The Woman Inside the Wall

They came around the base of the mountain and saw the golden calf.

And then came another sound.

The crash of stone against stone as Moses threw the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain.

The Word had barely been given before the people entrusted with it proved unfaithful to it.

And then came the grumbling.

The complaining.

The people cried out for bread, and God answered them with manna.

Morning after morning, the wilderness filled with the quiet sound of provision—

bread from heaven being gathered from the ground.

Then—

a sudden halt.

Twelve spies had entered Canaan. Ten returned carrying a report that spread fear throughout the camp.

The people who had watched the Red Sea split open looked at the fortified cities before them and decided the people on the other side were greater than the God who had brought them there.

They refused to enter.

And the next sound would last for forty years.

Footsteps.

The footsteps of a people moving but never moving forward.

Forty years of footsteps going nowhere.

They had seen things no generation before them had seen.

And still they struggled to believe.

They had watched the sea divide and still wondered whether God could provide water.

They had eaten bread from heaven and still questioned whether He could be trusted.

They had heard His voice at Sinai and still turned toward other gods.

An entire generation would die in the wilderness.

Israel had seen the mighty hand of YHWH, yet for forty years they wandered in circles—moving, but never moving beyond the boundary line of their own fear.

But the sound kept traveling.

Manna from heaven.

Water from a rock.

A cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

What Israel experienced as forty years of wandering was also forty years of evidence—

evidence of a mighty God who had not abandoned His people.

And the evidence kept accumulating.

Kings fell.

Nations heard.

The story moved beyond them.

Across the desert.

Across borders.

Into nations that had never stood at Sinai.

Into cities Israel had not yet entered.

Israel wandered.
The Word did not.

People forgot.

The Word remained.

People proved unfaithful.

God did not.

Forty years passed.

Moses died.

And a new generation stood on the eastern side of the Jordan, preparing to enter the land God had promised Abraham generations before.

But before their feet ever crossed the river, the sound of their story had already crossed ahead of them.

The sound of Egypt.

The sound of the sea.

The sound of what YHWH had done to kings who stood in Israel's way.

The testimony had traveled faster and farther than the people carrying it.

Through the wilderness.

Across borders and into enemy territory.

Through the gates of a fortified city called Jericho.

And into the house of a woman named Rahab.

A woman who had seen none of it.

But she had heard.

Two Spies

This was not the first time Israel had stood on the edge of the Promised Land.

Forty years earlier, Moses had sent twelve men to scout the land.

Joshua had been one of them.

He had seen the land with his own eyes—its fruitfulness, its fortified cities, its powerful inhabitants.

And he had watched ten men return to the camp carrying something more dangerous than information.

They carried fear.

Their report spread through Israel until an entire people who had watched God defeat Pharaoh became convinced He could not defeat Canaan.

Joshua had lived with the consequences of that report for forty years.

Now Moses is gone.

Joshua is leading Israel.

And once again they are standing at the edge of the land.

Joshua sends spies.

But this time, only two.

Quietly.

They enter Jericho and come to a house built into the city wall.

Joshua 2:1 introduces its owner simply:

“...a prostitute whose name was Rahab.”

Her name was Rahab.

The two spies are unnamed.

But she is not.

Rahab.

Joshua remembers her name.

Hebrews remembers her name.

James remembers her name.

And yet Scripture almost never lets us forget the word attached to it.

זוֹנָה — zonah.

Rahab the prostitute.

What Kind of Woman Was Rahab?

There has been plenty of discussion through the centuries about exactly what zonah tells us about Rahab.

Was she a prostitute as we understand the word today?

Was she an innkeeper?

Could she have been both—running the sort of establishment where strangers passing through Jericho might naturally find lodging?

The straightforward meaning of zonah in Joshua 2:1 is “prostitute,” and perhaps we do not need to work quite so hard to rehabilitate Rahab's reputation.

Joshua doesn't.

It tells us she was a zonah and moves on.

But the Hebrew word deserves another look.

Zonah comes from the Hebrew root זנה — zanah.

Literally, the word is associated with prostitution and sexual immorality.

But throughout the Old Testament, that same word family takes on another painful meaning.

Unfaithfulness to God.

The prophets use it to describe God's people turning away from Him and giving themselves to other gods.

Israel was bound to YHWH by covenant.

He had chosen them as His people, and they had pledged themselves to Him as their God.

And again and again, they gave their allegiance to someone else.

Perhaps that brings Rahab a little closer to us.

Most of us may have difficulty imagining ourselves in the particular circumstances of a Canaanite prostitute living in ancient Jericho.

But unfaithfulness?

We know something about that.

We know what it is to trust something other than God—to look for security in what we can control, to seek our worth in the approval of others, or to trust money, reputation, comfort, success, family, even our own understanding to give us what only God can give.

We know what it is to say that we trust God and then arrange our lives as though something else is more trustworthy.

We know zanah.

And here we are, meeting a woman whose name Scripture will almost never allow to stand alone.

