Joshua 2 & 6 · An Iconic Story
Rahab and the Scarlet Cord
A Canaanite woman hides two enemy spies, bargains for her whole family, and ties a scarlet cord in her window — and the city under a total ban loses exactly one household, whose name turns up later in the family line of Jesus.
Doré does not draw the escape or the cord; he draws the moment the promise is kept. Jericho is burning behind them, the army fills the background, and in the middle of it a small group of civilians is being walked out alive while Joshua gestures them past. The engraving puts the rescue where the text puts it: inside the judgment, not instead of it. Everything that made the story famous happened days earlier, in a window; this is the receipt.
Two Spies, One Door, and a Deal Made in the Dark
Joshua 2 and 6:22–25, told plainly
Joshua sends two men ahead to look at Jericho. They go into the house of a woman named Rahab, whose home is built into the city wall. Somebody tells the king, and soldiers come to the door that same night.
She hides the two men on her roof under stalks of drying flax and sends the soldiers off in the wrong direction. Then she climbs up and tells the spies why she did it: everyone in Jericho has heard what Israel's God did at the Red Sea and to the kings east of the Jordan, and the whole city is melting with fear. She asks for one thing: that when Israel takes the city, her family lives. The men swear it, on two conditions: a scarlet cord in her window, and every relative she wants saved inside the house with her.
and said to them, “I know that the LORD has given you this land and that the fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who dwell in the land are melting in fear of you. For we have heard how the LORD dried up the waters of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Amorites across the Jordan, whom you devoted to destruction. When we heard this, our hearts melted and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the LORD your God is God in the heavens above and on the earth below.Her speech is the hinge of the chapter: she has the same intelligence the whole city has, and draws the opposite conclusion from it.
Jericho falls. The two men go back for her, and Joshua spares Rahab, her father, her mother, her brothers, and everyone belonging to her. The text says she lived in Israel “to this day.” Centuries later Matthew opens his Gospel with the family line of Jesus, and her name is in it.
Let none think to harden their hearts against God and prosper; for he that made man's soul can at any time make the sword of his terrors approach to it. She hereupon makes profession of her faith in God and his promise; and perhaps there was not found so great faith (all things considered), no, not in Israel, as in this woman of Canaan.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Joshua 2:11
Six Places the Retellings Drift
what the text actually says, against what the story has become
“SHE WAS AN INNKEEPER, NOT A PROSTITUTE”
The Hebrew is zonah, the ordinary word for a prostitute, and it is used of her four times across the two chapters, twice after she is rescued. Both New Testament writers who name her reach for the Greek word for a prostitute. The innkeeper reading is real and old; Adam Clarke argues it at length from Herodotus and Diodorus. But it is a commentator's inference, not the text's word.
“JOSHUA 2 SAYS THE CORD MEANS CHRIST'S BLOOD”
Joshua 2:18 says the cord is a sign, so the soldiers can identify the house, and nothing more. The blood reading is church tradition, and a very old and beloved one: Clement of Rome draws it around AD 99 and the fathers keep it up for centuries. Barnes states the honest position exactly, and this page follows him. Labelled as tradition, it stands stronger, not weaker.
“HER LIE IS WHAT SAVED HER”
Hebrews 11:31 and James 2:25 both credit the receiving and hiding of the messengers; neither mentions the lie. The old commentators split hard here and this page shows the split rather than smoothing it: Wesley calls the words sinful while praising the faith; Augustine says no lie is just and that what God rewarded was her mercy; Cassian says the lie itself earned her a share in an eternal blessing.
“SHE WAS RESCUED STRAIGHT INTO ISRAEL”
Joshua 6:23 says the young men left her household outside the camp of Israel. Barnes reads it as a threshold, not a rejection: still in their paganism, they were separated from the camp for a time, and the full welcome comes two verses later at 6:25. The text records a doorway, not a leap.
