." Scottish Journal of Theology 76, no. 1 (02, 2023): 24-30. “she features in rabbinic works (b. Megillah 14b–15a relates how she married Joshua and was one of the four most beautiful women in the world).”