HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
Rahab is the Canaanite harlot of Jericho who saved the two Israelite spies — and, on the strength of one confession, was saved herself when her city fell. Scripture introduces her without apology: Joshua’s men “came into an harlot’s house, named Rahab, and lodged there” (Joshua 2:1). When the king’s search closes in she hides them under the flax on her roof, sends the pursuers off on a false trail, and then makes the confession the whole later tradition turns on: “I know that the LORD hath given you the land… for the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath” (Joshua 2:9–11). She strikes a bargain for her family, lets the spies down by a cord through her window, and binds in that window the “line of scarlet thread” by which her house will be spared (Joshua 2:18–21). When Jericho is put to the ban, “only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house” (Joshua 6:17); Joshua saves her alive, “and she dwelleth in Israel even unto this day” (Joshua 6:25).
Few Old Testament figures were drawn so deep into the New. Matthew writes her into the genealogy of Christ himself — “Salmon begat Booz of Rachab” (Matthew 1:5), one of the handful of women, most of them Gentiles or sinners, whom the evangelist names in the line of the Messiah. Hebrews makes her a hero of faith: “By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace” (Hebrews 11:31). And James makes her the very proof that faith shows itself in works: “Likewise also was not Rahab the harlot justified by works, when she had received the messengers?” (James 2:25). On this thin thread of verses the church built one of its most durable types: Rahab the Gentile harlot, her scarlet cord a sign of the blood of Christ, her house the church outside which there is no salvation, the former prostitute made a pure bride — while the rabbis, running the other way, made her a proselyte who married Joshua and bore a line of priests and prophets, and softened the very word “harlot” into “innkeeper.”
This page is a biographical tradition-timeline: not a life of Rahab but a history of what was said and believed about her across the centuries, set out earliest source first. Its “witnesses” are the datable sources that report on or interpret her — the narrative of Joshua and its three New Testament echoes, Josephus and the rabbis who reshaped her, and the long line of Fathers (Clement of Rome, Justin, Irenaeus, Origen, Cyprian, Cyril of Jerusalem, Chrysostom, Jerome, Theodoret, Bede) who made her scarlet cord and her rescued house the standing type of the Gentile church saved by the blood of Christ. The genuinely contested questions — was she a harlot or an innkeeper? is the scarlet cord really a type of Christ’s blood? is the Rahab of Matthew’s genealogy the same woman? did she marry Joshua? — are weighed on their own argument pages rather than settled by assertion. Rahab is the sharpest instance of a recurring biblical type — the Gentile who meets Israel’s God and confesses him — whose nearest kin are the Syrian commander Naaman (“there is no God in all the earth, but in Israel”), the Midianite priest Jethro (“now I know that the LORD is greater than all gods”), and the Queen of Sheba (who comes “from the uttermost parts of the earth” and blesses the LORD).
Related doctrines: Figures of the Hebrew Scriptures — see also Balaam son of Beor · Melchizedek · Nimrod · Enoch · Job · Naaman the Syrian · Jannes and Jambres · the Queen of Sheba · Jethro · Nebuchadnezzar · Og of Bashan · Cyrus the Great · the death of Moses · the curse of Ham · Shem son of Noah · Cain
Everything the later tradition made of Rahab grows from two chapters of Joshua. She is named at once for what she is — the spies “came into an harlot’s house, named Rahab” — and the narrative neither excuses the trade nor lets it define her. When Jericho’s king sends to seize the men, Rahab hides them under the flax drying on her roof and turns the search aside with a lie (“there came men unto me, but I wist not whence they were… whither the men went, I wot not”). Then, alone among her people, she reads the war rightly: “I know that the LORD hath given you the land… for the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath.” She has heard how the LORD dried up the Red Sea and destroyed Sihon and Og, and where her city’s heart melts, hers turns. She binds her house to the spies by an oath, lets them down by a cord through her window, and hangs in that window the “line of scarlet thread” that will mark the one house spared when the walls fall.1
The rescue is exact and total. At the ban on Jericho the sole exception is named twice over — “only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers” — and Joshua sends the same two spies to bring her out with “her father, and her mother, and her brethren, and all that she had.” The Canaanite who confessed the God of Israel is grafted into Israel itself: “Joshua saved Rahab the harlot alive… and she dwelleth in Israel even unto this day.” The harlot, the sevenfold ruin of the city she alone escapes, the scarlet cord in the window, and the confession of the one true God are the seeds of everything the tradition would grow.2
