Everyone knows what happened to the walls of Jericho.

Israel crossed the Jordan, marched around the city for seven days, the priests blew their trumpets, the people shouted, and the walls came crashing down. It is one of those Bible stories many of us first encountered as children, complete with songs, pictures and, in my case, perhaps rather more enthusiasm for collapsing cardboard walls than the story itself really warrants.

But there is a detail earlier in Joshua that makes the whole thing considerably stranger.

Before Israel ever enters Jericho, two spies are sent into the city. They find their way to the house of Rahab, a prostitute who hides them from the king’s men and then helps them escape. Joshua tells us how she does it:

“She let them down by a rope through the window, for the house she lived in was part of the city wall.”

I had read that detail many times without thinking very much about it. Rahab lived in the wall. That matters because only a few chapters later, the wall falls down. And Rahab survives.

The House in the Wall

Rahab’s location is not an incidental detail. It is an important part of what happens in Joshua 2. Her house sits in or forms part of Jericho’s fortifications, which means her window opens to the outside of the city. That is how she can lower the spies through it after the king’s men have gone looking for them elsewhere. Instead of leaving through the city gate, they disappear straight through Rahab’s window and down the outside of the wall.

Exactly what the house looked like is harder to establish. Ancient cities could incorporate domestic buildings into or alongside their defensive structures. Some commentators have suggested Rahab may have lived within a double-wall or casemate-style system, where spaces between defensive walls could be used for rooms or storage. That is possible, but the text does not provide an architectural plan, and I do not think we need to pretend it does.

What Joshua wants us to understand is simpler. Rahab’s house was in the city wall. That becomes particularly important when the spies make an agreement with her. Rahab has protected them, and in return, she asks them to spare her family when Israel attacks. They agree, but they give her very specific instructions. She must gather her father, mother, brothers and wider family into her house. Nobody is to leave. If someone steps outside, the spies will not be responsible for what happens to them. But everyone who remains inside will be protected. And there is another instruction. Rahab must tie a scarlet cord in the window.

So picture this with me for a moment. The safest place in Jericho, apparently, is about to be a house built into the wall Israel has come to destroy.

Then the Wall Falls

Joshua 6 contains the part everybody remembers. For six days, Israel marches around Jericho once each day. On the seventh day, they circle the city seven times. The priests sound their trumpets, and Joshua tells the people to shout. Then the wall collapses. The Israelites enter the city, and the destruction begins. At which point, if you remember where Rahab lives, there is an obvious problem. What happened to her house?

Joshua does not stop to explain. There is not aside telling us that Rahab lived in a particularly reinforced section of Jericho, or that one stretch of wall miraculously remained standing while everything around it collapsed. The story simply continues.

Then Joshua turns to the two men who had originally entered the city and tells them: “Go into the prostitute’s house and bring her out and all who belong to her, in accordance with your oath to her.” And they do. Rahab, her parents, her brothers and everyone belonging to her are brought out alive. The house in the wall that fell is apparently still accessible to the spies. I am not sure how I managed to read this story for so many years without noticing how odd that is.

Did Every Part of the Wall Collapse? There is a temptation with details like this to immediately find a practical answer and tidy everything up. One possibility is that Rahab’s section of the fortifications simply did not collapse. Joshua tells us that the wall fell and that Israel was then able to advance into the city, but it never says that every single section of Jericho’s defenses vanished simultaneously.

The Hebrew phrase used for the collapse is itself interesting. It can convey the sense of the wall falling “under itself” or collapsing in on itself. The emphasis appears to be on the failure of the fortification and the access it gives Israel, rather than on providing a detailed description of exactly which stones landed where.

Some commentators therefore picture a substantial collapse or breach while another section, including Rahab’s house, remained standing. Others suggest that if her dwelling formed part of a larger wall system, the collapse of one defensive section would not necessarily mean the destruction of every structure associated with it. Both are possible, but neither is actually described, and that distinction matters. Sometimes we make Bible stories sound more certain than the Bible itself does. We fill the gaps because unanswered questions make us uncomfortable. Before long, an interpretation becomes a fact, and then somebody else repeats it as though Joshua had included an architectural appendix at the end of chapter six.

