Third Day of Christmas: Rahab, the Ancestor of Jesus

For the third day of Christmas I am continuing to look the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew begins the good news of Jesus’ birth with a list of his ancestors, giving an special emphasis to the scandalous women of his family tree.

Rahab was a Canaanite prostitute. She lived in Jericho, in an apartment set inside the walls of the city. Her story appears in Joshua 2 and 6. When the Hebrews arrived at the promised land, they sent out spies to check things out. The spies entered the city of Jericho, and the king of Jericho heard about it. He demanded that Rahab turn the spies over to him, but she hid them on her roof, and sent the searchers off on a wild goose chase.

Rahab was an outsider, low on the ladder of social status. Not even one of the sacred prostitutes of the era, she was a common whore, called by a comical and rather graphic name. Rahab means “wide.” Again, the Bible is not shy about some details.

As an outsider and a woman who could sense the winds of political change, Rahab threw in her lot with the invading Hebrew army. She hid the spies in the hope that the invaders would spare her and her family when they conquered the city. It worked.

That a prostitute would betray her own city into the hands of its enemies for her own benefit is not perhas remarkable. What is remarkable is Rahab’s conversation with the spies before she hides them. She says:

I know that the LORD has given this land to you and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you. We have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Amorites east of the Jordan, whom you completely destroyed. When we heard of it, our hearts melted and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the LORD your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below. Now then, please swear to me by the LORD that you will show kindness to my family, because I have shown kindness to you.

In the ancient near east, the common belief about gods was that each god had his own territory. If Baal was the god of a city, then Baal controlled that city’s fate. The city would stand or fall in battle depending on Baal’s will. If foreigners conquered a city, it was because the city had failed to properly please its own god.

Rahab’s words to the Hebrew spies appeals to a different theology. She is not concerned with the god of her territory, but with YHWH (the personal name of the Hebrew God), whom she describes with the highest title possible: God in heaven above and on the earth below. Unlike other deities, this god rules everything.

Rahab is spared in the conquest of the city, and, according to Matthew, she marries into the Hebrew nation. The outsider, through her acknowledgment of the one God of heaven and earth, is welcomed into the community, and it becomes her family.

This becomes a theme of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus reached out to the outcasts of society: the prostitutes, the alcoholics, the tax-collectors (who were despised as collaborators with a foreign power). He called himself a physician, and said he came to heal the sick, not the healthy. Jesus did not come for the insiders, secure in their place in the world. He came for those who are left out and lonely.

The baby Jesus was laid in a manger, because there was no other room for him. He entered the world as an outsider, in order to bring us all into the family of God.