The New Testament takes up Rahab three times, and each writer puts her to a different use. Matthew sets her in the genealogy of the Messiah — “Salmon begat Booz of Rachab” — one of the four women (with Tamar, Ruth, and “her that had been the wife of Urias”) whose irregular or Gentile stories the evangelist chose to name in the royal line, so that the harlot of Jericho stands four generations above David and, through him, in the ancestry of Christ. Hebrews ranks her among the heroes of faith, immediately after the fall of the walls: “By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace.” And James, pressing the opposite edge of the same truth, makes her the second of his two proofs (after Abraham) that a living faith acts: “Likewise also was not Rahab the harlot justified by works, when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way?” All three keep the scandalous word — “the harlot” (Greek hē pornē) — and make it the measure of the grace or the faith they praise.3
The earliest datable treatment of Rahab after the Bible already begins to rehabilitate her. Retelling the Jericho episode for a Greco-Roman readership, Josephus silently drops the harlotry: the spies lodge not in a brothel but in “a certain inn,” and Rahab is its keeper — “they were in the inn kept by Rahab.” She hides the men, is spared with her family “who had fled to her inn,” and Joshua “gave her certain lands immediately, and had her in great esteem ever afterwards.” The Greek word is katagōgion, a lodging; the word for harlot never appears. This is the fountainhead of the “innkeeper, not harlot” reading that the Targum and Rashi would fix in Jewish tradition — and the exact opposite of the Christian instinct, which clung to “harlot” to magnify the grace that saved her.4 Full detail »
The Christian reading begins with the earliest surviving Christian writing outside the New Testament, and it begins already at full stretch. Clement praises Rahab twice over — “on account of her faith and hospitality, Rahab the harlot was saved” — and then reads the scarlet thread itself as a prophecy: the spies gave her the sign of a scarlet thread, “and thus they made it manifest that redemption should flow through the blood of the Lord to all them that believe and hope in God.” His conclusion sets the pattern for four centuries: “You see, beloved, that there was not only faith, but prophecy, in this woman.” The scarlet cord is no mere rescue-token but a deliberate foreshadowing of the blood of Christ — the seed of the whole typology Justin, Irenaeus, Origen, and Jerome would draw out.5 Full detail »
Arguing the Scriptures with the Jew Trypho, Justin makes the same figure sharper and wider. The scarlet thread the spies gave Rahab “manifested the symbol of the blood of Christ, by which those who were at one time harlots and unrighteous persons out of all nations are saved, receiving remission of sins, and continuing no longer in sin.” Independent of Clement, Justin adds the note that would dominate the tradition: “out of all nations” makes Rahab the type not merely of a saved sinner but of the saved Gentile — and he presses the reading as a proof drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures themselves.6 Full detail »
Irenaeus folds Rahab into his great argument that one God speaks across both Testaments. Rahab the harlot, “a Gentile, guilty of all sins,” received the three spies — “doubtless [a type of] the Father and the Son, together with the Holy Spirit” — and when the city fell at the seven trumpets she “was preserved… together with all her house, through faith of the scarlet sign.” He ties the thread to the Passover and the exodus, and seals it with the Lord’s own word to the unbelieving: “The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before you.” The trinitarian reading of the spies is his own flourish, one later Fathers would vary (Jerome makes the spies the mission to Jew and Gentile).7 Full detail »
Origen draws the figure out to its fullest early form. The scarlet sign is the blood of Christ and nothing else — “no other sign would have been accepted, except the scarlet-colored one that carried the sign of blood… there was no salvation for anyone except in the blood of Christ.” Rahab’s house is the church: “if anyone wants to be saved, let him come into the house of this one who was once a prostitute… Outside this house, that is, outside the church, no one is saved.” And the harlot herself becomes the redeemed bride — “once she was a prostitute, but now ‘a pure virgin, to one man’ she has been united, ‘to Christ.’” Origen’s reading of the house as the one ark of salvation would shape Cyprian’s; his homilies survive in Rufinus’s Latin, at one remove from the lost Greek.8 Full detail »
Cyprian turns the figure to his own fight over the unity of the Church. Rahab “bore a type of the Church”: she was told to gather her father, mother, and kindred into her house, “and whosoever shall go out of the doors of thine house into the street, his blood shall be upon him” — so “they who will live, and escape from the destruction of the world, must be gathered together into one house alone, that is, into the Church.” What Origen read spiritually, Cyprian makes an ecclesiological rule: there is no salvation outside the one house, the one Church.9 Full detail »
