“So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there….” Joshua 2:1
I like to look reality square in the face before elaborating on or interpreting it. I tend to look at the text and see what it literally means to me in plain Hebrew. The text here conveys two important things.
First, Rahab was a prostitute! No need to explain, we all know what it means to be a prostitute. A prostitute is a woman who provides sexual services for money.
Second, in Hebrew it says “the spies came to her house and lay there!” What does it mean to lay there? Given that it states she was a prostitute, and then they “lay” there, one could conceivably conclude that they received sexual services from her (!). If they simply lodged there, the Bible would reasonably have used the explicit Hebrew word for lodging. But the text potentially links Rahab’s profession to what the spies did there.
Such an introduction to this fascinating character raises many questions which are not usually asked!
Rahab’s hospitality was...
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