Women at Work in the Deuteronomistic History - International Voices ...

PROSTITUTES AND OTHER SEX WORKERS | 313
What needs to be asked here is, first, whether there are elements that would
indicate the probability or even the possibility that this הנוז השׁא was a
prostitute. In case we can answer positively this question, the second question is
about her social location, how she is depicted, and what the text tells about the
writer’s perception of prostitutes as part of lower-class women. We start with a
doubt, which prompted one of the earliest available papers on this issue, namely,
whether a woman who has her own paternal family so close by (who,
incidentally, is referred to from the point of reference of Rahab and not of her
father, הל־רשׁא־לכ־תאו היבא תיב־תאו), would need to (or would be able to)
sell herself as a harlot in the same city where her family dwelt.
Mich hat schon immer gewundert, warum eine Frau, die inmitten ihrer Sippe
lebt—Vater, Mutter und Brüder werden genannt—das Leben einer Hure führen
sollte. Sie war doch nicht aus Not gezwungen, ihren Körper zu verkaufen.
Allerdings stellt sich der Erzähler eine für ihn und seine Zeit „normale“
patriarchale Familie vor. Der Verlauf der Handlung weist sie jedoch als frei in
ihrem Hause lebende Frau aus. Auch die resolute Art, wie sie die Kundschafter
rettet, spricht für eine selbständige Frau. 119
Since people at times had to sell a daughter in order to escape debt, slavery
or death, and since up to this day women often end up in prostitution for the
most varied economic and social reasons, even having their own partner or
husband, in principle it would not be impossible that Rahab would be a
prostituted woman. She does not dwell with her family prior to Jericho’s
destruction, although from both chapters 2 and 6 one gathers she wanted to save
them. At any rate, I concur with Schulte that Rahab seems to live alone and that
there are no clear hints that she was a prostitute rather than some other
unattached woman.
One has to remember that, in order for the story to be credible, Rahab had to
be some kind of “public woman,” (and often “public woman” is—at least in
Spanish—an euphemism for a harlot, but not necessarily so). Several writers
have noticed that “the assurance with which the spies go to Rahab’s house is
striking.” 120 Further, they would have needed a place in which to lodge without
raising misgivings (on which they fail, but that is another important point in the
plot). The unlikely possibility would be, then, that an unmarried, unattached,
119
Schulte, “Beobachtungen,“ 256. One of Schulte’s proposals is the existence of an earlier (premonarchic)
form of marriage, later overrun by the patriarchal marriage or Baal-marriage, which
centered on the woman and her location. Somehow this issue is no longer in the scholar’s agenda;
since it would not be a professional term, we need not deal further with it here.
120
Soggin, Joshua, 39. There is also a theological reason, of course. As the writer himself notes,
Rahab also knows who they are.