To Cyril, instructing catechumens, Rahab is less a figure than an example — the proof that no sinner is beyond repentance. “Fix your eyes, woman, upon Rahab, and look for salvation for yourself too. For if she who openly and publicly practiced fornication was saved through repentance…” And Cyril catches a fine point in her confession: she said only “the Lord, your God, is God in heaven above and on earth below” — “your God,” not daring to call him “her God, because of her wantonness.” The reading is penitential where the Alexandrians’ is typological, and it would feed the church’s long use of Rahab as the sinner’s hope.10 Full detail »
Chrysostom returns to Rahab again and again, and fuses every strand. She is “a pearl mixed up in mire, like gold thrown in mud, the rose of piety hidden in thorns”; her confession is faith taken “on her lips”; and she “is a prefigurement of the church, which was at one time mixed up in the prostitution of the demons and which now accepts the spies of Christ.” On her place in the genealogy he draws the great conclusion: Matthew named “Ruth also and Rahab, the one an alien, the other an harlot,” so that “thou mayest learn that He came to do away with all our ills. For He hath come as a Physician, not as a Judge.” And to slack Christians he holds her up as a rebuke: it would be “disgraceful, if you should appear more faithless even than a harlot.” Where Josephus made her respectable, Chrysostom keeps the word “harlot” sharp — because grace is the whole point.11 Full detail »
Jerome carries the whole figure into Latin. The scarlet cord is “a mystic reference to the shedding of blood” which “the harlot Rahab (a type of the church) hung in her window that she might be saved.” The two spies are the mission to Jew and Gentile — “one to the circumcised; the other to the Gentiles, Peter and Paul” — so the harlot who takes them in is “the church gathered together from the Gentiles.” Even her name preaches: it means “a broad space” or “pride,” and she who “walked the broad, spacious road to death… was later converted unto humility.” This is the reading the medieval West would inherit.12 Full detail »
Theodoret makes Rahab the standing rebuke to confidence in descent. A foreigner and a prostitute, she “relied solely on their reputation, accepted their religion, abandoned her own beliefs”; her “lawlessness of life did not prevent salvation; faith covered the wounds of sin.” He marvels that the Spirit set “a foreign woman and prostitute” beside “Moses, Abraham, Noah, Enoch, and the other saints… to establish the power of faith and repress the Jews’ conceit” — and he keeps the old figure alongside the new: “as she was given the scarlet cord as a sign of salvation, so the church through the Lord’s blood enjoyed the eternal goods.”13 Full detail »
Jewish tradition ran the opposite way from the Christian, and further. Where the Fathers kept “harlot” to magnify grace, the Targum of the Prophets rendered the Hebrew zonah as pundeqita, an “innkeeper,” and Rashi followed it (“a lady innkeeper… who sold various kinds of foodstuff”) — the reading Josephus had already assumed. And where Scripture leaves her simply “dwelling in Israel,” the Talmud drew her all the way in: Rahab “converted and married Joshua,” and from her descended “eight prophets who were also priests… Neriah, Baruch, Seraiah… Jeremiah… Hilkiah,” and “Huldah the prophetess” besides. She is numbered among the four women of surpassing beauty in the world (Sarah, Abigail, Rahab, Esther), her very name a byword for allure. The harlot of Jericho becomes the proselyte matriarch of prophets and priests.14 Full detail »
Bede gathers the two New Testament strands — the faith of Hebrews and the works of James — and hands them to the Latin Middle Ages. Reading James, he asks “was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works when she received the messengers?” and answers with her whole reward: “a sinful woman, a foreign woman, who nevertheless by acts of mercy, by the duty of hospitality, even at the risk of her life, received the servants of God… was deemed worthy to be justified from sins, to be numbered among the citizens of the people of Israel… to be inserted in the genealogies of our Lord and Saviour.” The harlot’s faith, her works, and her place in Christ’s line are made one.15 Full detail »
The Hebrew calls her an ishah zonah (Joshua 2:1); the Septuagint renders it pornē, and both Hebrews 11:31 and James 2:25 call her “the harlot” (hē pornē). Against this stands a genuinely-advocated tradition — Josephus (an “inn”), the Targum (pundeqita), and Rashi (“a lady innkeeper… who sold… foodstuff”) — that she was an innkeeper, not a prostitute, the harlotry a slander or a mistranslation. As a replacement for “harlot” the reading is weak: the Hebrew zonah, the Greek of the Septuagint, and the New Testament’s own twice-repeated pornē are decisive, and the innkeeper gloss is a demonstrable later softening (Josephus and the Targum writing for audiences the scandal embarrassed). What survives is only the smaller, plausible point that the two roles need not exclude — a woman keeping a house open to travellers may well have been both — and that the consonants of zonah can pun on provisioning; but that she was merely an innkeeper is a rehabilitation the text does not support and the whole Christian reception (which kept the word precisely to magnify grace) rightly resisted.
