Canter Bridge

The Bible’s unlikely cast of heroes and heroines grows by one in the second chapter of the book of Joshua, where Jericho’s village whore welcomes the two spies that Joshua sends to identify the weak links in that city’s defenses. Perhaps stopping in for a bit of warmth, the two spies find that their whereabouts have been detected and their lives placed in danger.

Some have questioned whether this unnamed lady on Jericho’s walls might have been more a respectable innkeeper than a prostitute. This is doubtful. She is identified by words that strongly suggest prostitution and in the Bible’s wisdom literature identify the paradigmatic loose woman of a young man’s dreams and nightmares. Surprisingly, she is named. ‘Rahab’ has a meaning almost too suggestive for print.

This feminine protagonist of Jericho’s eventual fall to the Israelites is no model of virtue.

It is all the more astonishing then that her collaboration with the Hebrew spies—a camaraderie that may have involved the notorious activity of sleeping with the enemy—is described in the narrative with the quintessential language of divine loyal love.

Now this may have been a quite normal way to speak of generous hospitality and solidarity in a common cause. But in an anthology like the Bible’s Hexateuch (Genesis to Joshua), the vocabulary has already become identified with YHWH’s person and character. In context, the words often translated as ‘loving kindness’, ‘steadfast mercy’, or ‘loyal love’ have long ceased to be neutral descriptors. When they do not name the character of Israel’s patriarchal and now national deity, they allude to it.

In this way, the biblical literature extends its unlikely penchant for detecting divine activity in the most marginal of human beings.

The Hebrew Bible will seldom speak in the abstractions of the theologians. It simply tells its story, in the mix prying open the prejudgments of its readers regarding who is in, who is out, and where the somewhat fluid boundaries of YHWH’s Israel really fall.