Both Canaanite and Israelite, But Not Fully Either: The Story of Rahab as Means of Breaking Down Interpretive Binaries
Becca Laabs
The Bible is a vast collection of texts: the stories of God, God’s people, the early church, and even the world to come. It includes poems, songs, wisdom, prophecy, narrative, and more. When taken as a whole, though, the Bible virtually never provides one clear, unquestionable answer to the multiplicity of questions readers bring to it every day. It refuses to be categorized in simple, binary ways. As a person raised in a fairly liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in the mainline Protestant tradition, I was always taught that this very richness and complexity was one of the greatest gifts of the Bible. No two people will read it the same, and together we can find thoughtful, nuanced answers to the questions we have, always valuing human dignity and love for all creation over any sort of literalism or desire to be “right.” Ultimately, this has brought me to a personal hermeneutic that I like to call a hermeneutic of love and curiosity. When I come to the scriptures, I am always asking questions, attempting to feed an insatiable curiosity. Why is the text written this way? Who wrote it? When was it written? How many times has it been edited? What does it tell me about God? Are there any parts that portray God in a way that doesn’t make sense to me? As I read, I ponder, I do research, and I seek the opinions of people both similar to and incredibly different from myself. Regardless of the answers, or lack of answers, I find, though, I always return to the hermeneutic of love. I ask myself the question, “What does this text tell me about how to love of God, my neighbor, or myself?” Therefore, as I’ve just begun to learn what it means to take a queer approach to reading the Bible, I start in a similar place always focused on curiosity and love.
As a white, upper-middle-class, college-educated woman that does not identify as queer, I have had to make an effort to move outside of my norms and defaults to do a queer reading, acknowledging that my experience is one of an ally and absolute newcomer to the field. To do so, I turned to experts, listening to the voices of queer experts and trying to gain even a scrap of understanding regarding their experience with the Bible. This has led me to an understanding of a queer approach as a resistant approach. It is an approach that relies on the voices and scholarship of queer people and experiences, and it is an approach that does not rely on traditional systems or conceptions. This approach values the individual experience of queer people and seeks to learn more about the beautiful complexities of the human experience that can be found both in the Bible and in the world around us today. In this essay, I will be focusing on the story of Rahab in Joshua 2, a story that struck me due to the way blurs lines of identity, subverts binaries, and has a profound history of being used as a tool of oppression within the larger story of Joshua. Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute, exists on the margins of society, occupying a queer space that exists between the binary of Canaanite and Israelite, of betrayer and hero, of oppressed and oppressor. She subverts expectations, and her story leaves room for far more interpretations that it has been traditionally ascribed. Although there are no indicators in the Biblical text that she has any sort of gender or sexual identity that would typically be labeled queer, her story can be used to reveal that human existence does not always fit neatly into one of two categories, nor do those experiences need to in order to be important parts of our sacred text.
