RAHAB THE PROSTITUTE

'Tamar and Judah', Horace Vernet, 1840 - see BIBLE ART

This, of course, is not a painting of Rahab, who helped Joshua conquer Jericho. It shows Tamar (Genesis 38), who posed as a prostitute so that she could seduce her father-in-law Judah.

But there is a two-fold connection between the women:

• both used sex to get what they wanted - and were judged by their contemporaries as righteous women
• both were mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus, given at the beginning of Matthew's gospel.

Rahab is always defined as 'Rahab the prostitute', but some scholars quibble with this. The Bible uses the Hebrew word 'zonah', which in later times certainly meant 'prostitute'.

But it may not have meant 'prostitute' when the story was first told. Rahab may have been an inn-keeper - admittedly in a run-down section of the once-powerful city of Jericho. The word 'zonah' comes from the verb 'zan', which means to feed and provide food for.

Rahab may have been a hostess who kept an inn for travellers passing through Jericho. It would made her an ideal source of information. Listening to her guests, she would learn everything that happened in the city, and pick up news of the outside world. 

Inn-keepers are ideal sources of information -  Emperor Frederick the Great said that any good intelligence service had inn-keepers on its pay-roll.

Another point to back this up this theory: the Bible describes her looking after quite a large extended family. It's more likely for an inn-keeper to be in this position, since having a prostitute in the family was a mark of shame at the time, and would not have been sanctioned by any family. 

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