Rahab: Eternal Prostitute or Israel's Gatekeeper?

Reexamining the biblical memory

One of the Old Testament narratives my thesis will address is Joshua 2—the story of Rahab and the spies.

Specifically, I am examining the narrative through the lens of liminality. In other words, as a transitional or “threshold” narrative, where Rahab’s actions—her confession of loyalty to YHWH and her hesed toward the covenant people displayed in her daring actions to protect the spies—move her across a social threshold resulting in a change in status from prostitute to marriage and motherhood, and a place in the genealogy of Jesus. Interestingly, Rahab’s story is full of physical thresholds: a gate, a window, a wall, and a river.

While writing my thesis proposal, I received my pre-ordered copy of Wilda Gafney’s Womanist Midrash Volume 2: A Reintroduction to the Women of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. I turned immediately to chapter 1 (“Joshua: War on Women”).

Regarding Rahab, Gafney writes:

The text doesn’t seem to care how she ended up, either sold or selling herself, or how she may have even sold other women and girls or have had some male employees.

However, what the text does make clear is that Rahab is the deliverer of her people, her family…Determined, Rahab succeeds in saving many of her people as she can. Yet she is remembered as a whore, slut-shamed by the Bible and its readers for all time. Using my sanctified imagination, I can imagine Rahab, looking at her people in the eye after she saved their behinds, saying, “Now, who are you calling a whore? This whore is your savior.”¹

I remember reading the first Womanist Midrash and being stricken by her intelligence, humor, her mastery of the Hebrew language, her level of scholarship, and most of all, the stories born from her “sanctified imagination.” I had never read anything like it. So when I learned that a second volume was in the works, I pre-ordered and hoped it would arrive in time to include it in my thesis proposal. It showed up on my front porch two days before the deadline.

I devoured the first chapter while letting Gafney’s imagination and storytelling shepherd my own visions of what life might have been like for this marginal woman who not only held a temporal, liminal status of prostitute—she also lived inside the liminal space of the city wall. But her assumption that the Bible has “slut-shamed” Rahab for all time bothered me. Is this a true picture of the biblical memory?

Under Gafney’s tutelage, I used my own sanctified imagination to explore another possibility for Rahab and the enduring, shameful label superglued to her name in Scripture. One that might have more to do with Israel’s “prostitution” than Rahab’s.

With that said, here are some preliminary thoughts and modified excerpts from my thesis proposal. This is not a deep dive, just a theory I’m exploring. It is not the main argument of my thesis but rather a brief excursus. But it was through the lens of liminality that I discovered there might be a connection we have missed that the biblical authors didn’t—Rahab as Israel’s gatekeeper.

“Abraham’s Gate.” Bronze Age gate at Tel-Dan, northern Israel. And the new logo picture for my newsletter.

In Studying the Ancient Israelites: A Guide to Sources and Methods, Victor H. Matthews asserts that liminality was an important concept in ancient societies, including its symbolism imbedded within city gates which must be passed through for one’s status to change from outsider to insider.² Liminal space, however, is not limited to physical spaces and objects. Matthews describes social liminality as “neither this nor that,” as liminal persons no longer hold a particular status or identity but have not yet reached their new status and identity.³ It is the in-between. But liminal spaces, or thresholds, alert us that change is on the horizon.

Social categories such as prostitute, widowhood, marriage, and motherhood are literal and symbolic stages of liminality that may be temporary or permanent.⁴ In examining the narratives of “outsiders” considered marginal to some degree or another, it is important to understand the difference between a marginal space and a liminal space as one does not necessarily determine the other. The story of Rahab in Joshua 2 is one example of a marginal, liminal person in a marginal, liminal space on the threshold of a major change in status.

Rahab has long been regarded as a heroine of faith despite her enduring identification of “prostitute,” appearing three times in Joshua 6, and twice in the New Testament (Heb 11:31; James 2:25). Frymer-Kensky, however, points out that “prostitute” is not a judgement, bur rather an identification. It also explains why Rahab lives where she does—inside the city wall near the gate, possibly running a tavern-brothel. As a woman, prostitute, and Canaanite she is “triply marginalized.”⁵

Significant thresholds in Rahab’s story include the gate and wall of Jericho, which was itself a threshold city on the border of Canaan and Moab, and the window of her house through which the spies descend to safety. In the absence of an open gate, Rahab, which means “wide” or “broad,” opens her window, a “gate” she controls and where she keeps watch for the spies.

Richard Hess’s commentary on Joshua details Rahab’s character of courage, faithfulness, and trustworthiness. Through careful attention to the text, he argues that Rahab was completely chaste in her interaction with the spies.⁶

Gafney, on the other hand, states the opposite. Based on Hebrew words in the narrative that are often associated with sexual intercourse (בוֹא and שׁכב), she proposes that the spies entered Rahab’s house for sex before beginning their mission—which quickly derailed at Rahab’s directive. The spies never actually spied out (lit. “look over”) the land. Did they instead “look over” Rahab or other women in her brothel-tavern? We don’t know.

