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“…the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below. Now then, please swear to me by the Lord that you will show kindness to my family, because I have shown kindness to you. Give me a sure sign that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them—and that you will save us from death.” “Our lives for your lives!” the men assured her.  …  “Agreed,” she replied. “Let it be as you say.” So she sent them away, and they departed. And she tied the scarlet cord in the window. (Joshua 2:11b-14a, 21)

Rahab the prostitute, hanging by a thread at the approach of the army of Israel who intended to raze Jericho to the ground. 

Rahab clearly didn’t hold a high position in her ancient society.  She was likely assumed to be a woman of dubious character.  She quite likely was a victim of circumstances out of her control that placed her in this profession.  Economic hardship.  No husband to guard her rights.  A prostitute. 

And yet, Rahab the prostitute gives a full and sincere confession of faith in the God of Israel, nearly as strong a confession as anyone else in the book of Joshua as she speaks to the sovereignty and power of the Lord who will give this new land to his people. 

She trusted this Lord she had only ever heard about, and she entrusted herself to his people.  “Give me a sure sign… that you will save us from death,” she says.  And the sign they give her is a sign that oddly reverberates with the crimson blood of the lambs smeared over the entry ways of the Israelites on the night of Passover.  In her window she is to tie a scarlet cord, and huddle inside behind locked doors with her whole family as the Israelites did on the night of their salvation. 

But this cord signifies more.  This story is the second instance of this Hebrew word for hope.  Where is that word in this story?  The “scarlet cord.”  There are actually three words here in the Hebrew.  One of them means thread, one of them means scarlet, and the last of them has a root which means “to be tense/rigid,” or by extension “to be expectant.”  That last one is our word for hope, and is indeed translated as hope elsewhere in the Bible. 

Rahab the prostitute, hanging by a scarlet thread of hope in the Lord, even as the walls were quite literally about to collapse around her, putting an end to life as she’d known it.  But that scarlet thread of hope playing gently in the wind was also the promise that a new life was coming.   

Even when a thread is all you seem to be holding on by: it’s enough.  Hope in God never comes with much in this life we can lay our hands on, just a thin whisp of scarlet hope.  But as these members of Jesus’ own genealogy—Rahab, Jacob, and Ruth—would discover: God is faithful.  The Lord delivers.  A hope in him, threadbare though it may be, is never misplaced.