After the death of Moses, Joshua prepared the Israelites to enter the Promised Land. Before crossing the Jordan, he did the same thing Moses had done forty years earlier when the Israelites were on the brink of entering Canaan: he sent out spies.
So they set out, and they came to the house of a harlot named Rahab and lodged there. (Josh.2.1)
Why, of all places, would the spies go to lodge with a harlot? Doesn’t God hate harlots?
A ‘harlot’ symbolizes the seductive sensations and desires that inflame our lower nature but leave the soul unsatisfied. The name ‘Rahab’means proud or arrogant, and it is a term that is sometimes used to signify the domain of ‘Egypt’, the biblical symbol for the level of matter and illusion. Jericho, Rahab’s city, means Moon– which also is also a symbol of the illusory level of Being that ‘Egypt’ represents. The soul’s first mission in the Promised Land is going to be to once and for all completely destroy ‘Jericho’, so that absolutely nothing irredeemable remains. Joshua will even pronounce a curse, unlike any other curse in the Bible, anathematizing anyone who ever dares to rebuild the city of Jericho. So the spies go immediately to Rahab, the essence of Jericho.
But ‘Rahab’means something else as well, of which ‘Egypt’ is only a copy. Rahab symbolizes the primordial Chaosthat was ‘vanquished by the Creator’ in Hebrew legends.
The prophet Isaiah will say:
It was You that hacked Rahab in pieces, that pierced the Dragon. It was You that dried up the Sea, the waters of the great deep.
And the Book of Job will say:
By His power He stilled the sea; By His skill He struck down Rahab.
Joshua, according to legend, was swallowed by a sea-monster in his infancy, but at a distant point of the sea-coast the monster spewed him forth unharmed. So on a deep psychological level, we see that Rahab was the ‘sea-monster’ who swallowed and spewed forth Joshua – in mythical terms, his ‘mother’. Later on, according to the legends, Joshua will marry Rahab (in her current incarnation as the ‘harlot of Jericho’), so she is also his ‘wife’.
Like the Greek goddess Gaia (who is sometimes portrayed as Uranus’ mother, and sometimes as his wife), Rahab is Chaos, the turbulent Passions. She is the ‘Sea’, the deep vast unconscious. She is the ancient archetype that underlies the power of the Sacred Feminine. Christian tradition will call her ‘Mary Magdalene’ (Mary of the High Tower). As the soul ascends the path of spiritual initiation, the Sacred Feminine (Rahab) must reunite with the Sacred Masculine(Joshua) so that together they can merge back into Oneness and return to Divinity.