The oldest and most widespread Christian reading of Rahab is the one traced above: the “line of scarlet thread” in her window (Joshua 2:18–21) as a sign of the blood of Christ by which her house was spared. As a typological figure the reading is sound: it is dense and multiply-anchored (a scarlet/blood sign marking the one house rescued from a citywide judgment, an obvious kin to the Passover blood on the doorposts), and it is nearly unanimous and unbroken from the first Christian century — Clement of Rome, Justin, Irenaeus, Origen, Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, Hilary, Theodoret — a pedigree few types can match. What is overstated is only the maximal form: unlike the Passover blood, Scripture never itself names the scarlet cord a type of Christ’s blood, so the reading rests on patristic inference, not apostolic citation; the “scarlet” is functionally a marker (the cord she let the spies down by), not emphasized in Joshua as blood; and the more elaborate codings — the three spies as the Trinity, the exact hue as royalty-and-blood — are homiletical adornment, not the plain sense. The core type is genuine; the claim that the text encodes it is not.
Matthew names “Rachab” as the wife of Salmon and mother of Boaz (Matthew 1:5) — the only text that marries Rahab into Israel by name. The identification with the harlot of Jericho is plausible, and probably right: Matthew elsewhere reaches for exactly such women (Tamar, Ruth, Bathsheba), the famous Rahab is the only Rahab the tradition knew, and the minor spelling difference (Ραχάβ vs. the Septuagint’s Ραάβ) is trivial. The real difficulty is chronological: only four generations (Salmon, Boaz, Obed, Jesse) span the roughly four centuries from the conquest to David, so if Rahab is Salmon’s wife the genealogy must be telescoped — names omitted, as Hebrew genealogies routinely omit them. That telescoping is real and worth stating plainly, but it does not defeat the identification: it shows only that Matthew’s list is selective (as ancient genealogies are), not that his “Rachab” is a different woman. The identity holds; the generation-count does not.
The Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 14b–15a) holds that Rahab converted, married Joshua, and became the ancestress of eight men who were both priests and prophets — Jeremiah, Hilkiah, Baruch, and the rest — and of Huldah the prophetess. As history the claim is weak: Scripture never links Rahab to Joshua, who takes no wife in the record; the one canonical notice of her marriage makes her the wife of Salmon of Judah (Matthew 1:5), not Joshua of Ephraim, and the two are incompatible; and the priest-prophet descent is a honorific midrash reading her rescued faith forward into a glorious line, not a genealogy the Bible records. It is a revealing tradition — the measure of how completely Jewish memory drew the outsider in — but a theological honour conferred on Rahab, not a datum about her life.
