Note: I added this post for future reference; i.e. talking purposes, although archaeologists have concluded that Jericho was destroyed long before the Israelites allegedly entered the “promise land”. The value of the article is that the author points out one of the many issues with the lack of vowels in early Hebrew.
This post contains extracts from the BAS article Was Rahab Really a Harlot? by Anthony J. Frendo.
The spies had given an oath to Rahab to spare her and her family when the Israelites invaded the land. They would be released from this oath, they told her as they left, unless she tied to the window the crimson rope by which she had let the spies down.
Alerted by the crimson rope, when the Israelites conquered and destroyed the city, they spared only Rahab and her family (Joshua 2:1–24; 6:22–25).
It is true that the text identifies Rahab as a zônāh, a prostitute (Joshua 2:1), but she actually comes across more as a landlady or innkeeper than a prostitute. And the first-century C.E. Jewish historian Josephus tells us that Rahab kept an inn (katagōgion in Greek).1
Was she an innkeeper or a prostitute? Or perhaps both?
The consonants that make up the word “prostitute” in Hebrew are znh (זנה), which happen to be identical to the consonants of the Hebrew word for a female person who gives food and provisions.2 And indeed, the Biblical text does not make or imply any negative comments regarding Rahab’s profession.3 Josephus’s information that Rahab kept an inn could well be an old tradition, although this does not necessarily negate the fact that she could also have been a prostitute. Josephus may have preserved the innkeeper tradition in conjunction with the folk memory of a local group who had been spared by the incoming Israelites.
Endnote 2 – Was Rahab Really a Harlot?
A female prostitute in Hebrew is zônāh (the root being znh) whereas the word for a female provider of food is zānāh (the root of which is zûn= to feed). Both zônāh and zānāh are singular feminine participles (used as nouns) of the respective verbal roots just mentioned. The vowel ô in zônāh is written with the consonant wāw used as a mater lectionis (a consonant used to signify a vowel sound). However, there are five instances in the Hebrew Bible where the word zônāh is used without the letter wāw used as a mater lectionis, namely Leviticus 21:7 (where the word is used in the singular exactly as in Joshua 2:1, but written zōnāh) and 1 Kings 3:16; 22:38; Ezekiel 16:33; and Hosea 4:14 in which four cases it is in the plural. When the word zônāh is not written with the letter wāw used as a mater lectionis, the only consonants which appear are z, n, and h which could be rendered, when vocalized, either as zōnāh (prostitute) or as zānāh (a female provider of food, and by extension therefore a female innkeeper). All this means that the word predicated of Rahab could at one and the same time be read either as meaning “prostitute” or “landlady,” or indeed both, especially when one considers that the Masoretes very probably pronounced “what have been described above as ā and o in exactly the same way (probably o), since they use the same vowel sign for both. However, both traditional pronunciation and IH [Israeli Hebrew] distinguish two vowel sounds.” See J.D. Martin, Davidson’s Introductory Hebrew Grammar, 27th ed. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), p. 15.
MLA Citation
Frendo, Anthony J. “Was Rahab Really a Harlot?” Biblical Archaeology Review 39.5 (2013): 62–65.