He didn’t. Joshua is interested in telling us that Jericho’s defenses failed, that Israel entered the city, and that Rahab survived because of the promise made to her. Exactly how her particular house remained accessible is left unexplained.

The Red Cord Everybody Remembers.

There is another small but fascinating detail hidden inside the story. Most readers remember the scarlet cord Rahab hangs from her window. It has become one of the most recognizable parts of her story, particularly in Christian interpretation, where its color has often been connected with blood, Passover and eventually the death of Jesus. That symbolism is ancient. Early Christian writers such as Clement of Rome and Origen saw the red cord as pointing towards the blood of Christ.

But Joshua never says that. Within the story itself, the cord first has a very practical function. It marks Rahab’s house as the one covered by the promise the spies have made to her. The same window through which they escaped becomes the place where she displays the agreed sign. Even here, though, there is another surprise. The rope Rahab uses to lower the spies and the scarlet cord she later hangs in the window are described using different Hebrew words. We often picture her simply tying the escape rope back outside as the sign, but the text does not actually say that. And when Jericho finally falls, the scarlet cord is not mentioned at all.

Joshua does not describe a soldier spotting a strip of red hanging among the collapsing walls. He simply tells us that Joshua sends the two spies back to the house, and they bring Rahab and her family out. The sign mattered, but the story itself is far less interested in the cord than later centuries of interpretation became.

The Woman Who Already Knew.

By this point, it would be easy to make Rahab’s house the center of the story, but I am not sure it is. Because the most interesting thing about Rahab happens before the walls fall, before the trumpets sound and before she hangs anything from her window. She tells the spies what she believes.

Rahab has heard what happened at the Red Sea. She knows about Israel’s victories east of the Jordan. She knows that Jericho is frightened and that the people’s courage is disappearing. Everyone else appears to have heard the same reports. But Rahab draws a different conclusion.

“The LORD your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.”

That is an astonishing confession to place in the mouth of a Canaanite woman living inside the very city Israel is preparing to attack. Rahab has not crossed the Jordan with Israel or stood beside Moses. She has not watched the sea divide or eaten manna in the wilderness. Everything she knows has come to her through reports of what has happened elsewhere. Yet she appears to understand something that others in Jericho do not. They hear the stories and become frightened, but Rahab hears the stories and believes. There is a significant difference between the two.

Fear can make us hide behind our walls. Rahab decides the walls are not going to save her. Perhaps that is why the location of her house becomes so interesting. She lives right at Jericho’s boundary. Her home is physically part of the structure designed to keep Israel outside. Yet before Israel ever enters the city, Rahab has already crossed the boundary in another sense. She has chosen to place her trust not in Jericho’s defenses, but in the God she believes is about to bring them down.

It is tempting, but I would not push the symbolism too far. Joshua never tells us that her house represents her spiritual position, and it is easy to make ancient stories carry meanings they were never intended to bear. But the irony is difficult to miss. The person living in the wall is the person who understands that the wall cannot save her.

The Safest House in Jericho.

There is something wonderfully strange about the instructions the spies give Rahab. When the attack comes, gather everyone into your house. Stay inside, do not leave and hang the cord from the window. Look at the situation purely from a military point of view, and it sounds almost ridiculous. If you know an army is coming to destroy a fortified city, moving your entire family into a house built into the fortifications would not seem the most obvious survival plan. Yet that house becomes the place of safety. Not because the wall is stronger than anyone realized, and certainly not because Rahab has somehow found the one structurally superior property in Jericho.

The wall still falls, but Rahab survives because the promise attached to that house matters more than the wall surrounding it. We do not need to resolve every detail of how her house remained standing, because Joshua’s attention is elsewhere. What matters to the storyteller is what happens to Rahab.

A woman living on the edge of a doomed city hears stories about a God she has never seen, decides those stories are true, risks her life to protect two strangers, gathers her family around her and waits. Outside, Jericho has walls. Inside Rahab’s house, there is only a promise.

In the end, the wall is the thing that fails.