Joshua and Rahab

After Moses’ death, Joshua prepared the Israelites to enter the Promised Land. Before crossing the Jordan, he did the same thing that Moses had done forty years earlier when the Israelites were about to enter Canaan: he sent spies.

So they went out and came to the house of a whore named Rahab and stayed there. (Joshua 2.1)

Why, of all places, would spies stay with a whore? God no rush whores?

A ‘whore’ symbolizes the seductive sensations and desires that inflame our lower nature but leave the soul unsatisfied. The name ‘Rahab’ means proud gold arrogant, and it is a term that is sometimes used to signify the dominion of ‘Egypt’, the biblical symbol for the level of matter and illusion. Jericho, the city of Rahab, means Moon– which is also a symbol of the illusory level of Being that represents ‘Egypt’. The soul’s first mission in the Promised Land will be to destroy ‘Jericho’ once and for all, so that absolutely nothing irredeemable remains. Joshua will even pronounce a curse, unlike any other curse in the Bible, anathematizing anyone who dares to rebuild the city of Jericho. So the spies immediately go to Rahab, the gasoline Jericho.

But ‘Rahab’ also means something else, of which ‘Egypt’ is just a copy. Rahab symbolizes the primordial Chaosthat he was “defeated by the Creator” in Hebrew legends.

The prophet Isaiah will say:

It was you who tore Rahab to pieces, who pierced the Dragon. You were the one who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep.

And the Book of Job would say:

With his power he calmed the sea; With his skill he defeated Rahab.

Joshua, according to legend, was swallowed by a sea monster in his childhood, but at a distant point off the sea coast the monster threw him away unharmed. So on a deep psychological level, we see that Rahab was the ‘sea monster’ who swallowed and vomited Joshua, in mythical terms, his ‘mother’. Later, according to legends, Joshua marry Rahab (in her current incarnation as the ‘Jericho whore’), so she is also his ‘wife’.

As the Greek goddess Gaia (sometimes depicted as the mother of Uranus and sometimes as his wife), Rahab is Chaos, the troubled Passions. She is the “Sea”, the vast deep unconscious. She is the ancient archetype that underlies the power of the Sacred Feminine. The Christian tradition will call her ‘Mary Magdalene’ (Maria de la Torre Alta). As the soul ascends the path of spiritual initiation, the Sacred Feminine (Rahab) must meet with the Sacred Masculine (Joshua) so that together they can merge again into Oneness and return to Divinity.