The story of Rahab is found at the beginning of what is known at the Deuteronomistic History, the books of the Bible spanning from Joshua-2 Kings. These books form a semi-cohesive narrative account of Israel’s development into a nation, and that development begins with the colonization and genocide of the Canaanites upon reaching the promised land. Joshua 2 is right in the middle of the action, beginning when Joshua sends military spies into the city of Jericho to scope out the city. The two men go into the city, quickly entering the house of the prostitute Rahab (2:1). Then, when the king of Jericho finds out and demands that she hand over the spies, she refuses, choosing to hide them instead (2:3-7). Because she proclaims her faith in God to the men and deals with them kindly (2:9-12), she is ultimately spared from the Israelite attack on the city and allowed to live with the people of Israel (6:22-25). Read traditionally, the main point of this passage seems like it could be quite simple, and “the strategy of interpreting Rahab as a prime role model of faith whom God welcomes into the community of believers”[i] is a pervasive one. In fact, this appears to be the most pervasive reading of the text in traditional Biblical scholarship, influencing nearly every reading done since. Not only does it fit neatly into the larger narrative of Israel’s conquest of Canaan in both the book of Joshua and the rest of the Deuteronomistic history as a whole, it also offers a powerful story of redemption in which faith in God brings a woman out of a position of weakness and into relationship with the community of faith. It reminds us that “anyone who is prepared to recognize what Yahweh is doing is free to join Yahweh’s people,”[ii] a message that we have been taught to believe since the earliest Christian church when Gentiles were welcomed into the body of Christ. Unfortunately, that simple reading just is not enough. Like the many feminist, postcolonial, womanist, and queer interpreters that have worked with this text, I am not satisfied with a neat summary of this story that neglects to account for factors of gender, power dynamics, oppression, and genocide. This traditional reading does not address the complexities of Rahab’s position, the choices she makes, or the conquest narrative as a whole. It reduces her to a sort of stock figure, a hero that makes exactly the right choice for the Israelites for no reason other than pure faith. While I do not claim Rahab’s faith was false, I do believe that failing to account for her marginalized human experience leaves much of the story untold. Thus, to better address those complexities, we must look closer at the text, keeping in mind a queer approach that places value on Rahab’s marginalized experience and position as a complex human that cannot be easily summarized or categorized by binaries.
To begin, we will explore in more depth the situational and personal context that puts Rahab in a queer space. In the text, there is no clear indicator of Rahab’s sexuality. She is, of course, an inherently sexualized figure due to the nature of her profession, but we are not told what exactly that sexuality entails in explicit terms. In the text, the only clear indicator of her sexuality that we are given is in 2:1 when the spies are described as having “spent the night there,” a translation derived from a Hebrew verb that is “a common idiom for sexual intercourse.”[iii] In that sense, we can deduce that Rahab is likely engaging in heterosexual sex, bearing in mind that this is still an assumption based on connotative word choices. However, one could argue that even though she engages in heterosexual sex, she is far from heteronormative. Clearly, she does not embody the heteronormative, patriarchal expectations for a woman of her era. She is not married, monogamous, or bearing children, all of which would have been expected for a woman in the Biblical times.[iv] Instead, she is a prostitute, a term that by definition, indicates that she does not fit into the patriarchal structures. The Hebrew word used here for prostitute can be defined as “a woman occasionally or professionally committing fornication,”[v] with fornication being defined as “illicit sex by a female that violates a relationship with a male, either a husband or father.”[vi] By definition, this is not fitting into the patriarchal expectation that a woman would marry, be monogamous with her husband, and bear children. Likewise, a connection can be made between this description of prostitution and other texts in the Bible in which sexual behavior associated with queer identities has similarly been described as illicit “fornication” outside of the patriarchal norm. Therefore, although Rahab may not be queer in a contemporary sense of the word, her social location and sexual behavior form the foundation of a queer identity in a biblical narrative that never really explicitly describes queerness.
In yet another push against the normative structures of her time, Rahab also interestingly utilizes power, subverting the normative power structures of the biblical era in a few ways. Foremost, Rahab immediately stands out as a woman that does not fit the role her society would have assigned to her. She is unmarried, and she has a surprising amount of agency. There is no mention of a male relative having power over her; on the contrary, she is the one who bargains for the safety of her “father and mother, [her] brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them” (2:13). She is the one calling the shots, both in her own family as well as with the Israelite spies. It is her power and choices that keep them from falling into the hands of the King of Jericho. However, that power seems to come from a place of desperation rather than some kind of cultural norm. At this point in the narrative, she seems to understand that her city will soon be ruined by the Israelite army (2:9-11), and her two options are to betray her people and aid in the genocide of an entire city or to die alongside the society that would only ever see her as a second-class citizen. This dilemma makes this text an easy one to approach with a hermeneutic of curiosity because there are so many questions one can ask about her proclamation of faith and its motivations: Is she a follower of God proclaiming her Lord? Or is she a cunning woman faced with a unique and unexpected opportunity for survival? Is she a selfish betrayer of the Canaanites or a selfless hero for the Israelites? In taking a queer approach and casting aside binaries, I feel comfortable saying that the answer to all of the above questions is yes. In this narrative, if we assume Rahab is not a liar, she is both a person of faith and a betrayer to her people. She both saved her family and helped the Israelites while also condemning an entire city to destruction. There is no easy answer to who she is or why she makes the choices she does, but she is obviously much more complicated than a mere “stock figure.”[vii] In fact, she only appears to be a stock figure if an interpreter assumes her motivations are entirely clear, straightforward, and perfectly well-thought-out, guided only by courageous faith instead of the endless nuances of human experience. Therefore, we must read Rahab as a complete, complex human character, a figure that reveals the impossibility of sorting human experience into binaries and the complexity that any human faces when making choices of faith, life, and death.