Rahab the prostitute.

Zanah clings to her name like a surname.

And she appears just as Israel has spent forty years wandering in the wilderness because of their own unfaithfulness.

The irony is difficult to miss.

The covenant people had seen God's works. They had experienced His deliverance. They had received His Word. And still, again and again, they turned away.

Rahab was different.

She was Canaanite, born into a world filled with the gods of Canaan.

Rahab had lived according to what she knew—according to what she could see all around her.

Jericho was home.

Its walls were strong.

Its gods were familiar.

Its king still ruled.

But somewhere beneath all of that, something had begun to stir.

A story.

A story about a God who had split the sea.

Rahab had only heard.

And now she had to decide whether what she had heard about this God was more trustworthy than everything she could see.

Israel had seen and struggled to believe.

Rahab would have to believe without seeing.

Like a visually impaired runner, she would have to follow the sound.

The Battle Cry of the Zonah

When the king of Jericho sends men demanding that she surrender them, Rahab hides the spies on her roof and sends the king's men in the wrong direction.

Then she goes back to the roof to have a word with these strangers from the wilderness.

I know.

The Hebrew is יָדַעְתִּי — yadaʿti, from yadaʿ, “to know.”

Yadaʿ can describe more than simply possessing information. Throughout Scripture, it can speak of knowledge that is personal, relational, even experiential.

Which makes Rahab's choice of words remarkable.

Because Rahab had experienced none of it.

So how could Rahab say,

“I know”?

She tells us.

We have heard.

כִּי שָׁמַעְנוּ — ki shamanu.

There it is.

The sound made it.

Somebody told the story.

And somebody told somebody else.

And somehow the testimony traveled all the way from Egypt, through forty years of wilderness wandering, across borders, into Canaan, through the gates of Jericho, and into Rahab's house.

The very event Miriam had sung about forty years earlier had reached Rahab's ears.

She had not experienced the event.

She had experienced the testimony.

And what Israel had seen with their own eyes and repeatedly struggled to trust, Rahab heard and believed.

We have heard.

And therefore:

I know.

But Rahab does not stop there.

She says:

That is more than information.

It is allegiance.

Rahab has heard enough to recognize that the gods she has always known are not God.

YHWH is.

And once she knows better, she begins to live differently.

She hides the spies.

She protects them.

She helps them escape.

She stakes her own life—and eventually the lives of her family—on what she now knows to be true.

Forty years earlier, twelve spies had crossed into Canaan.

Ten came back carrying fear.

Their words spread through the camp until an entire generation became convinced that the people of Canaan were more powerful than the God who had brought them out of Egypt.

Now two spies have crossed into Canaan.

And after leaving Rahab, the men return to Joshua and say:

Listen closely.

Rahab had told them:

“I know that the LORD has given you the land...”

And the spies return saying:

“Surely the LORD has given all the land into our hands...”

Where had they heard that?

From Rahab.

Forty years earlier, Israelite spies had carried the words of Canaan back to God's people and filled them with fear.

Now Israelite spies carried the words of a Canaanite woman back to God's people and gave them courage.

And not just any Canaanite woman.

Rahab the zonah.

The woman whose name Scripture would almost permanently link to a word associated with unfaithfulness spoke words of faith to a nation that had spent forty years struggling to believe.

Her words became their battle cry:

YHWH has given us the land.

The sound that had traveled from Egypt, through the wilderness, across borders and into Rahab's house did not stop with her.

She sent it back out.

Rahab heard.

What she heard, she believed.

What she believed, she lived.

And what she knew to be true about God, she told someone else.

Perhaps that is not so different from the way the testimony of God has always traveled.

Rahab did not have a spotless past to offer. She did not have generations of covenant faithfulness behind her.

She simply told what she knew about a faithful God.

The sea had opened.

Kings had fallen.

YHWH was God in heaven above and on earth beneath.

One sinner telling another sinner about the greatness of God.

And the sound kept traveling.

A Cord of Hope

Before the spies leave, Rahab asks for one thing in return for the hesed she has shown them:

Save my family.

The spies agree.

And they give her a sign.

The Hebrew word translated cord is תִּקְוָה — tiqvah.

Here, it means a cord or line.

But that same Hebrew word appears elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures with another meaning:

hope.

Not a different word that happens to sound the same.

The same word.

Tiqvah.

A cord.

A hope.

The spies are giving Rahab something tangible to hold on to while she waits for a promise she cannot yet see fulfilled.

They tell her to tie the scarlet tiqvah in her window.

And perhaps we should not translate their words, “hang your scarlet hope in the window.”

But it is difficult not to see what she is doing.

Rahab is taking everything she has heard, everything she has come to believe about YHWH, and everything she is trusting Him to do—

and hanging it where she can see it.

Joshua tells us:

Her tiqvah.

Her cord of hope.

She doesn't wait for Israel to arrive.

She doesn't wait for trumpets.

