TEXT [Commentary]

B.   Joshua Sends Spies into Jericho (2:1-24)

1.   Rahab shelters the spies (2:1-7)

1 Then Joshua secretly sent out two spies from the Israelite camp at Acacia Grove.[*] He instructed them, “Scout out the land on the other side of the Jordan River, especially around Jericho.” So the two men set out and came to the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there that night.

2 But someone told the king of Jericho, “Some Israelites have come here tonight to spy out the land.” 3 So the king of Jericho sent orders to Rahab: “Bring out the men who have come into your house, for they have come here to spy out the whole land.”

4 Rahab had hidden the two men, but she replied, “Yes, the men were here earlier, but I didn’t know where they were from. 5 They left the town at dusk, as the gates were about to close. I don’t know where they went. If you hurry, you can probably catch up with them.” 6 (Actually, she had taken them up to the roof and hidden them beneath bundles of flax she had laid out.) 7 So the king’s men went looking for the spies along the road leading to the shallow crossings of the Jordan River. And as soon as the king’s men had left, the gate of Jericho was shut.

NOTES

2:1 Joshua. Heb., yehoshua‘ bin-nun [TH5126, ZH5673] (Joshua son of Nun). Use of the longer form of Joshua’s name here marks the beginning of his action as Israel’s commander-in-chief, as its use at 1:1 marks the beginning of his commissioning as commander-in-chief. This longer form is not used between these two verses.

Acacia Grove. Heb., shittim [TH7851, ZH8850]. Numbers 22:1 says Israel “traveled to the plains of Moab and camped east of the Jordan River, across from Jericho”; Num 25:1 gives the name of the place upon Israel’s first arrival there. Here we see Israel still encamped at “Shittim,” probably the Abel-shittim of Num 33:49 mg. It has been identified with Tell ­el-Kefrein (Woudstra 1981:69), or with Tell el-Hammam (Aharoni 1979:34, 429).

especially around Jericho. Or, “even Jericho” or, “that is, Jericho.” Since Jericho was to be Israel’s first objective once they had crossed the Jordan, there is no reason to suppose ­Joshua would have sent scouts beyond Jericho until they had taken it.

Jericho. The name probably means “Moon Town,” from Heb. yareakh [TH3394, ZH3734] (moon). Few today would doubt the identification of Jericho with Tell es-Sultan, a relatively small (about 12 acres) occupation mound, with the copious spring, Ain es-Sultan (also called Ain Elisha), just under its eastern shoulder.

the two men. The Hebrew text of 6:23 refers to them as “young men.”

Rahab. The name is rakhab [TH7343, ZH8147] (enlarge, make wide), not rahab [TH7293, ZH8105] as in Isa 51:9 mg (English “h” is used to represent two different Hebrew letters). Rahab the harlot’s name is a short form of a sentence name such as Rahab-el; but the divine name to complete it is absent. The full name would have meant, “Asherah [or Baal? or El?] has enlarged/caused to be wide [the womb].” The name was a prayer for the fertility of the woman bearing it.

2:2 Some Israelites. Hebrew was a dialect of Canaanite, a member of the Northwest Semitic cluster of the Semitic family of languages. Speaking the same language, but with small vocabulary and grammatical differences, the men probably gave themselves away by their speech.

to spy out. Here and in 2:3 the verb means to go over the land very carefully, to “dig out” the information that would help Israel succeed in the coming entry and occupation against Canaanite resistance.

2:4 Rahab had hidden the two men. Biblical Hebrew does not have a separate pluperfect form, but here as in many other places, the context calls for a pluperfect (past perfect) verb.

2:5 you can probably catch up with them. The Hebrew is a bit stronger: “Follow them quickly, for you will catch them” [or, “in order to catch them”]. Rahab’s advice implied that the king’s messengers did not have time to search her house, or they would miss the men they were seeking.

2:6 flax. This is a plant with tall, slender stems, whose fibers are processed to make linen.

2:7 the gate . . . was shut. Medium-sized cities like Jericho had one main gate, in which were two large wooden doors, reinforced with bronze. The planks of each door ran horizontally and were set into a vertical timber, which functioned as the door’s single hinge. The gate was barred by dropping a large plank across the two doors into metal brackets on the inside. Such a gate (from Iran) has been “reset” in the British Museum.

COMMENTARY [Text]

In an approach from the east, Jericho was the key to conquering the southern hill country. It could not be bypassed. As with any good military commander, Joshua needed information about his objective. Joshua sent two men to “scout out the land . . . especially around Jericho” (2:1). They entered Jericho and came into the house of Rahab, who was a prostitute. Evidence from the ancient Near East indicates women innkeepers often were prostitutes (or “madams”). Rahab the harlot was probably also an innkeeper. What kind of house would have been better suited for young strangers to avoid unwanted attention? This does not necessarily mean that they availed themselves of all her “services,” though the verb used to state that they “stayed there that night,” and the Hebrew of 2:3 (“the men who came in to you”) could indicate that. The text simply doesn’t say. Josephus and the Targums also relate the tradition that Rahab was an innkeeper, as well as a prostitute.

In his message to Rahab (2:3), Jericho’s king assumed her loyalty to the Canaanite cause, and assumed she was not aware of the men’s mission. But Rahab believed in the divine destiny of Israel, though she knew little of Israel or of Israel’s God. She realized Jericho and the rest of the Canaanites were doomed, and she wanted to become a believer in Israel’s God. Jericho was a small enough town, and Rahab was knowledgeable and astute enough to know that it was only a matter of time before the king’s agents came around to her place, frequented as it was by townsmen and strangers alike. Preparing for that moment, Rahab already had hidden the spies on the flat roof of her house, under the flax stalks she had laid out there to dry.

Rahab’s deception leaps out at the modern Western reader. In her own culture, however—and in Israel’s, also—“truth” was more importantly defined, not as “agreement with fact,” but as “loyalty toward the neighbor and the Lord” (Woudstra 1981:71). Similar examples of such loyalty that involved deceptive speech toward others who intended harm are the Hebrew midwives’ reports to Pharaoh that the Hebrew women delivered too quickly for them to carry out his orders (Exod 1:19), and Moses’s request of Pharaoh to allow Israel to “take a three-day journey into the wilderness” (Exod 5:3).

City gates were shut for the night and opened again in the morning. By shutting the gates immediately after the pursuers had departed, the authorities were taking a sensible precaution. If the two Israelite scouts had not left the city as Rahab implied, perhaps they would be discovered in Jericho during the night. And wherever the two spies were, there was no need to leave the city open to any other dangers.