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

314 | WOMEN AT WORK IN THE DTRH
non-public woman would have fit this role more easily than a “bartender,” an
innkeeper or a harlot. An innkeeper is also the earliest reading. Cohen keeps
both meanings: “harlot. Hebrew zonah, which the Targum and Jewish
commentators connect with mazon, ‘food,’ and render ‘an innkeeper.’ It may be
that she was both. …strangers would not normally be noticed where travellers
were constantly coming and going.” 121
Still, there is one important aspect of this story, which several commentaries
note, to wit: its purposeful ambiguity and even picaresque character, evident in
the association of Rahab’s name with the “open place, open court, plaza;” 122 the
recognition that the men “came in to her” and slept there (2:1,3–4); the folkloric
nature of the tale; and the very use of the ambiguous הנוז השׁא. In my view,
precisely this ambiguity, especially the double entendres, take away at least half
of the fun of the story if one tries to decide whether Rahab was or was not a
prostitute.
Some facts are clear in the text no matter how one chooses to interpret
them. Rahab is not an upper-class citizen. She lives close to the city gates at the
city walls, the most exposed area in case of a breakthrough, not only due to
physical proximity, but also because within the preindustrial walled city there
were additional walls, enclosing and protecting particular neighborhoods.
Preindustrial cities show a pattern characterized by a concentration of the most
prominent institutions at the core of the city, going increasingly far from the
center as they decrease in importance. Neighborhoods both determine and reveal
status, so that there is control over who lives where, and people do not move as
they wish, but as they are allowed to mainly by socio-economic, ethnic, and
family position. 123
On the other hand, since city gates were strategic as both the weakest point
of access and as a post of control over its movements, we may surmise it was
too important to have been left unattended. Perhaps part of Rahab’s tasks as
Jericho’s innkeeper (if that is what she was) was, precisely, to inform about
foreigners coming in. There is no evidence, of course; not even a distinctive
biblical term for “innkeeper” as far as I know. Yet, there is Babylonian evidence
121
Cohen, Joshua & Judges, 7. He translates it with the term “prostitute” and adds a note that
“perhaps she was both.”
122
Schulte, “Beobachtungen,” 256 n.9 quoting Noth: “Haus am freien Platz.” Soggin, Joshua, 40–
41: “good example of a West Semitic name, no doubt linked with a divine name or title, e.g. rāHāb-
‘el.”
123
Sjoberg, Preindustrial City, 95–96 mentions “1) the pre-eminence of the ‘central’ area over the
periphery; 2) certain finer spatial differences according to ethnic, occupational, and family ties, and
3) the low incidence of functional differentiation in other land use patterns.” On fortification of cities
and importance of walls and gates, see Borowski, Daily Life, 46–49; Aaron Burke, “The
Architecture of Defense: Fortified Settlements of the Levant during the Middle Bronze Age” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Chicago, 2004), especially 325–30 on social complexity and fortifications and
his concluding chapter, 331–5.