Jacob Chanikuzhy

Who are the four most beautiful women that the world has ever seen? The chances to get a unanimous answer would be almost nil. However, the Jewish rabbis had the answer: Sara, Abigail, Esther and Rahab. The answer is surprising because the fourth among these names – Rahab – was a prostitute. She was a Canaanite who lived in Jericho. We find her first in the Book of Joshua (Joshua 2,1ff.).
Joshua sent two men to spy in Jericho. His intention might have been to assess the fortification of the city in order to plan a strategy to capture it. Some would wonder why Joshua sent the spies at all. God had promised him to give the land of Canaan to the Israelites. Then sending the spies to Canaan would appear as Joshua’s lack of confidence in the divine promise. Some think that Joshua trusted more on his own military strategies than on divine plan. This need not be the case. The fact that God promised the land of Canaan to Israelites does not mean that they needed to do nothing to possess it. Rather, divine assurance should have given them strong motivation to do with full confidence all that in their capacity to achieve that divine promise. Joshua might have remembered Moses’ act of sending spies to Canaan.
The spies sent by Moses went to the house of Rahab, a prostitute. Some interpreters find it very difficult to digest the idea that the Israelite spies went to the house of a prostitute. Hence, they suggest that the Hebrew word (zonah) translated as harlot can also be translated as innkeeper and so she was just an innkeeper, not a prostitute. Some others think that although she was a harlot in the past, she was no longer a prostitute at the time when the spies went to her house.
However, mainline scholars do not agree with these suggestions. In their view it is quite understandable why the Israelite spies went to the home of a harlot. All the strangers entering the town were under the surveillance as the later events illustrated. Hence in all likelihood the spies wanted to avoid any public appearance and instantly sought for a place of hiding. The home of a harlot was the logical place where they could expect an easy access. It was also a place where they could gather some intelligence since she might have had contacts with different sorts of people. There is no indication in the bible that the spies approached her for some sexual services.
The reason why some scholars hesitate to admit that Rahab was a harlot is their judgement that prostitution is morally wrong. They judge her exclusively from the point of view of sexual ethics. In the Ancient Near East as well as in the contemporary world, the common causes of prostitution were poverty, and debt slavery. They were the victims of unjust or even criminal economic and political systems. Rahab thus appears as the one who was thrown to the streets to sell her body to buy bread for her family. She was full of grievance against the existing social system and the king of Jericho who was the guardian and chief beneficiary of this exploitative system. This explains why she turned such a sincere and enthusiastic alley to the Israelite spies. Cooperating with the Israelites meant for her freedom from slavery. The biblical text alludes to the freedom gained by Rahab and her household by narrating this story in the context of the season of Passover feast which commemorates the freedom gained by the Israelites from Egyptian slavery (Rahab hid them under the stalks of flax which was harvested just before the Passover. Binding the scarlet cord on the window reminds one of the blood smeared on the doorposts of the Israelites in Egypt that caused the angel of death to pass over the Israel homes).
In the story Rahab, a sinner and slave, turns out to be the Saviour of the spies, members of the chosen people. By helping them, she and her household was saved from slavery and death. Moreover, God has so elevated this sinner to become the ancestress of the Messiah himself (Mt 1,5-6). Thus, the story of Rahab beautifully narrates how God saved a sinner woman, and how God instrumentalized her to save his own people and made her a link that connected her to Jesus, the Saviour of the world.