When it comes time for Advent, the season of waiting in preparation for the coming of Jesus, we generally go back to the same passages in Luke and Matthew to retell the story. But when we’ve done that a couple dozen times, we start looking to the edges of those stories to fill in our Christmas experience. And one of the places we go is to the genealogy of Jesus in the first chapter of Gospel of Matthew.
In that genealogy, which is filled with the names of men as was the norm, we find reference to a few women: Tamar (1:3), Rahab (1:5), Ruth (1:5), and “Uriah’s wife” Bathsheba (1:6).
The stories of all four of these women are gritty and unpleasant. They show the low social standing of women at that time and there is a bleak sexuality that hovers over them like a dark cloud. Things are far from perfect for women now, but they were much worse back then.
Of those four, it’s Rahab that I want to focus on here.
The name Rahab shows up throughout the Old Testament. We find it in the Psalms, Isaiah, and Job, not just in the second chapter of Joshua. Here are a few of them:
You crushed Rahab like one of the slain; with your strong arm you scattered your enemies (Ps. 89:10).
Awake, awake, arm of the Lord, clothe yourself with strength! Awake, as in days gone by, as in generations of old. Was it not you who cut Rahab to pieces, who pierced that monster through? (Isaiah 51:9)
By his power he churned up the sea; by his wisdom he cut Rahab to pieces (Job 26:12).
References to the sea and to being cut to pieces make these passages confusing for the casual Bible reader. But a little digging points to stories about another Rahab, a mythical sea dragon of Canaanite religion. This Rahab was an anti-creation monster, a force for chaos in the world. And there must have been some telling of a creation story that included Yahweh defeating this chaos monster as he brought order to the world. We don’t see that at all in Gen. 1, where all God does is speak and the cosmos come to be in an orderly way.
But here’s the point: The Rahab of Joshua 2 was named after a false god. She was named after one of Yahweh’s rivals. She was named after a terrible goddess whose religion stood in contrast to and in defiance of Yahweh. Canaanite religion was carved into her identity because of her name. This would have been a huge obstacle in her joining with the armies of Yahweh as she did in Joshua 2.
The second thing about Rahab was that she was a prostitute. Now, she wasn’t a brothel prostitute, like we have in our imaginations. She was a temple prostitute. They didn’t really have brothel prostitution back then. Pretty much all prostitution took place at a temple or a shrine dedicated to some god or goddess. They didn’t need brothels because the temples provided all of the prostitutes that were wanted.
Therefore, to visit Rahab was to take part in the worship of a false god or goddess. This makes the meaning of her name that much more significant. We don’t know, but it’s possible that the goddess she served was the Rahab she was named for. (By the way, in the Tamar story, there’s the problem of idol worship and not just of sexual indiscretion, since Tamar took on the role of a prostitute in that story.) Now, all this was socially acceptable and even honored in the ancient Near East. Back then, they engaged in what has been called the hieros gamos, where sex acts with temple prostitutes were considered sacred and an integral part of their worship. Because of that, Rahab would have been considered sacred. It’s totally twisted. But even so, because of it Rahab didn’t suffer the degradation that modern sex slaves do.
This is why Rahab was known by the king of Jericho. In fact, he sends a messenger to her (Josh. 2:3). How did he know her? He probably engaged in sex with her as the king of the city. Yep, that was actually part of the job of kings back then. In fact, it’s possible that she was the main prostitute of the local shrine and that each year at a particular feast day the two of them engaged in the hieros gamos together in public as part of a religious ceremony requesting the gods to provide fertility to the crops and animals of the city.
The fact that she had a nice house on the city wall speaks to her wealth and social status in the city. Religiously and socially, Rahab wasn’t an outcaste. She was at the center of things.
All of that makes her treason against Jericho that much deeper of a betrayal. She was key to the worship and civic life of Jericho and yet she turned her back on her god and her king and her community in order to embrace the God of the Hebrews. That was huge!
There are a few other details about her life that we pick up from Matt. 1 and the book of Ruth.
After escaping the ruin of Jericho, she married a Hebrew man named Salmon. She got a new start in a new community. There were so many obstacles to this marriage and this embrace of her by the Hebrew community regardless of her help of Joshua’s spies. She had been dedicated to a false god. She was not of Hebrew blood. She had been a prostitute and unlike the Canaanites, the Hebrews looked down on this. She was a financial ruin, having left everything behind she had when she escaped from Jericho. Despite all these things and more, some Hebrew man chose her as his wife.
Not only that, she was the mother of Boaz who became the husband of Ruth as we see in the short but beautiful book of Ruth. Despite everything she’d done and had done to her in her life as a temple prostitute, she taught her son how to respect women. In a key moment in the story of Ruth, the desperate widow Ruth offers herself to Boaz sexually (that’s what “uncover his feet” really means in Ruth 3:4). But Boaz doesn’t take advantage of the situation. Instead, he sets aside her sexual invitation and makes arrangements to marry her first. This is a radical reversal in Rahab’s life and thereby in the life of her family.
All of this together speaks of God’s ability to turn lives upside-down and spin them around in ways no one would ever imagine. Rahab was imbedded and, well, in bed with Jericho and its religion as a prostitute in service of some false god. But she gave it all up for a chance to become a part of Yahweh’s covenant people. And when she did so, she didn’t gain wealth. What she gained was a new Lord, a new community, a new way of life, and a new family. And in the process, she became an important part of God’s Story, aiding his people in Jericho and preparing the way for the birth of Jesus.