“HER HOUSE CAME DOWN WITH THE WALL”
The text has her house on the wall (2:15) and the wall falling flat (6:20), and then the spies walking in and bringing her out (6:22–23). The tension is real and the old commentators name it openly. Barnes answers that the stretch of wall adjoining her house had not fallen with the rest. That is his reading of a difficulty the text does not explain.
“RAHAB IS A FOOTNOTE”
Matthew 1:5 puts her in the line of the Messiah: wife of Salmon, mother of Boaz, and so Ruth's mother-in-law by marriage and David's great-great-grandmother. Matthew Henry had already noticed it in his notes on Joshua 2. The woman under the ban ends up four generations above the king.
The Lord your God, he is God - From the rumour of God’s miraculous interpositions Rahab believed, and makes the self-same confession to which Moses endeavors to bring Israel by rehearsing similar arguments Deu 4:39. Rahab had only heard of what Israel had experienced. Her faith then was ready. It is noteworthy, too, that the same reports which work faith and conversion in the harlot, cause only terror and astonishment among her countrymen. (Compare Luk 8:37-39.)
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on Joshua 2:11
The House on the Wall
the only architecture the chapter describes, and every turn of the plot runs through it
Joshua 2 is a story about a building. Where the flax is, where the window is, which side of the wall it opens on, and who is inside the door when the city falls: those four facts carry the whole plot. Read the house from the roof down.
TOP
THE ROOF
Joshua 2:6
Stalks of flax, laid out to dry
Flat roofs were working surfaces. Flax was spread there to dry before it was retted and spun into linen, which is why there was something on Rahab's roof big enough to hide two men under.
THE WALL, AND THE WINDOW IN IT
Joshua 2:15
Her house was built into the city wall
The window opened on the outside face of Jericho's wall. That single architectural fact is why a rope let down from it reaches open country, and why two hunted men leave the city without ever passing a gate.
THE CORD IN THE WINDOW
Joshua 2:18, 21
The same rope, left hanging
The spies climb down on a cord and then tell her to leave a scarlet one in that window. She ties it the moment they are gone, before the army comes, before the wall falls, while there is still nothing to see.
GROUND
THE DOOR NOBODY MAY LEAVE
Joshua 2:19
Everyone she loves, inside
The oath has fine print: anyone who steps out into the street is on his own. The mark on the outside only covers what is behind the door, which is exactly the shape of the night Israel left Egypt.
One house, read top to bottom. Every band opens its verse in the reader.
Two more details set the scene. Flax laid out to dry places the episode at the flax harvest, in spring, the same season the Jordan runs at flood stage a chapter later (Jos 3:15). And Rahab's own speech names her sources: the Red Sea, and the two kings east of the river. She is not reasoning from a vision. She is reasoning from the news, which everyone in Jericho had.
Now the city and everything in it must be devoted to the LORD for destruction. Only Rahab the prostitute and all those with her in her house will live, because she hid the spies we sent.The ban, and the single exemption written into it by name.
That word “devoted” is the legal weight the story is pushing against. Jericho is not looted; it is given away. Everything in it belongs to God as the first-fruits of the land, and nobody is allowed to profit from the first city taken. Into that total claim the text writes one exception, and it is a foreigner with the worst reputation in town, by Joshua's own order (6:22).
But Jericho, as the first Canaanite city that was captured, was devoted by Israel as first-fruits to God, as a token that Israel received all the land from Him.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on Joshua 6:17
The cherem, or "anathema," was a devotion to utter destruction (De 7:2; When such a ban was pronounced against a hostile city, the men and animals were killed--no booty was allowed to be taken.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Joshua 6:17-19
And Joshua spared Rahab the prostitute, with her father’s household and all who belonged to her, because she hid the men Joshua had sent to spy out Jericho. So she has lived among the Israelites to this day.“To this day”: the narrator writing while people who knew her were still alive.
