Chapter 9: The Outsider Who Stayed

Jericho was gone. But Rahab was not.

A Canaanite prostitute from a pagan city was brought into the people of God and lived among the Israelites from that day forward. Not because she earned it. Because she believed.

Rahab married an Israelite man named Salmon. Their son was Boaz. Boaz would later marry a foreign widow named Ruth, another woman the world had overlooked. From Boaz came Obed. From Obed came Jesse. And from Jesse came King David.

The woman who had hidden two spies on her roof and tied a scarlet cord to her window became part of the royal line of Israel. But God did not stop there. From the line of David, generations later, came Jesus of Nazareth.

Rahab is named in the first chapter of Matthew, in the genealogy of Christ, one of only five women mentioned in that entire bloodline. And in the book of Hebrews, where the greatest examples of faith are listed alongside Abraham and Moses, she is there too.

★ "By faith the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies, was not killed with those who were disobedient." (Hebrews 11:31)

God wrote her into the most important lineage in human history.