Was Rahab Really a Harlot?

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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).^a13

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?