Even unto this day - These words are rightly noted as implying that the narrative was written not long after the occurrences which it records.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on Joshua 6:25
What the Text Refuses to Tell
what the text does not say
This is a short, fast chapter with a great deal left out. Each gap has gathered centuries of retelling around it, and the retellings are often better known than the text. Here is what Scripture actually declines to say.
What happened between Jericho and Bethlehem?
Matthew 1:5 names Salmon as her husband and Boaz as her son. Joshua never mentions a marriage, and no Old Testament book tells the story of how a rescued Canaanite household became an Israelite family. The genealogy states the outcome and skips the road. Anything filling that gap is invention, and this page leaves it empty.
Was she still a prostitute when the spies came?
The word zonah is attached to her at 2:1 and again at 6:25, after the rescue. Whether it describes her life at that moment or simply the trade she was known for, Scripture does not say, and it never records a scene of her leaving it. What the text does instead is keep the word on her while it puts her inside the covenant.
What did the spies actually report?
They were sent to assess a fortified city. Joshua 2:23–24 gives their entire debrief in a sentence, and it is about morale, not defences: the LORD has given the land into our hands, and all the inhabitants melt away before us. What they saw of the walls, the gates and the garrison, the thing they went for, is never recorded.
Did Rahab understand the cord as anything but a signal?
“She bound the scarlet cord in the window” (2:21): no comment, no explanation, no reaction. Clement of Rome would later call her a prophetess for it. That reading is Clement's, and belongs to him; the verse itself records an obedient knot and nothing else.
Three New Testament Writers, and Not One of Them Mentions the Cord
the New Testament's own use first, then the church's oldest reading, labelled
Rahab is named three times in the New Testament, by three writers, for three different reasons. Hebrews credits her faith. James credits her works. Matthew puts her in the family line of Jesus. The scarlet cord appears in none of them.
By faith the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies in peace, did not perish with those who were disobedient.Faith, and what it credits is the welcome she gave, not the words she said at the door.
In the same way, was not even Rahab the prostitute justified by her actions when she welcomed the spies and sent them off on another route?Works: the same act, read from the other side, in a letter arguing that faith shows.
Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse,The genealogy: a Canaanite under a total ban, four generations above King David.
That last one is the gospel logic of the story, and it runs through the genealogy rather than through the cord. A woman from a city devoted to destruction, carrying the label the law used for the people Israel was told not to marry, is not merely spared; she is written into the line the Messiah comes through. Matthew could have opened his Gospel without her. He put her in the fifth verse.
Yet this Rahab was afterwards advanced to be a princess in Israel, the wife of Salmon, and one of the ancestors of Christ, Matt. i. Those that faithfully serve Christ and suffer for him he will not only protect, but prefer, and will do for them more than they are able to ask or think.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Joshua 2:12-13
THE ARTWORK
Tissot paints the negotiation rather than the rescue: three people on a roof at night, the two men listening and the woman doing the talking. He gets the geography right (the flat working roof, the city wall dropping away behind them) and he gets the balance of power right too. She has their lives in her hands, and she is using the moment to bargain for her family's.
James Tissot, The Harlot of Jericho and the Two Spies (c. 1896–1902), The Jewish Museum, New York. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The cord: the church's oldest reading, labelled as tradition
unless, when we enter the land, you have tied this scarlet cord in the window through which you let us down, and unless you have brought your father and mother and brothers and all your family into your house.What the verse itself claims for the cord: it is a sign, so the house can be told from every other house.
Within a lifetime or two of the apostles, Christians were reading that scarlet line as a picture of the blood of Christ. The earliest surviving example is Clement of Rome, writing to Corinth around AD 99, which makes it one of the oldest recorded Christian readings of any Old Testament passage. It is a beautiful reading. It is also a reading, not a statement of Joshua 2, and this page keeps the two apart on purpose.
