Rahab: a prostitute and unlikeliest hero of the Old Testament
Canaanite woman doesn’t fit the mold of those usually praised by Biblical writers
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Of all the Old Testament heroes, Rahab may be the unlikeliest of all.
The story of Rahab is told in Joshua 2 and 6, where Rahab, a prostitute and innkeeper, plays a vital role in the Israelite conquest of Canaan shortly after the death of Moses. In the Christian Bible, the extent of Rahab’s heroism isn’t fully explicit until the New Testament, where two epistles praise Rahab for putting her faith into action and where the Gospel of Matthew refers to her as one of the ancestors of Jesus.
That’s quite an unexpected legacy, and for more reasons than one: Rahab wasn’t an Israelite, but, at least according to Jewish tradition, one of the most widely famous of the Canaanites. In other words, using New Testament lingo, she was a Gentile. And while her occupation may have made her one of the wealthiest of the women inhabitants of Jericho, her work as a prostitute put her firmly in the camp of the marginalized. And when we first come across Rahab, she is a woman living in fear who may have undertaken her heroic deed as much to save her own skin as out of love for those she saved.
The Biblical story of Rahab begins at a time when the people in Canaan were hearing stories about how Israelites were threatening to take over their land. As someone who constantly welcomed outside men to her home, located in or on the wall of Jericho, Rahab was targeted by two spies sent by Joshua, the successor to Moses. The spies were spending the night at Rahab’s home, and while the text isn’t clear exactly why, Rahab decides to hide them in the stacks of flax on her rooftop when the king1 sent his men to look for the interlopers. Perhaps she believed that the Israelites were stronger militarily than her own city was, and so she decided to hedge her bets by not alienating them.
In any case, she eventually helps the spies escape by letting them out of the city using a red rope to lower them, but only after making them promise that they would “save alive my father, my mother, my brothers, and my sisters, and all that they have, and deliver our lives from death.”2 The scarlet rope the spies used to leave Rahab’s home eventually became what the Israelite soldiers, after conquering Jericho, looked for to identify and save Rahab and her extended family.
And that’s the last we hear of Rahab in the Bible until the New Testament, where she is commended for the faith that led to her actions. In the letter to the Hebrews, the author3 has Rahab as just one of two Old Testament women4 in what as become known as the Hall of Faith:5
By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled for seven days. By faith Rahab the prostitute didn’t perish with those who were disobedient, having received the spies in peace.
And in the epistle of James,6 Rahab is again commanded for the actions that came as a result of her faith:
You see then that by deeds a person is justified, and not only by faith. In the same way, wasn’t Rahab the prostitute also justified by deeds when she received the messengers and sent them out another way?
But the most notable reference to Rahab in the New Testament comes at the beginning, in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, where Rahab is listed as one of Jesus’ ancestors:7
Salmon became the father of Boaz by Rahab.
Salmon in turn was a great-great-grandfather of David, whom both Matthew and Luke name as one of Jesus’ best-known ancestors.
That Rahab is listed here is surprising.8 It wasn’t customary in the genealogies of the day to list women, but Matthew here lists five of them: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba (referred to not by name but as “her who had been Uriah’s wife”) and, finally, Mary, all of whom had atypical life stories. Rahab was one of two non-Israelites among the ancestors, the other being Ruth. Although Rahab was the only prostitute, Tamar at point pretended to be one. And Rahab was one of four of the women — all but Ruth — who, according to the Bible, had pregnancies that began with means other than sexual relations with a husband.
Matthew seems to be conveying a message that Jesus was in some literal sense a man of the people: He wasn’t born of just Jews, nor just of those who had lived exemplary lives. The Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew from the very beginning portrayed as someone who came from genuine human stock.
Taken together, Matthew’s Gospel and the two epistles forcefully convey that the good news Jesus taught is for anybody, not just for the priestly class or those with the right genetic or behavioral background. Although those three books were written primarily to Jewish audiences, Rahab’s prominence in them suggests that the three authors all viewed the way of Jesus as the means of salvation for Jew and Gentile alike.
This commentary on the Book of Joshua is part of our Bible for Modern-day Saints series. Biblical quotations are adapted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain.
At this time in history, kings had city-states under their domain, so the king might be seen as having a role something like what a strongman mayor might have today.
See Joshua 2:13.
Hebrews was written anonymously.
The other was the matriarch Sarah, who was married to Abraham.
Chapter 11.
See James 2:24-25.
See Matthew 1:5.
It is the majority view of Bible scholars that the Rahab listed in Matthew is the same person as the one in Joshua. There is a minority view, however, that Joshua’s Rahab and Matthew’s Rahab are two different women. That view is based partly on a Jewish tradition that the Old Testament Rahab eventually married Joshua himself, which, according to the same tradition, would have made her an ancestor of prophets such as Jeremiah, Huldah and Ezekiel.