And it was told the king of Jericho, and was said: Behold there are men come in hither, by night, of the children of Israel, to spy the land.

“"And Joshua the son of Nun," it says, "sent two spies from Shittim, saying to them 'Go up and survey the land and Jericho.' When they arrived in Jericho, the two young men entered the house of a prostitute by the name of Rahab and stayed there as guests." Pay attention to the structure of this mystery, most beloved brothers, and ask yourselves why men as great as these, for whom the Lord had performed such marvels and miracles, entered the house of a woman of ill repute, as if they were unable to lodge elsewhere. They did this not by chance, I believe, but intentionally by prophetic design. For I find this prostitute in many places, not only as a hostess of saints but also as their bride. The most holy prophet Hosea, for instance, was commanded by the Lord to accept a harlot as his wife: "For the Lord said to me, 'Take for your wife a prostitute and generate children of prostitution.' " Even our Lord and Savior himself, when he had sat down by the well in Samaria, conversed with an immoral woman to whom no one had previously spoken there. After he said to her, "You have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband," she believed that he was the Messiah, that is, she confessed him to be the Christ. Then there was the harlot who washed the Savior's feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair and anointed them while kissing them. Let us see, therefore, what our hostess represents. This Rahab, although she is called a prostitute, nevertheless is a sign of the virgin church, considered as a foreshadow of the coming realities at the end of the age, where she alone is preserved to life among all who are perishing. For even when it was said to the prophet Hosea, "Take for your wife a prostitute," surely then the image of the church as coming from the Gentiles was being prefigured, given that the people were to be gathered from the harlotry of the nations and from prostitution with idols, for, it says, "they prostituted themselves to strange gods." Indeed, she is called "the church" because the Greek word ecclesia means "gathering of the people." And just as the apostle says, "An unfaithful wife is sanctified through her faithful husband," so also is the church, coming from the infidelity of the Gentiles and prostitution with idols, sanctified through the body of Christ, of which we are members, as we learn from the same apostolic author. Because the church, as I have often said, gathered from the multitude of Gentiles, was then called a prostitute, therefore the church is found in the figure of Rahab, the hostess of saints.”

“And it was told the king of Jericho, saying,.... Who being alarmed at the near approach of the Israelites, and knowing their claim to the land of Canaan, and their design upon it, employed men to watch and observe what passed in the city, and parts adjacent, and inform him of it; or some persons of themselves, and for their own safety, and the good of their fellow citizens, gave notice to the king of it: behold, there came men hither tonight of the children of Israel; who were known by their habit and language; or at least, being strangers, were suspected to be of that people, the terror of whom had fallen on all the inhabitants, so that every strange man they took for an Israelite; from hence it appears, that the spies came to Jericho at night, that they might not be observed: but with all their precaution they were taken notice of, and their design suspected, namely: to search out the country; which were the proper places to attack first, and where there was the greatest probability of succeeding, as well as to find out the disposition of the inhabitants, whether fearful or fearless of them.”

“When the king of Jericho was informed of the fact that these strange men had entered the house of Rahab, and suspecting their reason for coming, summoned Rahab to give them up, she hid them (lit., hid him, i.e., each one of the spies: for this change from the plural to the singular see Ewald, 219), and said to the king's messengers: כּן, recte, "It is quite correct, the men came to me, but I do not know where they were from; and when in the darkness the gate was at the shutting (i.e., ought to be shut: for this construction, see Gen 15:12), they went out again, I know not whither. Pursue them quickly, you will certainly overtake them." The writer then adds this explanation in Jos 2:6 : she had hidden them upon the roof of her house among stalks of flax. The expression "to-night" (lit., the night) in Jos 2:2 is more precisely defined in Jos 2:5, viz., as night was coming on, before the town-gate was shut, after which it would have been in vain for them to attempt to leave the town. "Stalks of flax," not "cotton pods" (Arab., J. D. Mich. ), or "tree-flax, i.e., cotton," as Thenius explains it, but flax stalks or stalk-flax, as distinguished from carded flax, in which there is no wood left, λινοκαλάμη, stipula lini (lxx, Vulg.). Flax stalks, which grow to the height of three or four feet in Egypt, and attain the thickness of a reed, and would probably be quite as large in the plain of Jericho, the climate of which resembles that of Egypt, would form a very good hiding-place for the spies if they were piled up upon the roof to dry in the sun. The falsehood by which Rahab sought not only to avert all suspicion from herself of any conspiracy with the Israelitish men who had entered her house, but to prevent any further search for them in her house, and to frustrate the attempt to arrest them, is not to be justified as a lie of necessity told for a good purpose, nor, as Grotius maintains, by the unfounded assertion that, "before the preaching of the gospel, a salutary lie was not regarded as a fault even by good men." Nor can it be shown that it was thought "allowable," or even "praiseworthy," simply because the writer mentions the fact without expressing any subjective opinion, or because, as we learn from what follows (Jos 2:9.), Rahab was convinced of the truth of the miracles which God had wrought for His people, and acted in firm faith that the true God would give the land of Canaan to the Israelites, and that all opposition made to them would be vain, and would be, in fact, rebellion against the Almighty God himself. For a lie is always a sin. Therefore even if Rahab was not actuated at all by the desire to save herself and her family from destruction, and the motive from which she acted had its roots in her faith in the living God (Heb 11:31), so that what she did for the spies, and thereby for the cause of the Lord, was counted to her for righteousness ("justified by works," Jam 2:25), yet the course which she adopted was a sin of weakness, which was forgiven her in mercy because of her faith. (Note: Calvin's estimate is also a correct one: "It has often happened, that even when good men have endeavoured to keep a straight course, they have turned aside into circuitous paths. Rahab acted wrongly when she told a lie and said that the spies had gone; and the action was acceptable to God only because the evil that was mixed with the good was not imputed to her. Yet, although God wished the spies to be delivered, He did not sanction their being protected by a lie." Augustine also pronounces the same opinion concerning Rahab as that which he expressed concerning the Hebrew midwives (see the comm. on Exo 1:21).)”