Among the People

Joshua sent the two men who had spied out the land back to the house where they had stayed. “Go into the house of the prostitute and bring out the woman and all who are with her, just as you promised her.” The men who had made the oath were given the work of keeping it.

The young spies went in and brought out Rahab. They brought her father and mother and brothers, and all who belonged to her. The family she had named in her request on the roof now came out of the city with her.

They brought out her whole family and settled them outside the camp of Israel. The account does not give the words exchanged when the men returned, or describe the passage from the house to the camp. It records the people brought out, making clear that the promise had extended beyond Rahab alone.

Then the Israelites burned the city and everything in it. They put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the LORD’s house. Rahab and her household had been taken out before the account describes Jericho burning.

Joshua spared her, together with her father’s household and all who belonged to her, because she had hidden the men he sent. The account follows their first place outside the camp with a statement about where she came to live. “So she has lived among the Israelites to this day.”

The woman first named in a house in Jericho is now named among the Israelites. Her story does not end at the window, or even with her escape from the city. It ends here with a place among the people whose spies she had sheltered.

Later writings name her again. Hebrews remembers her in its account of faith: “By faith the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies in peace, did not perish with those who were disobedient.” The sentence keeps both the description by which she was introduced and the act for which she is remembered.

James also returns to what she did. “In the same way, was not even Rahab the prostitute justified by her actions when she welcomed the spies and sent them off on another route?” His question recalls the welcome and the departure, the men received into her house and then directed away from their pursuers.

Neither passage supplies a speech from her later life. Both look back to the encounter in Jericho, when two men entered her house and she chose to hide them. The roof and the route into the hills remain part of the way her name is told.

Matthew places that name in a different kind of account. His genealogy includes these words: “Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David the king.” Here she appears as the mother of Boaz, within the family line that leads to David.

Matthew identifies the genealogy at its beginning as the record of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Rahab’s name belongs within that record. The woman named when the spies entered Jericho is named again in the family line of David, and of Jesus.

Joshua leaves her living among the Israelites, with the household she asked the men to spare. The later writings carry her name beyond the city where the story began. Rahab came out of Jericho alive, and her name remained in the account of the people among whom she made her home.