Was Rahab Really a Harlot? - The BAS Library

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Did Rahab live on the wall or in the wall?

Rahab is a Biblical heroine. She is also, according to the text, a harlot. It all happened when Joshua sent two men to spy out the land before the Israelites entered the Promised Land. They stayed at Rahab’s house. The king of Jericho learned of this and ordered Rahab to produce the spies; instead, she hid them. To the king of Jericho, she prevaricated: “I didn’t know where they were from.” And they have left anyway, she told the king’s men. In fact, she had hid the spies on the roof.

Thus misled, the king’s men pursued the Israelite spies toward the Jordan River, and the gate of the city was closed for the night. Rahab then “let [the spies] down by a rope through the window.”

The spies had given an oath to Rahab to spare her and her family when the Israelites invaded the land. They would be released from this oath, they told her as they left, unless she tied to the window the crimson rope by which she had let the spies down.

Alerted by the crimson rope, when the Israelites conquered and destroyed the city, they spared only Rahab and her family (Joshua 2:1–24; 6:22–25).

It is true that the text identifies Rahab as a zônāh, a prostitute (Joshua 2:1), but she actually comes across more as a landlady or innkeeper than a prostitute. And the first-century C.E. Jewish historian Josephus tells us that Rahab kept an inn (katagōgion in Greek).¹

Was she an innkeeper or a prostitute? Or perhaps both?

The consonants that make up the word “prostitute” in Hebrew are znh (זנה), which happen to be identical to the consonants of the Hebrew word for a female person who gives food and provisions.² And indeed, the Biblical text does not make or imply any negative comments regarding Rahab’s profession.³ Josephus’s information that Rahab kept 063 an inn could well be an old tradition, although this does not necessarily negate the fact that she could also have been a prostitute. Josephus may have preserved the innkeeper tradition in conjunction with the folk memory of a local group who had been spared by the incoming Israelites.

Certainty eludes us. So let us return to the question posed at the beginning of this article: Did Rahab live on the wall or in the wall? It’s not as silly a question as it might first appear.⁴

In different historical periods in Canaan and ancient Israel, the city wall varied. Sometimes it was a thick solid wall, and conceivably people could live on top of it. But sometimes it was a casemate wall, that is, two parallel walls with periodic perpendicular walls forming casemates (or rooms) where people lived. In this case, the back of peoples’ houses might form the city wall. Which was intended here?

According to Joshua 2:15, “Then she let them [the spies sent by Joshua] down by a rope through the window, for her house was on the outer side of the city wall and she resided within [emphasis added] the wall itself” (New Revised Standard Version; similarly New Jewish Publication Society version). The critical Hebrew words are beqîr haḥômāh, translated in these two Bible translations as Rahab residing “within the wall itself” (or “in the actual wall”). Other translations vary: “on the surface of the wall”; “on an angle of the wall”; “on the face of the wall.”⁵

It is generally agreed that ḥômāh refers to a city wall; it thus seems that the word qîr is the problem. In Biblical Hebrew, qîr refers to the wall of a 064 room, but in Middle Hebrew, the language of the post-Biblical rabbinical text of the Mishnah, this word could mean hem, edge or edging.⁶

In Joshua 2:15b it seems the word qîr does not mean wall, but edge or hollow/chamber; hence, we could translate beqîr haḥômāh either as “in the hollow of the city wall” or “at the edge of the city wall.”

The first proposed translation (“in the hollow of the city wall” and therefore “within the wall”) would mean that the city wall in question would have been of the casemate type, whereas “at the edge of the city wall” indicates that Rahab’s house was on top of the city wall.

Which translation is to be preferred? Both translations are grammatically correct. And casemate walls as well as houses built on top of city walls were both common in ancient Israel.

The only way to reach a solution is to determine the type of defensive walls common in Israel either in the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.E.), which appears to be the period in which the story of Rahab is set, or toward the end of Iron Age II (sixth century B.C.E.), when the text of Joshua 2 is generally considered to have been edited.