Finally, this leads us to a consideration of Rahab’s ultimate role within the Israelite culture that she finds herself residing in at the closing of her story. In chapter 6, the Israelite spies are sent back into Jericho before its destruction to bring “the woman out of it and all who belong to her, as you swore to her” (6:22). The spies bring Rahab and her kindred out of the city and “set them outside the camp of Israel” (6:23). We are then told by the narrator that Rahab’s “family has lived in Israel ever since” (6:25), and that is the end of her story in the Old Testament. Similarly to the rest of Rahab’s story, this ending leaves interpreters with a lot of potential questions regarding just what Rahab’s new status in Israel is. At this point, Rahab is still a prostitute and a Canaanite and is therefore not eligible to be taken as a wife or fully welcomed into the community of Israel.[viii] In fact, it is not made clear anywhere in the book of Joshua that she ever becomes a true Israelite. Instead, she and her family live as “perpetual aliens,”[ix] always “at the margins of Israel, never totally absorbed.”[x] While some interpreters make the argument that she and her family ultimately cease to be Canaanite and become fully Israelite,[xi] there is simply not explicit proof of that in the text. We are told she and her family “lived in Israel ever since,” (6:25), but that does not mean that they ever become Israelites. In this sense, Rahab remains stuck between two identities, no longer fully Canaanite, but not quite fully Israelite either. Once again, she is existing outside of a binary that is central to the book of Joshua and the Deuteronomistic History as a whole, residing in a queer, marginalized space of unwelcome to the mainstream society. However, this in-betweenness should not be interpreted as some sort of condemnation, nor do I find it particularly valuable to read it as some sort of metaphor for the new, blended nation of Israel, “a mixed multitude incorporating many others”[xii] in which a variety of people are grafted into the new nation of Israel. Instead, I again propose that we read this in-betweenness as an experiential human expression of Rahab’s queer position in society. Rahab is a perfect example of how humans cannot be accurately sorted into binaries, whether those binaries are related to sex, gender, race, class, ethnicity, or some other normative measure. The story of Rahab shows that we are all caught in some sort of in-between. We are all a blending of many different roles, identities, and experiences, and because of that, we just do not fit into binaries. The story of Rahab reflects that reality, giving us an example of an independent woman that made hard choices for her faith, her safety, and her family and leaving us without a clear moral solution.