Moreover, they gave her a sign to this effect, that she should hang forth from her house a scarlet thread. And thus they made it manifest that redemption should flow through the blood of the Lord to all them that believe and hope in God. You see, beloved, that there was not only faith, but prophecy, in this woman.
Clement of Rome· Clement's First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 12 (c. 99)
Barnes, writing eighteen centuries later, explains where the reading came from without either endorsing it as the text's claim or dismissing it: scarlet was the colour of the purification rites, so the fathers saw the emblem. That is exactly the honest position, from a commentator who loved the tradition:
The “line” or cord was spun of threads dyed with cochineal: i. e., of a deep and bright scarlet color. The color would catch the eye at once, and supplied an obvious token by which the house of Rahab might be distinguished. The use of scarlet in the Levitical rites, especially in those more closely connected with the idea of putting away of sin and its consequences (compare e. g., Lev 14:4, Lev 14:6,Lev 14:51; Num 19:6), naturally led the fathers, from Clement of Rome onward, to see in this scarlet thread, no less than in the blood of the Passover (Exo 12:7, Exo 12:13, etc.), an emblem of salvation by the Blood of Christ; a salvation common alike to Christ’s messengers and to those whom they visit.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on Joshua 2:18
The blood on the houses where you are staying will distinguish them; when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No plague will fall on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.The pattern the fathers were hearing behind the cord: a household saved, marked in red on the outside of a door.
This was like the blood sprinkled upon the door-post, which secured the first-born from the destroying angel, and, being of the same colour, some allude to this also to represent the safety of believers under the protection of the blood of Christ sprinkled on the conscience.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Joshua 2:18
Note how carefully Henry words it: some allude to this. Even the warmest of the old preachers marks the Passover parallel as something readers bring to the verse, not something the verse says. The wider sacrifice-line through Scripture has its own study: the Scarlet Thread.
The Argument About Rahab's Lie
three readings from the old writers, each given at full strength; this page does not settle it
Rahab told the king's men that the spies had already gone. They had not; they were on her roof. Christians have argued about that sentence for sixteen hundred years, and the disagreement is genuine: good men who loved the same Scripture read it three different ways. Here they are, side by side, at full strength.
SINFUL, AND HER FAITH IS PRAISED ANYWAY
And this is justly mentioned as a great and generous act of faith, Heb. xi, 31, for she apparently ventured her life upon a steadfast persuasion of the truth of God's word and promise given to the Israelites. Whence they were - Her answer contained in these and the following words, was false, and therefore unquestionably sinful; tho' her intention was good therein.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765), on Joshua 2:4
NO LIE IS JUST: WHAT GOD REWARDED WAS THE MERCY
As for its being written that God dealt well with the Hebrew midwives and with Rahab the harlot of Jericho, he did not deal well with them because they lied but because they were merciful to the men of God. And so, it was not their deception that was rewarded, but their benevolence; the benignity of their intention, not the iniquity of their invention.
Augustine of Hippo· Against Lying 15.31-32 (c. 430)
THE LIE ITSELF EARNED HER A SHARE IN THE BLESSING
This was the case with Rahab. Scripture not only recalls nothing virtuous about her but even speaks of her immorality. Yet for her lie alone, whereby she chose to conceal the spies rather than betray them, she deserved to share an eternal blessing with the people of God.
John Cassian· Conference 17.17.1-2 (c. 435)
Two things are worth noticing before anyone picks a side. First, Hebrews and James both name what they are commending, and in both cases it is the receiving and hiding of the messengers, not the sentence she spoke at the door. Second, none of these three writers is arguing that Rahab should have handed the men over. The question between them is narrower than it looks.
The innkeeper reading, and why the commentators fought over it
Adam Clarke devotes pages to the case that Rahab kept a house of entertainment, marshalling Herodotus on Egyptian women running taverns and Diodorus on their standing in the household, and adding that the king would simply have arrested lodgers in a disreputable house rather than sending a request to its keeper. It is a serious argument from a serious man, and it is repeated by Jamieson, Fausset and Brown. Barnes takes the other side and gives the reason: the Hebrew word is the word the law uses elsewhere for a prostitute, and it cannot be quietly softened. Both readings are honest; the word is what it is.
