Joshua2chapter 2

Joshua 2:1

Shittim is the camp of Numbers 25:1, where Israel committed whoredom with the daughters of Moab, and it is the last stop before the river. Joshua sends two men and sends them secretly, where Moses sent twelve openly at Numbers 13:2, a man from every tribe. The word the King James renders harlot is the ordinary Hebrew word for a prostitute, and Hebrews 11:31 and James 2:25 both keep it when they name her. Adam Clarke argues she kept a house of entertainment and Albert Barnes answers that Leviticus 21:7 and Jeremiah 5:7 will not allow that rendering, and Joshua uses the same word of her again at 6:17 and 6:25.

Joshua 2:2-3

The report reaches the throne the same night the men arrive, and the king already knows they are of the children of Israel, so the city had been watching the river before anybody crossed it. Jericho has a king of its own, which is how Canaan is organised through this book, one king to a city, and Joshua 12:24 counts thirty-one of them at the end. The king sends word asking Rahab to bring the men out rather than sending officers to search the house, and Adam Clarke takes that as a sign her house was a public lodging where guests could not be seized on light grounds.

Joshua 2:4-5

She has hidden them before she opens her mouth, so the words at the door cover a decision already made. What she says is false, and the older commentators say so without softening it: John Wesley calls it unquestionably sinful though her intention was good, Jamieson, Fausset and Brown call it a sinful expedient pardoned in a believer, and Adam Clarke writes that God never says to any, Do evil that good may come of it. John Cassian took the other line and held that for the concealment itself she earned a share in the blessing of God's people. Scripture commends the receiving of the messengers at James 2:25 and the faith at Hebrews 11:31, and neither passage mentions the answer she gave the officers.

Joshua 2:6-7

Flax was pulled in the spring and dried on the flat roofs, and Adam Clarke puts that harvest at the end of March, which sets this night within days of the crossing dated to the tenth day of the first month at Joshua 4:19. Joshua 3:15 says the Jordan overflows all his banks all the time of harvest, so the same season that gives Rahab her hiding place is what makes the river impassable. The pursuers take the road to the fords and the gate is shut behind them, which is why the two men cannot walk out of the city and have to go down the wall.

Joshua 2:8-11

Her speech is the Song of the Sea coming true inside Canaan. Exodus 15:14-16 said the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away and that fear and dread shall fall upon them, and forty years later a woman in Jericho says our hearts did melt and no courage remained in any man. She names the Red Sea, which is forty years old, and Sihon and Og from Numbers 21, which is recent, so the country has been keeping account of Israel the whole time; Joshua 5:1 then reports the same fear from the kings themselves. Her last words, that the Lord is God in heaven above and in earth beneath, are what Moses presses on Israel at Deuteronomy 4:39, and Albert Barnes observes that the reports which brought a Canaanite to faith left her countrymen only afraid.

Joshua 2:12-14

She asks them to swear by the Lord, using the covenant name rather than a Canaanite one, and Adam Clarke reads that as the measure of what she had already learned. The word rendered kindness is the covenant word for loyal love, and she asks it back in the terms she gave it, kindness for kindness. Her list runs father, mother, brethren and sisters, with no husband and no children in it, and every person she bargains for is somebody else. The men stake their own lives on the bargain and attach a condition to it, which verses 17 to 20 then spell out.

Joshua 2:15-16

The window opens on open country because the back wall of the house is the town wall, and Albert Barnes sets Paul's escape at 2 Corinthians 11:33 beside it, let down by the wall in a basket. A house built into the wall is what readers weigh against Joshua 6:20, where the wall falls down flat, since 6:22-23 has the spies fetching her out of a house still standing; some writers hold that her stretch of wall was left and others that the collapse was not uniform, and the text offers no explanation of its own. Then she tells them which way to run and how long to lie still, which is local knowledge two strangers did not have.

Joshua 2:17-19

The oath carries three conditions and the men state each one: the scarlet line hung in the window, every relative gathered inside the house, and silence about the errand. His blood shall be upon his head is a legal formula rather than a threat, the same words David uses at 2 Samuel 1:16, and it puts the account on the man who walks out. Safety lies inside a marked house and nowhere outside it, which is the shape of the night in Exodus 12:22, where none was to go out at the door of his house until the morning, and Origen and Matthew Henry both read the two passages together.

Joshua 2:20-21

She binds the line the moment they are gone, while the city stands whole and no army is in sight. The scarlet has been read as a figure of the blood since the early church: Clement of Rome makes the link in his letter to Corinth, Ambrose of Milan calls it a banner of the Lord's passion, Origen reads the house as the one place of safety, and Charles Spurgeon preached the whole scene as The Scarlet Line in the Window. The New Testament names Rahab three times and never mentions the cord, so the reading belongs to those writers rather than to an apostle, and Matthew Henry gives it as a resemblance and not as an argument.

Joshua 2:22-24

The report at verse 24 is Rahab's own sentence from verse 9 handed back to Joshua, that the inhabitants of the land faint, so the intelligence the invasion runs on came out of the mouth of a Canaanite. Set beside Numbers 13:31-33, where ten men said we be not able to go up and described giants, this is the same country reported in the opposite direction, and Joshua was one of the two who dissented the first time. Adam Clarke marks the contrast between the two reports and reads this one as what Joshua needed in order to plan the campaign.