Ultimately, the story of Rahab can be interpreted in a variety of ways as it leaves room for questions, study, and exploration of the human experience. Rahab exemplifies the reality that humans are not binary beings, and that by queering common narratives, we can find more opportunities for meaning and points of connection with the text. For instance, most people probably cannot identify with making a bold declaration of faith to betray their country and join a new, holy nation, but nearly everyone can relate to complex questions of in-betweenness, identity, and faith. Rahab is a prostitute and an independent woman, a betrayer and a hero, a Canaanite and an Israelite. Alongside all of that, she is also a person that proclaimed her faith, doing what she believed to be right despite complicated and terrifying circumstances. Of course, none of this is to say that this interpretation of this story, or Rahab herself, is any less flawed than other readings. I, as a reader with a hermeneutic of curiosity and love, am still left with many doubts. Rahab is still a contributor to the genocide and colonization of Canaan, a text that I have not yet found peace with. It is hard to read love into that narrative, and there are absolutely valid claims, such as those from Marcella Maria Althaus-Reid that Rahab is a queer traitor, submitting to the “heterosexual, mono-loving mentality of only one nation, one God, and one faith.”[xiii] To those considerations, I have no clear answer. The conquest of Canaan as a whole is a narrative laden with complexity. It is simultaneously a narrative of God fulfilling God’s promise to Israel and a narrative of God commanding the Israelites to engage in a holy war that will wipe an entire nation from existence. How do we read such a text with a hermeneutic of love? This is a question that I do not have a satisfactory answer to now, nor do I know if I will ever. Yet, it is in the grappling with that sort of difficult, unanswerable question that a queer approach to the text shines. There is no simple right or wrong answer when reading the text with a queer approach because there are no simple right or wrong answers when you deal with the complexity of human experience and understanding. Instead, we rely on faith, love, and the inherent worth of every human to be our guide when we approach a difficult text. We should not come to the text with a desire to get every little detail right or to find the one true meaning. On the contrary, we should read to learn more about God and humanity, to gain wisdom, empathy, and understanding, and to remind us of our God-given call to minister to others as the body of Christ. In the story of Rahab, that may simply mean scrapping any traditional reading that neglects to respect the full humanity of the Canaanites or the complexity of Rahab herself. It also means learning to cast aside binaries that only serve to divide people into man-made groups and embracing everyone’s full, messy, and complicated identities as unique individuals created in the image of a God that cannot be confined by any binaries.
Bibliography
Butler, Trent C. World Biblical Commentary, Volume 7A: Joshua 1-12, Second Edition. Edited by Peter H. Davids. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014.
Carden, Michael. “Joshua.” In The Queer Bible Commentary, 144-166. Edited by Deryn Guest, Robert E. Goss, Mona West, and Thomas Bonache. London: SCM Press, 2006.
Runions, Erin. “From Disgust to Humor: Rahab’s Queer Affect.” In Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship, 45-74. Edited by Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011.
Scholz, Suzanne. “Convert, Prostitute or Traitor? Rahab as the Anti-Matriarch in Contemporary Biblical Interpretations.” In In the Arms of Biblical Women, 145-178. Edited by John T. Greene and Mishael M. Caspi. Piscataway: Georgia’s Press LLC, 2013.
Notes
[i] Scholz, Suzanne, “Convert, Prostitute or Traitor? Rahab as the Anti-Matriarch in Contemporary Biblical Interpretations,” in In the Arms of Biblical Women, ed. John T. Greene & Mishael M. Caspi (Piscataway: Georgia’s Press LLC, 2013), 154.
[ii] Scholz, Suzanne, “Convert Prostitute, or Traitor?,” 159
[iii] Carden, Michael, “Joshua,” in The Queer Bible Commentary, ed. Deryn Guest, Robert E. Goss, Mona West, & Thomas Bonache (London: SCM Press, 2006), 156.
[iv] Runions, Erin, “From Disgust to Humor: Rahab’s Queer Affect,” in Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship, ed. Teresa J. Hornsby & Ken Stone (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 47.
[v] Butler, Trent C., World Biblical Commentary, Volume 7A: Joshua 1-12, Second Edition, ed. Peter H. Davids (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), 256.
[vi] Butler, Trent C., World Biblical Commentary, 256.
[vii] Butler, Trent C., World Biblical Commentary, 265.
[viii] Butler, Trent C., World Biblical Commentary, 379.
[ix] Butler, 379.
[x] Butler, 379.
[xi] Butler, 379.
[xii] Butler, 379.
[xiii] Scholz, Suzanne, “Convert Prostitute, or Traitor?,” 172