The House on the Wall

Joshua son of Nun sent two men out from Shittim in secret. “Go, inspect the land, especially Jericho.” They went as he commanded, and in Jericho they entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there.

The account gives her occupation before it gives anything she says. It does not tell how the men chose her house or what passed between them when they arrived. They came to inspect a city, and the first place the story follows them is into the home of a woman whose name it will remember.

Their coming did not remain a secret. Someone reported to the king of Jericho, “Behold, some men of Israel have come here tonight to spy out the land.” The report identified where they came from and why they had come. Joshua’s two men were now the king’s concern.

The king sent word directly to Rahab. “Bring out the men who came to you and entered your house, for they have come to spy out the whole land.” He knew which house to name. His order required her to bring its visitors out.

But Rahab had already taken the two men and hidden them. Before the demand reached her, she had acted on their behalf. The king’s message arrived at a house where the men he wanted were concealed, and where the woman receiving his order knew exactly where they were.

She acknowledged that they had come. “Yes, the men did come to me, but I did not know where they had come from.” She did not deny the part of the report that placed them under her roof. Instead, she gave the king’s men an account that would take them away from it.

“At dusk, when the gate was about to close, the men went out, and I do not know which way they went. Pursue them quickly, and you may catch them!” Her answer supplied a departure, an hour, and a reason to hurry. If the pursuers accepted it, they would have to leave at once.

The men had not gone out at dusk. Rahab had taken them up to the roof and hidden them among stalks of flax she had laid out there. While she spoke of a road she could not name, the men remained above her, in the place she herself had prepared for them.

The account sets her words beside that fact without softening the difference. She said they had left; she had hidden them. The king had ordered her to surrender the men, and she sent his search away from the house that held them.

The king’s men set out along the road to the fords of the Jordan. They went looking for travelers who, according to Rahab, had already passed through the gate. The search moved toward the river, while the two strangers it sought remained within Jericho.

As soon as the pursuers had gone out, the gate was shut. The way through which they had hurried was closed behind them. The spies were still inside the city they had been sent to inspect, with the king searching for them beyond its walls.

For the moment, Rahab’s answer had held. The men on the roof had been given time, though they had not yet been given a way out. Below the flax lay the secret she had kept from the king; before the night ended, she would have words of her own for the men she had hidden.