In the face of the parallel passages (e. g. Lev 21:7: Jer 5:7) the rendering advocated for obvious reasons, namely, “the house of a woman, an innkeeper,” cannot be maintained. Rahab must remain an example under the Law similar to that Luk 7:37 under the Gospel, of “a woman that was a sinner,” yet, because of her faith, not only pardoned, but exalted to the highest honor.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on Joshua 2:1
Outside the camp, and then inside it
The rescue happens in two movements, and the second one is easy to miss. The household is brought out and set down outside the camp of Israel, and then, two verses later, Rahab is living in the middle of Israel, permanently. Barnes reads the interval as what it looks like: a pagan household not yet inside the covenant, and not left there.
The part of the wall adjoining Rahab’s house had not fallen along with the rest. Rahab and “all that she had,” i. e., the persons belonging to her household, were brought out and “left without the camp of Israel.” These words literally “made to rest outside the camp of Israel” - indicate that being still in their paganism, they were separated from the camp of the Lord. This was only for a time. They desired, and eventually obtained, admission to the covenant of the chosen people of God Jos 6:25.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on Joshua 6:23
Meanwhile, Joshua told the two men who had spied out the land, “Go into the house of the prostitute and bring out the woman and all who are with her, just as you promised her.” So the young spies went in and brought out Rahab, her father and mother and brothers, and all who belonged to her. They brought out her whole family and settled them outside the camp of Israel.The spies keep the oath in person: the two men who swore it are the two men sent to fetch her.
Read the Great Books
the works that have carried this teaching: go further than this page
Commentary on the Whole Bible
Matthew Henry · 1710
Henry is the warmest voice on this chapter and the quickest to see where it is going; he had already spotted the genealogy while commenting on Joshua 2, and his note on the cord is a model of marking tradition as tradition.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →Notes on the Old and New Testaments
Albert Barnes · 1832–1869
The most careful English commentary on Joshua for the questions this page asks: the ban, the wall, the word zonah, and the honest history of how the fathers came to read the scarlet cord as they did.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →First Letter to the Corinthians
Clement of Rome · c. 99
One of the oldest Christian writings outside the New Testament, and the source of the scarlet-cord tradition. Chapter 12 is short, and reading it in place shows exactly how early the reading is, and that it is a reading.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →Against Lying
Augustine of Hippo · c. 430
Augustine takes up Rahab directly in the middle of the sharpest ancient treatment of truth-telling under pressure. Whether or not a reader ends where he does, the argument is worth meeting first-hand.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →One Household, Marked From the Outside
“Let it be as you say,” she replied, and she sent them away. And when they had gone, she tied the scarlet cord in the window.She ties it immediately, before the army comes, while there is still nothing to see and no reason to believe.
The story leaves an ordinary shape behind it. A city hears the same news and hardens; one woman hears it and moves. A promise is made and then kept in person by the men who made it. A mark goes on the outside of a door and everyone the owner loves is gathered behind it. And a name that no one in Jericho would have chosen for the honour turns up, centuries later, in the first paragraph of the Gospel of Matthew, in the family line of the one who came to save people from outside the camp.
GO ON FROM HERE
Built from MannaFest's research brief on the Land and the Kingdom stories and the gate-verified Joshua quote pool — public-domain commentary quoted verbatim (Albert Barnes, Matthew Henry, John Wesley, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown) alongside the early church (Clement of Rome, Augustine of Hippo, John Cassian). Hebrew word data floor-verified against the site's word-level text of Joshua 2 and 6. Scripture BSB, fetched from the floor. Artwork: Gustave Doré (1866) and James Tissot (c. 1896-1902), both public domain, license-verified at Wikimedia Commons.