What we do know about the spies is their original location. They were in Shittim. This is no minor detail. Shittim is the place where “Israel yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor” when the Israelite men committed sexual immorality and idolatry with the Moabite women (Num 25). Things did not go well. The unfaithful were executed, and one brazen couple who walked in and went after it in front of the whole camp was impaled by Phineas, to whom, rather bizarrely, God extended a covenant of peace and a lasting priesthood.

Idolatry and sexual immorality are big no-no’s in the Hebrew Bible (cf. Acts 15:19-21). The events at Shittim were a very bad biblical memory. They are also textually linked with Rahab.

As we juxtapose these two Shittim stories, Rahab’s position, profession, and name take on a new significance. Rahab is a prostitute, zonah, and the word for Israel’s faithlessness at Shittim is zanah.⁷

Thinking back to Womanist Midrash, one reason I admire Reverend Gafney is her ability to zoom in on a woman in Scripture, pull her off of the page, and a shape a three-dimensional human being with a story, a mind, feelings, a family, a purpose, and a well-deserved place in history. She ensures modern readers remember the forgotten.

But this is not where I excel. I am a big-picture thinker. I prefer to zoom out and search the outer boundaries of stories for the ends of connecting threads, and Shittim is one of those threads. Through the lens of liminality, Shittim alerts us to Israel’s deliverance and freedom that plunges into their temporal, liminal state of prostitute, while Rahab’s temporal, liminal state of prostitute rises to deliverance and freedom.

I’m going to lean towards Hess here since the text is ambiguous, but it seems that Rahab the prostitute, when encountered by the spies, is not interested in sex, but in abandoning her home and identity and saving her family. Through her own agency and fortitude, she “passes through” (pushes through?) her liminal space with an astounding confession of loyalty in the language of a treaty, echoing Moses across the liminal boundary of the Jordan River.

In Joshua 6, the oath is kept, Rahab and her family are saved, and Jericho is destroyed along with its gates, walls, and windows. Thinking back to Victor Matthews’ point that symbolism imbedded within city gates must be passed through for one’s status to change from outsider to insider, it’s interesting to note that after Rahab passes through, there is no opportunity for return. The thresholds to her old life are destroyed. Her new status as “insider” in Israel is permanent.

Rahab and her family survive only to wind up “outside the camp,” but I think it’s safe to say this is another temporal, liminal space—the period of purification. Some ritually impure people were sent outside the camp, usually for seven days, but not permanently excluded from the community (Lev. 14:8, Num. 12:14-15). I believe this was the case for Rahab and her family, considering her eventual marriage to a man named Salmon, to whom she bore a son named Boaz, who married a woman named Ruth, who had a son named Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of King David (Mt. 1). Rahab saved her own Canaanite family from the destruction of Jericho and, true to her name, widened the household of Israel.

So, why the lingering label of “prostitute?” It could be what Frymer-Kensky suggests—an identification that does not pass judgement. However, reading this story through the lens of liminality means that it also identifies a critical juncture in Israel’s history. Moses spent the final weeks of his life imploring them to be faithful to YHWH after they entered the land, and the looming question upon his death is, will they obey? Will they remain faithful? Or will they prostitute themselves again as they did at Shittim?

My theory is that Rahab’s enduring status of “prostitute” is an enduring reminder of Israel’s prostitution, and that the biblical memory of her fidelity while in her temporal, liminal state of prostitute serves as a warning and witness against them. If a triply marginalized prostitute can relinquish her national identity, her gods, her profession, and pledge allegiance to YHWH, then the covenant people are without excuse for their own faithlessness. I believe this was not lost on the biblical authors.

I’ll wrap it up here for now as these preliminary thoughts are getting long. This is why my professor consistently reminds me that the thesis has a 120-page limit.

In a future post I’d like to explore this theory in light of Rahab’s appearances in the New Testament, with a special emphasis on Hebrews.

1. Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2024), 19-20.

2. Victor H. Matthews, Studying the Ancient Israelites: A Guide to Sources and Methods, (Grand Rapids, Nottingham: Baker Academic, Apollos, 2007), 138.

3. Matthews, Studying the Ancient Israelites, 125.

4. Shawn Bubel, “Marginality and Liminality for the Study of the Ancient Near East,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 9, no. 2 (2022), 155-162. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/janeh-2021-0016/html?lang=en

5. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 35.

6. Richard S. Hess, Joshua : An Introduction and Commentary (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 1996.) 91-92.

7. Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible, 35.