This Scarlet Cord (37 page)
“I hope so,” Lord Nahshon replied, and Sala ignored the tiny note of doubt that sounded in his father’s voice.
“I’ll get one of Joshua’s priests to marry us,” Sala said, jumping to his feet as if he was going to run out the door and find the priest immediately.
“Sala!”
He turned to look back at his father.
“Come back in here. You must get her father’s permission first. And Rahab may not want to be married in a war camp; she might wish to wait until we return to Ramac where the ceremony can be done with all the correct rituals.”
Sala didn’t think so, but he didn’t want to push his father too much. He summoned up his most agreeable voice. “I’ll ask Rahab what she wants to do and I’ll abide by her decision.”
“It will be her father’s decision, Sala. Now, what about the rest of her family? What are
they
going to do?”
“Shemu told me that their farm is still intact. Joshua didn’t raid south of the river crossing.”
“That is excellent news.” Sala saw the relief on his father’s face and realized Nahshon had been afraid he would be saddled with Rahab’s entire family.
Nahshon said, “Come back in here and sit down. We will speak to Mepu tomorrow morning. I have a few ideas that I want to sleep on.”
Sala exerted all the self-control he was capable of and agreed.
The following afternoon Rahab and Atene were sitting in the shade cast by their tent watching a group of little girls play with the dolls some of the Israelite women had given them. When they saw Mepu and Shemu coming toward them, they both started to get up.
“Sit, sit,” Mepu said, waving them back down as he came up to them. The two men joined them in the shade, careful not to block the women’s view of the children.
Mepu got straight to the reason for his visit. “Rahab, Sala’s father has asked for you in marriage to his son and I have agreed. He has further asked if Sala may take you to live in Ramac, and I have agreed to that as well. I hope you are comfortable with this arrangement.”
Rahab’s smile was more blinding than the sun reflecting off the heads of the children. “Oh, Papa, thank you! Of course I am comfortable with your arrangement!”
Mepu smiled back, as did Shemu. Mepu went on, “There is one more thing to decide, and Lord Nahshon has left the choice to me. So I am asking you, do you wish to be married now, by one of Joshua’s priests, or do you wish to wait until you get to Ramac.”
“Now,” Rahab said. “I want to get married now.”
Atene laughed.
Rahab turned and gave her friend a tight hug. “Oh, Atene! I am so happy!”
“And I am happy for you, my dear, dear sister.” She looked at her husband over Rahab’s shoulder. “What are
we
going to do, Shemu? Surely you’re not planning to remain with these Israelites?”
Shemu said, “I think we must all be called Israelites now, no matter where we might be. But following an army is no life for a family. We have learned that our farm was not disturbed, so we can return home.”
Atene’s smile was almost as dazzling as Rahab’s. “That will be good.”
Rahab looked at her father. “But without Jericho as a market, where will you sell your wine, Papa?”
Mepu was looking younger than he had in months. “Lord Nahshon told us there is a small Israelite community to the south, at Jerusalem. We can sell some wine to them. But even better, Lord Nahshon has offered to take most of our wine and sell it into Egypt.” He chuckled. “It seems we will be following my original plan after all.”
Shemu grinned. “Lord Nahshon has asked me to supervise all of his wine trade,
and
he will pay me a handsome salary to do so.”
Rahab and Atene looked at each other, almost dazed by all this good news.
“We won’t be completely separated then,” Atene said.
An angry squeal came from the group of children and Rahab looked over to see that two of them had decided they wanted the same doll. She jumped up to smooth the quarrel and soon had the children playing happily again.
Mepu had risen. “So, shall I go and give Lord Nahshon my answer?”
Rahab ran to give her father a hug. “Yes,” she said into his ear. “And don’t be too long about it!’
He laughed.
It was almost midnight when Rahab slipped out of her tent. Her father and Lord Nahshon had made all the marriage arrangements earlier in the day. There had been no talk of the money and goods that the new husband’s father traditionally gave to the father of the bride before a marriage could be finalized. The business arrangement struck earlier between Nahshon and Mepu would suffice; it was going to be profitable for both men and their families.
Nor was there talk of a betrothal. They were not living in normal times and both fathers agreed to bypass the betrothal so the children could marry and leave for Ramac as soon as possible. As soon as possible turned out to be the following day and arrangements were made with one of Joshua’s priests.
Rahab was so happy and excited that she couldn’t sleep. In the morning she would get her heart’s desire; she would marry Sala. She felt a twinge of sorrow when she thought about leaving her family, but it was only a small drop in the great sea of her happiness.
The night was deeply silent; everyone was asleep. She crept out of the tent and walked a little distance from the encampment, shivering in the chill night air. Smoke was still rising from the ruins of Jericho, but Rahab did not look in that direction. Instead she faced east, toward the place where the Great Sea lay, where her new home would be. She looked up into the sky and her breath caught at the magnificent display in the blackness of the overreaching heavens. She felt as if Yahweh was shining each and every one of those brilliant starry lights just for her.
He had been so good to her. He had saved her family from destruction and given them a future. Most of all, He had given her Sala, without whom her life would be like a sky filled with heavy dark clouds and rain. Instead she had the stars.