Casemate walls are a hallmark of city and town walls in Israel during the later period rather than of the earlier Canaanite city walls in the Late Bronze Age,⁷ although some casemate walls are also known in Canaan during this latter period.⁸ However, during the Late Bronze Age the common practice was to reuse the solid walls from the preceding Middle Bronze Age with the outer walls of buildings at the edge of the mounds functioning as a defensive system;⁹ indeed, “in the Egyptian monuments showing Canaanite cities [of the Late Bronze Age] we can identify windows—in a solid wall there are no windows!”¹⁰ This Late Bronze Age practice of having the outer walls of houses built at the edge of mounds on top of the earlier Middle Bronze Age city walls and functioning as a defensive system in their own right is also exemplified in Stratum C at the Biblical site of Tell Beit Mirsim (excavated by the great American Biblical archaeologist William Foxwell Albright).¹¹

When the Biblical text was redacted later in the Iron Age, the predominant structure was the so-called “Israelite House” or “Four-Room House,” consisting of three long rooms and a broad room across the other three. One of these rooms was incorporated in the fortification system of the town.

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Beersheba in the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.E. is an excellent example. The buildings were “set against” the walls of the city, with the broad room at their rear serving simultaneously as part of the city’s defensive casemate wall.¹²

The question is whether Rahab’s house was built on the city wall of Jericho or within it. Was it a solid wall or a casemate wall?

A possible solution is suggested by the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that may preserve a different version of the Hebrew text. For a long time it was thought that the LXX (as the Septuagint version is often abbreviated) was an inferior text, or perhaps a poor translation of the Hebrew text, but as a result of the Dead Sea Scrolls it has now been recognized as an independent text sometimes preferable to the standard Hebrew text (the Masoretic text or MT, as it is known).^a ¹³

The first key here is that the LXX text of Joshua 2:15 does not contain the words “because her house was at the edge of the city wall—indeed,¹⁴ she used to dwell on the city wall” which constitute the second half verse in the Masoretic text. Moreover, the words “by a rope (baḥebel)” are also missing from the LXX version.

I suggest that the original text of Joshua 2:15 conformed to the LXX version, and that it had thus simply read: “Then she let them down through the window.” This statement would not have made sense, however, to an audience living in a time of casemate city walls. There would have been no window on the outside wall and the house would not have sat at a height. But it does make sense in a text reflecting the archaeological situation in the Late Bronze Age when the rear walls of buildings were set on the top of the reused Middle Bronze Age fortifications of Canaanite towns.

To make the text understandable to a reader in Israel during the late Iron Age, a redactor (editor) added the glosses now found in the standard Hebrew text (or MT).

In short, the original sentence of Joshua 2:15, namely “Then she let them down through the window” reflects a Late Bronze Age context. It had to be explained to a late Iron Age audience. Thus the glosses, especially in the second half verse of the Masoretic text.

This means that without the gloss, Joshua 2:15 reflects a Late Bronze Age tradition irrespective of when the overall narrative of Joshua 2 was written and subsequently edited. The original writer of this chapter must have had at his disposal information about the Late Bronze Age defensive system common in Canaan during this period.

Regardless of whether the Israelites actually conquered Jericho, the tradition about Rahab and the Israelite spies could very well reflect an early historical tradition.

Whoever wrote Joshua 2:15 must have received a tradition about Jericho’s fortifications in the Late Bronze Age from someone who was acquainted with this type of town defense in this period.¹⁵ Indeed, the final editor(s) of Joshua in the sixth century B.C.E. must have felt the need to explain the text to their audience by way of a gloss clarifying that “because her house was at the edge of the city wall—indeed, she used to dwell on the city wall,” and she let the spies down “by a rope.”

Did Rahab live on the wall or in the wall?

Footnotes

See “Chief Scroll Editor Opens Up—An Interview with Emanuel Tov,” BAR 28:03; see “Deuteronomy 32:8, ” sidebar to Ronald S. Hendel, “The Most Original Bible Text: How to Get There: Combine the Best from Each Tradition,” Bible Review 16:04.

Endnotes

See M.J. Evans, “Women,” in Bill T. Arnold and H.G.M. Williamson, eds., Dictionary of the Old Testament Historical Books (Downers Grove, IL/Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 2005), pp. 989–999 (see p. 990); see also Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 5.1.2.