She doesn't wait until she feels the walls begin to shake beneath her feet.

She hangs it while Jericho is still standing.

Nothing outside her window has changed.

The walls are still standing.

The gates are still closed.

The king still rules.

Israel is still somewhere beyond the Jordan.

But something has changed in Rahab's window.

A scarlet tiqvah now hangs there.

And from that moment forward, whenever Rahab looks outside, she sees everything beyond it through the cord.

The walls are still there.

But now she sees them past her tiqvah.

Her circumstances have not changed.

Her perspective has.

She is looking at the same Jericho, but now she is looking at it through hope.

Her hope becomes visible before her deliverance does.

And then she waits.

Inside a house built into a wall she believes is going to fall.

That is faith.

By Faith, Rahab

Scripture introduced her to us as:

Rahab the zonah.

And while zonah means “prostitute” here, we have already seen that the Hebrew word family from which it comes is also used throughout Scripture for unfaithfulness.

So allow me, for just a moment, to hear that echo in her name.

Rahab the Unfaithful.

But something has happened in that house in Jericho.

Rahab heard something true about YHWH.

And she believed it.

“I know that the LORD has given you the land.”

And then one night, two strangers from Israel entered her world.

Two spies.

They belonged to the God she had come to trust.

And so she protected them.

She hid them beneath the flax, stood between them and the king of Jericho, lowered them through her window, and sent them safely back to Israel.

And they did not return empty-handed.

They carried Rahab's words with them:

“Surely the LORD has given all the land into our hands…”

The testimony that had traveled all the way to Rahab was now traveling back out of her house.

The sound had reached her.

And she sent it on.

Then Rahab hung her tiqvah in the window, gathered her family inside, and waited.

And Hebrews places her faith directly beside the faith of those who would soon be marching outside her walls:

“By faith the walls of Jericho fell…”

And then:

“By faith Rahab the prostitute…”

Israel marched.

Rahab waited.

Israel carried trumpets.

Rahab hung a scarlet cord.

Israel stood outside the walls believing God would bring them down.

Rahab waited inside those same walls believing God would bring her through.

Both were acts of faith.

Until now, Rahab had only heard.

But now God would let her see.

For six days, she watched the army of Israel march around Jericho.

On the seventh day, she watched them circle the city seven times.

She heard the priests blow the trumpets.

She heard the people shout.

And then—

she watched the walls fall.

Not because Israel battered them down.

Not because they breached the gates.

The walls that had looked immovable collapsed before the God Rahab had already declared was “God in heaven above and on earth beneath.”

For forty years, the testimony of YHWH's mighty works had traveled toward Rahab.

She heard it.

She believed it.

She lived according to it.

And now faith became sight.

The woman who had only heard about the mighty works of YHWH found herself standing in the middle of one.

Scripture gives us words for that moment:

Rahab had followed the sound until faith became sight.

And centuries later, when the New Testament looks back at the woman who stood inside those falling walls, it does something interesting.

It does not clean up her introduction.

Hebrews still calls her Rahab the prostitute.

James does too.

The zonah remains attached to her name.

Perhaps because without it, we might miss what God has done with it.

Scripture introduced us to:

Rahab the zonah.

But Hebrews remembers her this way:

The old word is still there.

But now something stands in front of it.

By faith.

Her past has not been edited out of the testimony.

It has become part of the testimony.

The woman whose name had been linked to a word from a family of words Scripture uses for unfaithfulness is now held before us as an example of faith.

And James does something perhaps even more surprising.

When he wants to show us what living faith looks like, he reaches back to the man we met near the beginning of this race.

Abraham.

The man to whom the promise had been given.

And then James places Rahab beside him.

In the same way.

Abraham heard God and arranged his life around what he heard.

Rahab heard about God and did the same.

One stood near the beginning of the promise.

The other had no idea she had just stepped into it.

And yet when the New Testament looks backward, it places their names beside one another.

Abraham.

Rahab.

Not because their stories were the same.

But because their faith did the same thing.

It moved.

And perhaps that is where Rahab's story brings us back to the runner we met at the beginning.

Sometimes we can see the course clearly in front of us.

We know where we are going.

We know what has been placed in our hands.

Perhaps we can even see the next runner waiting ahead.

And sometimes we cannot.

Sometimes all we have is the sound of someone who has seen what we cannot see.

A testimony.

A voice telling us what is true.

And we have to decide whether we will run accordingly.

Rahab did.

She trusted the testimony of those who had seen.

And then one night, the race came to her door.

Two spies.

Rahab did not know where the course had begun.

She did not know where it would eventually lead.

As far as she knew, this wasn't even her race.

She only knew those men belonged to the God she had come to trust.

So she protected them.

She hid them.

She sent them safely on.

Rahab could not see the whole course.

But she could hear.

And she ran according to what she had heard.

And here, of all places—in the house of a Canaanite zonah, inside the walls of the very city standing in Israel's way—

the baton was still moving.