The spies, the hiding, and the confession (KJV): “And they went, and came into an harlot’s house, named Rahab, and lodged there” (Joshua 2:1); “I know that the LORD hath given you the land… for the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath” (Joshua 2:9–11); the scarlet line and the oath, “thou shalt bind this line of scarlet thread in the window… And she bound the scarlet line in the window” (Joshua 2:17–21). ↩
The ban and the rescue: “only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers” (Joshua 6:17); “And Joshua saved Rahab the harlot alive, and her father’s household… and she dwelleth in Israel even unto this day” (Joshua 6:22–25). ↩
The three New Testament notices (KJV): “And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab” (Matthew 1:5); “By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace” (Hebrews 11:31); “Likewise also was not Rahab the harlot justified by works, when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way?” (James 2:25). Both Hebrews and James call her hē pornē, “the harlot.” ↩
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 5.1.2, trans. William Whiston, lexundria.com: “they were in the inn kept by Rahab… they saved alive Rahab, with her family, who had fled to her inn… he gave her certain lands immediately.” The Greek katagōgion (“lodging”) replaces any word for harlot. See Josephus on Rahab (detail page). ↩
Clement of Rome, First Epistle to the Corinthians 12, ANF vol. 1 (Roberts–Donaldson), newadvent.org: “On account of her faith and hospitality, Rahab the harlot was saved… they made it manifest that redemption should flow through the blood of the Lord… there was not only faith, but prophecy, in this woman.” See Clement of Rome on Rahab (detail page). ↩
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 111, ANF vol. 1, newadvent.org: the scarlet thread “manifested the symbol of the blood of Christ, by which those who were at one time harlots and unrighteous persons out of all nations are saved.” See Justin Martyr on Rahab (detail page). ↩
Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.20.12, ANF vol. 1, newadvent.org: Rahab “receive[d] the three spies… [a type of] the Father and the Son, together with the Holy Spirit… preserved… through faith of the scarlet sign.” See Irenaeus of Lyons on Rahab (detail page). ↩
Origen, Homilies on Joshua 3.5 and 6.4, trans. Barbara J. Bruce, Fathers of the Church 105 (Catholic University of America Press, 2002), Google Books (landing page): “there was no salvation for anyone except in the blood of Christ… Outside this house, that is, outside the church, no one is saved… now ‘a pure virgin, to one man’ she has been united, ‘to Christ.’” The homilies survive in Rufinus’s Latin. See Origen on Rahab (detail page). ↩
Cyprian of Carthage, Epistle 75.4 (to Magnus), ANF vol. 5, historicalchristian.faith: Rahab “bore a type of the Church… they who will live… must be gathered together into one house alone, that is, into the Church.” See Cyprian on Rahab (detail page). ↩
Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 2.9, NPNF2 vol. 7, newadvent.org: “Fix your eyes, woman, upon Rahab… saved through repentance… ‘Your God,’ she said, for she did not dare call him her God, because of her wantonness.” See Cyril of Jerusalem on Rahab (detail page). ↩
John Chrysostom: “Rahab is a prefigurement of the church… a pearl mixed up in mire” (Homilies on Repentance and Almsgiving 7, trans. Christo, Fathers of the Church 96); “He hath come as a Physician, not as a Judge” (Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew 3, NPNF1 vol. 10, historicalchristian.faith); “more faithless even than a harlot” (Homilies on the Epistle to the Hebrews 27, NPNF1 vol. 14, historicalchristian.faith). See John Chrysostom on Rahab (detail page). ↩
Jerome, Letter 52.3 (to Nepotian), NPNF2 vol. 6, historicalchristian.faith (the scarlet cord “a mystic reference to the shedding of blood… a type of the church”), and the Homilies on the Psalms 18, trans. Ewald, Fathers of the Church 48 (“the church gathered together from the Gentiles”; the name Rahab and the turn to humility). See Jerome on Rahab (detail page). ↩
Theodoret of Cyrus, On Divine Providence 10.49, trans. Halton, Ancient Christian Writers 49 (the harlot who “abandoned her own beliefs”), and the Interpretation of the Epistle to the Hebrews, on Hebrews 11:31, trans. Hill (“faith covered the wounds of sin… repress the Jews’ conceit… as she was given the scarlet cord… so the church through the Lord’s blood”). See Theodoret of Cyrus on Rahab (detail page). ↩
The innkeeper reading: Targum Jonathan on Joshua 2:1 (pundeqita) and Rashi on Joshua 2:1 (“a lady innkeeper… who sold various kinds of foodstuff”). The proselyte and priest-prophet descent: Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 14b–15a (William Davidson translation): “Rahab converted and married Joshua… Eight prophets, who were also priests, descended from Rahab… four women of extraordinary beauty… Sarah, and Abigail, Rahab, and Esther.” See the Rahab in Jewish tradition detail page. ↩
Bede, Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, on James 2:25, trans. David Hurst (Cistercian, 1985), historicalchristian.faith: “a sinful woman, a foreign woman… deemed worthy to be justified from sins, to be numbered among the citizens of the people of Israel… to be inserted in the genealogies of our Lord and Saviour.” See Bede on Rahab (detail page). ↩