A female prostitute in Hebrew is zônāh (the root being znh) whereas the word for a female provider of food is zānāh (the root of which is zûn= to feed). Both zônāh and zānāh are singular feminine participles (used as nouns) of the respective verbal roots just mentioned. The vowel ô in zônāh is written with the consonant wāw used as a mater lectionis (a consonant used to signify a vowel sound). However, there are five instances in the Hebrew Bible where the word zônāh is used without the letter wāw used as a mater lectionis, namely Leviticus 21:7 (where the word is used in the singular exactly as in Joshua 2:1, but written zōnāh) and 1 Kings 3:16; 22:38; Ezekiel 16:33; and Hosea 4:14 in which four cases it is in the plural. When the word zônāh is not written with the letter wāw used as a mater lectionis, the only consonants which appear are z, n, and h which could be rendered, when vocalized, either as zōnāh (prostitute) or as zānāh (a female provider of food, and by extension therefore a female innkeeper). All this means that the word predicated of Rahab could at one and the same time be read either as meaning “prostitute” or “landlady,” or indeed both, especially when one considers that the Masoretes very probably pronounced “what have been described above as ā and o in exactly the same way (probably o), since they use the same vowel sign for both. However, both traditional pronunciation and IH [Israeli Hebrew] distinguish two vowel sounds.” See J.D. Martin, Davidson’s Introductory Hebrew Grammar, 27th ed. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), p. 15.

Stuttgarter Erklārungsbibel mit Apokryphen: die Heilige Schrift nach der Übersetzung Martin Luthers mit Einführungen und Erklārungen, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007), p. 271.

For a more detailed treatment of this problem, see my Pre-Exilic Israel, the Hebrew Bible, and Archaeology: Integrating Text and Artefact (New York/London: T & T Clark International, 2011), pp. 71–80.

S. Friedeberg, Joshua: An Annotated Hebrew Text (London: William Heinemann, 1913), p. 39, where his translation “on the surface of the wall” is referring to “the custom of building houses on the walls of the city,” a custom which “still obtains in the East”; J. Maxwell Miller and Gene M. Tucker, The Book of Joshua (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), translate beqîr haḥômāh as “on an angle of the wall” (p. 26); whilst Richard D. Nelson, Joshua: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), chooses to translate this phrase as “on the face of the wall” (p. 37).

Indeed, Jastrow specifies that it could signify wall, recess or chamber, as well as rim or border of mats. M. Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, 2 vols. (New York: Pardes, 1950), p. 1368.

Casemate walls became popular in Israel only from the tenth century B.C.E. onward; see H. Weippert, “Mauer und Mauertechnik,” in K. Galling, ed., Biblisches Reallexikon, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1977), p. 212.

Weippert, “Mauer und Mauertechnik,” p. 212.

Such is the case, for example, with the Late Bronze Age northern wall of Building 315 at Tell Batash where it was discovered at the edge of the mound, and where it clearly functioned as part of the outer defensive system of this town; see Amihai Mazar, Timnah (Tel Batash), I, Stratigraphy and Architecture: Text (Jerusalem: The Institute of Archaeology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1997), p. 59.

10.

Jacob J. Baumgarten, “Urbanization in the Late Bronze Age,” in Aharon Kempinksi and Ronnie Reich, eds., The Architecture of Ancient Israel: from the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1992), pp. 143–150 (see p. 145, n. 15).

11.

William F. Albright, “Beit Mirsim, Tell,” in Ephraim Stern, ed., The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration Society and Carta, 1993), pp. 177–180 (see p. 179).

12.

See G.R.H. Wright, Ancient Building in South Syria and Palestine, vol. 1, Text (Leiden: Brill, 1985), p. 72, and G.R.H. Wright, Ancient Building in South Syria and Palestine, vol. 2, Illustrations (Leiden: Brill, 1985), p. 74, fig. 226.

13.

Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. revised and expanded (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), pp. 128 and 140.

14.

Analyzing the conjunction wāw as an emphatic particle; for such usage of the conjunction wāw, see, for example, Bruce K. Waltke and M. O’Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990), pp. 649, 652, 653.

15.

For the possibility of a defensive system at Jericho in the Late Bronze Age, see Frendo, Pre-Exilic Israel, p. 79, n. 49, and Kathleen M. Kenyon, Digging up Jericho (London: Ernest Benn, 1957), p. 262.