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Joshua 2:1-14
Rahab and the Spies
1Then Joshua son of Nun secretly sent two spies from Shittim. “Go, look over the land,” he said, “especially Jericho.” So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there.
2 The king of Jericho was told, “Look, some of the Israelites have come here tonight to spy out the land.” 3 So the king of Jericho sent this message to Rahab: “Bring out the men who came to you and entered your house, because they have come to spy out the whole land.”
4 But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them. She said, “Yes, the men came to me, but I did not know where they had come from. 5 At dusk, when it was time to close the city gate, the men left. I don’t know which way they went. Go after them quickly. You may catch up with them.” 6 (But she had taken them up to the roof and hidden them under the stalks of flax she had laid out on the roof.) 7 So the men set out in pursuit of the spies on the road that leads to the fords of the Jordan, and as soon as the pursuers had gone out, the gate was shut.
8 Before the spies lay down for the night, she went up on the roof 9 and said to them, “I know that the Lord has given this land to you and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you. 10 We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Amorites east of the Jordan, whom you completely destroyed. 11 When we heard of it, our hearts melted in fear and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.
12 “Now then, please swear to me by the Lord that you will show kindness to my family, because I have shown kindness to you. Give me a sure sign 13 that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them—and that you will save us from death.”
14 “Our lives for your lives!” the men assured her. “If you don’t tell what we are doing, we will treat you kindly and faithfully when the Lord gives us the land.”
A number of times since I’ve been pastoring churches, people have told me they made a resolution to read the whole Bible from beginning to end, but then gave it up in Joshua or Judges. These are hard books for modern readers to deal with. The Book of Joshua is an account of the conquest by the Hebrew people of the promised land. And Judges is about the violent and chaotic life in that promised land before the rise of a national government.
Our reading for today comes from Joshua, which includes a number of ‘war stories,’ some of which are disturbingly violent. But in spite of the violent content, some of the stories in Joshua are surprisingly relevant to our lives of faith in the 21st century. And today’s reading is one of them.
Just to set the scene, Joshua was the successor to Moses as the leader of the chosen people after Moses died. So that means Joshua led the invasion of the promised land. The Canaanites and others who were living in the promised land didn’t care about God’s covenant with the Israelites, and they no intention of handing over their homeland without a fight. So that’s why the Book of Joshua includes so many accounts of the military conflict that enabled the Israelites to take possession of the land that had been promised to their ancestors.
And some of those accounts are almost gruesome in their violence. That’s what stops some modern readers. They can’t deal with a book that says God instructed the Israelites to exterminate every man, woman and child in some Canaanite towns. They ask, “Can this be the same God who came into the world in the form of Jesus? The same God who loved the world so much he went to the cross to reconcile it to himself?”
These strike me as fair questions. So it seems like we should take the time to reflect a little on the Book of Joshua when it comes up in the lectionary. There are a few things we need to keep in mind about this book and other historical books like Judges and the books of Samuel and Kings and Chronicles.
First of all, it’s important to keep in mind that these books were compiled centuries after the events they describe. Three thousand years ago, there were no pictures or video of the battles, and probably not even any scribes watching and taking notes on what really happened. Instead, the stories of these events would have circulated orally for some time before scribes wrote them down. Then they could have been revised over the centuries before they reached their final form. Some scholars say the core of the Old Testament probably didn’t take its final form until the Babylonian exile, which was probably at least six or seven centuries after the Israelites reached the promised land.
Over those centuries, the Hebrew people probably did a lot of thinking about the historical events that are reported in the Book of Joshua. They did a lot of “theological reflection.” So what wound up being written down wasn’t really history the way we understand it – with footnotes and fact-checking and so on. What wound up in the historical books of the Old Testament was a mixture of history and theological interpretation of that history. The stories tell what happened, but they also tell how the Israelites understood the theological meaning of what happened.
For instance, by the time these books were compiled, one of the greatest problems the Hebrews had is that people kept falling into the worship of the gods of their Canaanite neighbors. There were even times when pagan idols were set up in the temple in Jerusalem. So it’s easy to imagine that in retrospect, the Israelites might have concluded that they should have got rid of all the Canaanites when they took over the land. And once you reach that conclusion, it’s not a stretch to conclude that God really wanted them to get rid of the Canaanites – every man, woman and child. And once you come to that conclusion, your historical accounts are going to reflect that interpretation.
In today’s passage, we have the story of how a prostitute named Rahab helped the Hebrew army conquer the Canaanite city of Jericho. When Joshua sent spies into Jericho to gather intelligence for the invasion, the spies were noticed, but were hidden by Rahab. Rahab had concluded that God was with the Israelites, so she threw in her lot with them. And because she did that – because she chose to help the Israelites and their God – Rahab and her family were spared during the conquest of Jericho and came under the protection of the Israelite people.
And by the way, Rahab is actually mentioned in the first chapter of the New Testament – in the Gospel of Matthew. In the genealogy of Jesus, she is identified as the great-grandmother of King David and as such, an earthly ancestor of Jesus.
So it’s interesting that the Israelites remembered that at a critical point in their history, a woman who was a prostitute played a crucial role in that history, and that she was granted God’s favor in spite of her unacceptable profession. In terminology that would become a central idea of the Christian faith a thousand years later, Rahab was saved from her sinful life by the grace of God. She was forgiven and accepted by God as one of his own people.
That’s one of the reasons why it’s important for followers of Jesus to give serious thought and study to the books of the Old Testament – even the ones that can seem violent and disturbing. Because when we face the fact that some of the stories are closer to what we might consider theological reflection than real history, we sometimes find themes that we can recognize as central aspects of the relationship between God and humankind. In this case, it’s the theme of grace. And that’s a theme that would be illustrated most powerfully by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus when he appeared among us in human form.
Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for those who interpreted and passed down the stories of your relationship with your people. Guide us as we try to sift out of them the principles that still inform our relationship with you in Jesus. Amen.
Blessings,
Henry
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