“Thank You, Yahweh,” she whispered into the cool night air. “Thank You for choosing me to be Your servant.”
A soft step sounded behind her and she turned to see Sala come up to her side. She smiled up at him. “You couldn’t sleep either?”
“No.” He put his arm around her and she rested her head on his shoulder.
They stood for a while in silence, their eyes upon the dazzling blanket of stars. Then he bent his head and buried his lips in her hair. “I love you so much. You have been through so many terrible things, Rahab, but now you have me to take care of you. I will make you happy. I promise you that. I will make you happy.”
She slid her arm around his waist and turned her body into his. “I know you will, Sala. And I will do my best to make you happy too.”
“You make me happy just by existing,” he said, his voice muffled by her hair.
She tilted her head to look up at him. “I know one thing that would make me happy.”
“And what is that, my love?”
“A ride in a boat.”
He laughed, a free, carefree laugh that lifted her heart and made her smile.
He said, “I will buy you your own little sailboat and you can go out whenever you want. And if ever any man questions your freedom, you will say that you are Rahab and you saved the warriors of Israel.”
She chuckled. “I will remember that.”
“Yahweh has been good to us,” he said, his voice suddenly grave.
“I know. Remember how you once told me that I had to listen for Him?”
“Yes.”
“That is what we both must do, now and for the rest of our lives. Listen for Him and do His will.”
“Yes. We will always do that.”
He held her close to him, so close that she could feel the beating of his heart through their clothing. Then with deliberate resolution, he moved away. “Tomorrow night we will be man and wife, but for now I think it’s best if we go in.”
She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “All right.”
He picked up her hand and the two of them walked side by side back to the camp.
R
AHAB AND
S
ALA’S GREAT DESTINY, OF COURSE, WAS TO
be among the direct forebears of Jesus. We know this because their names are listed with Christ’s ancestors at the beginning of the gospel of Matthew: “Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab . . .”
The most amazing thing about Matthew’s genealogy is that it actually includes the names of women. This was highly unusual for Jewish pedigrees. Luke’s genealogy of Christ, which names only men, is far more the norm. The reason for the accustomed absence of female names is that in the Jewish world women had no legal rights. From the time of their birth to the time of their death, they were under the command of a man—be it father, husband, or son. It has always seemed to me a wonderful sign of the changes that Jesus brought into the world that a woman’s name should appear in His genealogy.
As those of you who have read the book of Joshua know, Rahab’s story takes up about five paragraphs, and out of those five paragraphs I’ve created a book of 85,000 words. One part of Rahab’s story in Joshua that intrigued me was the fact that she was a believer in the Israelite God. How did that come to be? I asked myself, and there was my story.
Clearly I had to look elsewhere to get material for my novel and so I investigated whatever information was available on the period. The areas that I looked into were the religion and archeology of Canaan generally and Jericho specifically.
When Jericho was excavated, no written records were discovered. Our knowledge of the city and its culture comes from the other archeological evidence that has been found there. Over the years there has been controversy among archaeologists about the date that Jericho fell. Kathleen Kenyon, who excavated the site in the 1950s and published a book about it—
Digging Up Jericho
—declared that the city was destroyed about 1550 BC, the end of the Middle Bronze Age. The biblical narrative, however, places Joshua in the early part of the Late Bronze Age, about 1400 BC. Needless to say, this difference caused many difficulties for biblical scholars.
The most recently accepted dating of the demise of Jericho and the earthquake that destroyed the city—about 1400 BC, the early part of the Late Bronze Age—can be found in the work of archeologist Bryant G. Wood.
Although we currently have no written records from Jericho, the city of Ugarit on the eastern Mediterranean had great libraries from which a number of scrolls written in early Canaanite were recovered. It is these scrolls that give us the stories of the god Baal, the goddess Asherah, and the fertility religion they embodied. I used the material from Ugarit as the background for the religion that was probably also practiced in Jericho; the ideas of a sacral kingship and a sacred marriage are drawn from these manuscripts.
The biggest difficulty I had in writing the story of Rahab was the dramatically different worldview of the people I was writing about. Joshua and his army were embarking on what Muslims today call
jihad—
the destruction of everyone and everything that does not conform to their own religious practices and belief. We don’t approve of
jihad
today—in fact, we deplore it as being against everything the modern Christian believes to be ethical. How was I to make heroes out of people who thought like this? People who thought nothing of killing every man, woman, child, and animal in a city they conquered?
There really is no satisfactory answer to this problem, so I simply tried to create the world of three thousand years ago in a way that would seem coherent and real. You, the reader, will have to judge whether or not I have been successful.
Joan Wolf
January 2012
1. What can you take from the ancient story of Rahab that will apply to your own life in the modern world?
2. How did you feel about this different way of viewing Rahab? She has been known as a prostitute for so long. Did it ever bother you that a prostitute was listed as one of Jesus’s ancestors? Did you think the author was successful in explaining how this reputation might not be true?
3. The instructions of the God of the Old Testament often seem to contradict the teachings of Jesus. Certainly it would be hard to imagine Jesus advocating the murder of entire populations. Can you reconcile the two? And if so, how?
