The Scarlet Line

The first person in Canaan to confess the God of Israel was a prostitute, and she did it on her roof, at night, to two spies she was hiding under the flax. The Bible never softens her trade; it calls her "the harlot" every time it names her, in Joshua, in Hebrews, in James, as if to make sure nobody forgets. And it puts her in the family tree of Jesus.

The house on the wall

"And Joshua the son of Nun sent out of Shittim two men to spy secretly, saying, Go view the land, even Jericho. And they went, and came into an harlot's house, named Rahab, and lodged there" (Joshua 2:1). Two strangers in a walled city, and the one door that would open to strangers without questions was hers. Her house was "upon the town wall" (2:15), which is where a city keeps the people it uses and does not want to see. The king hears within the hour and sends for them. And Rahab, who has already hidden them on the roof under the drying flax, lies to the king's men to their faces and sends them off toward the Jordan.

Augustine, who wrote a whole book against lying, could not bring himself to condemn her, and was honest about why: "this was not because they lied, but because they were merciful to God's people." God did not reward the lie. He counted the mercy.

What she knew

Then she climbs up to the roof in the dark, and says to two men she has known for an hour the most complete confession of faith in the whole book of Joshua:

Forty years after the Red Sea, the story had reached Jericho, and everyone in the city had heard it, and everyone's heart had melted. The whole city knew. Only one person in it did anything about it. She uses the covenant name, the LORD, which she had no business knowing, and she says the sentence Israel itself had trouble saying: He is God in heaven above and in earth beneath. Not one god among many. The only one. From a harlot on a roof in a doomed city, to two frightened spies, with the king's men on the road outside.

And then she asks. "swear unto me by the LORD, since I have shewed you kindness, that ye will also shew kindness unto my father's house… and deliver our lives from death" (2:12-13). Not "save me." Save my father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters. The first thing her faith did was reach for her family. "And the men answered her, Our life for yours" (2:14).

The scarlet line

She lets them down by a rope through her window, since her house is on the wall, and they give her the sign: "thou shalt bind this line of scarlet thread in the window which thou didst let us down by: and thou shalt bring thy father, and thy mother, and thy brethren, and all thy father's household, home unto thee" (2:18). A red cord in a window on the wall of a city about to fall. Everyone inside the house lives; anyone who goes out into the street is on his own. It is the Passover again, forty years on, in a Canaanite window: a mark of red where the ones coming to destroy could see it, and a door you do not go out of. "And she said, According unto your words, so be it. And she sent them away, and they departed: and she bound the scarlet line in the window" (2:21). Immediately. She did not wait to see the army first.

A type of the church, Jerome says. Not a type of the good woman. The church is Rahab: the one everyone knew about, on the wall, who heard what God had done and believed it and hung out the red, and gathered in everyone she could get through her door before the walls came down.

Only Rahab shall live

The walls fell. "And the city shall be accursed, even it, and all that are therein, to the LORD: only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent" (Joshua 6:17). The same two spies go and bring her out, "and her father, and her mother, and her brethren, and all that she had" (6:23). Her house on the wall stood while the wall around it fell; the text does not explain that and neither will I. "And Joshua saved Rahab the harlot alive, and her father's household… and she dwelleth in Israel even unto this day" (6:25). She dwelleth. She did not just survive. She moved in.

Where this lands

Hebrews puts her in the roll of faith between the walls of Jericho and Gideon: "By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace" (Hebrews 11:31). James, who wants to show that faith does something, reaches for her too: "was not Rahab the harlot justified by works, when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way?" (James 2:25). Both of them say "the harlot." Her faith was the believing on the roof; her works were the flax, the rope, the lie, and the red cord; and there was never any daylight between the two. She believed, so she hid them. That is what James means, and Rahab is his proof.

And then Matthew, opening his Gospel with a list of names, writes: "Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse" (Matthew 1:5). Salmon was one of the men of that generation; some have thought one of the two spies. Whoever he was, he married her, and their son was Boaz, who married a Moabite widow named Ruth, and their great-grandson was David, and the line runs straight to a manger. The harlot of Jericho is the great-great-grandmother of the king, and an ancestor of Christ, and the Gospel writer who could have left her out put her in on purpose. The first confession of faith in the promised land came from a woman on a wall who had heard what God did at the sea and believed it. He is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath. That was enough. It is still enough, and the red in the window still means what it meant: everyone in this house lives.

Related: When I See the Blood, Ruth, The Book of the Generations, Faith Is a Verb, and Faith and Works. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.