“She bound the scarlet line in the window.”
Joshua 2:21
A shibboleth is a special kind of password, which is to say a key or badge that opens a social door and grants admission to a social group. As everyone versed in scripture knowledge knows, shibboleth was at first a word that the lisping Ephramites could not pronounce, and that the Sons of Giliad therefore used to identify the survivors of a shattered Ephramite army. When a bloodied and bedraggled warrior staggered down to the ford of the Jordan, he was challenged to pronounce the word “shibboleth,” and thereby show his secret badge. Those who pronounced it “sibboleth” were immediately slain.
As I explained some years ago, shibboleths often take the form of sacrilege. The password that grants admission to one social group is in such cases a violation of the norms of that group’s enemy. Thus anti-Christian secret societies used to require an aspiring member to trample on a crucifix, spit on a Bible, or otherwise treat the sacred objects and words Christianity as profane. In on-line culture, such sacrilegious shibboleths are called “shill tests,” and in these tests an aspiring member is required to type words that an undercover agent would find it very hard to type. As I explained in that long-ago post, to get past the sentries of one group, you must often slay another group’s sacred cow.
A shibboleth is a password that prevents infiltration by spies. A “scarlet thread” is a secret badge with which a traitor makes himself known to his new compatriots, and is thereby passed over when his new compatriots descend like wolves on the people whose compatriot the traitor only pretends to be. Like shibboleth, the term “scarlet thread” comes from the Old Testament, and more particularly from the curious tale of a traitor known as Rahab the Harlot.
Rahab the Harlot dwells in the city of Jericho, and when Joshua sends two spies into that city, the two young men somehow fall in with Rahab, who we must never forget is a harlot, and she hides these two handsome young spies in her house. This house was built on, or rather up against, the city wall; and on its city-wall side had a high window that looked out over the countryside. It was from this high window that Rahab lowered Joshua’s spies on a “scarlet thread,” after telling them that her people were ripe for conquest because they were rotten with fear.
“Your terror is fallen upon us . . . the inhabitants of the land faint because of you.”
Rahab’s reward for betraying her people is that she and her family will be spared when Jericho is sacked and its citizens are slaughtered. But to assure their deliverance, Rahab must keep her family in her house (of ill repute), and must display the “scarlet thread” in the front window. of that house.
“Behold, when we come into the land, thou shall bind this thread in the window which thou didst let us down by; and thou shalt bring thy father, and thy mother, and thy brethren, and all thy father’s household, home unto thee” Joshua 2: 18.
Thus a “scarlet thread” is a means whereby a traitor escapes the destruction brought down by his or her treason. One wonders how many who “miraculously” survive some near-universal destruction owe their deliverance to display of a secret badge or “scarlet thread.” Rahab was a harlot, so she knew how treachery works.
“She bound the scarlet line in the window.”
Not long after, as every Sunday-school scholar knows, Joshua’s army compasses the city of Jericho and “the walls came a tumbling down.” Then, as many Sunday-school scholars do not know, before the sack and slaughter begins, a house displaying a “scarlet thread” is sought and a traitorous harlot is saved. Which was very fortunate for that traitorous harlot and her family, because of Joshua’s army we are told:
“They utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.” Joshua 6: 21
Like a shibboleth, a “scarlet thread” is a special kind of password, although it grants its possessor the privilege of escape and not admission. It is a secret badge with which traitors and spies show their true colors to their true friends, and by which traitors and spies are exempted when their true friends utterly destroy their pretended friends with the edge of the sword.
The Orthosphere 
Well ain’t that just Peachy!
And I used to be so Keenan her.
OK, I’ll fetch my coat….
Maybe someone else can understand your gnomic utterances.
I was alluding to a certain Peachy Keenan (to be sure, to be sure… well… errr no… it turns out that there’s a pot of Goldberg at the end of this rainbow) who became a trending topic in parts of the DR for having LARPed for ages as one of us ™. When things got crunchy on the campuses recently, she pulled the ripcord, tied on her ancestral kabbalistic red thread and broke cover.
https://peachykeenan.substack.com/p/meet-the-zoomerwaffen
Scroll down a bit and you’ll get to the bit headed “Spoiler Alert: Opening my Genomic Kimono!“
Not entirely unrelated to theme of this post, although admittedly a bit of a stretch.
I wonder how long these conversos will stay converted. My guess is that they will get the golem under control and then sick it on us again. I’m willing to be open-minded, but I think I have seen this movie once before.
See Matthew 1:5.
I’m not sure Rahab is quite the same as the Canaanite woman. I read Rahab’s profession of faith as her simply joining what she thought would be the winning side. If I read the story as history and not a pious symbol, Rahab is a contemptible human being. The last we hear of her, she lives among the Israelites, but apparently not as one of them.
Yet the writer of the Gospel of Matthew deliberately specifies Rahab, with the Moabitess Ruth specified in the second half of verse 5. That combo in Matthew 1 represents a specifically Christological interpretation.
I don’t know, but I don’t think this is the same Rahab. I’m not an expert, but this may be why Rahab the Harlot is specified with that epithet. And wouldn’t the mother of Boaz have lived long after the days of Joshua?
It’s not about chronological time possibility: there’s an exegetical tradition likely (but not conclusively) being drawn upon here. Here’s a link (while not to a Catholic source, it’s more immediately handy, and it summarizes things I’ve encountered in Catholic commentaries in the past):
https://armstronginstitute.org/359-before-boaz-and-ruth-salmon-and-rahab
Thanks for passing this along. I don’t find their argument terribly persuasive, but also cannot see what difference it would make if I was convinced that Boaz married Rahab the Harlot. It may well be a failing on my part, but I see these genealogies as a failed attempt on the part of to evangelists to convert the Jews. The attempt was worthwhile because the Jews insisted that the Messiah have the right bloodline. But it obviously failed. This apologetic doesn’t work on a gentile like me, for whom the Bible has authority because of Jesus instead of Jesus having authority because of the Bible. As Christ himself said, we should judge things by their fruits. I judge Christ by his life, not by his family tree.
That’s an honest, albeit highly peculiar, approach to Scripture. It’s reduction to instrumentality is in harmony with 19th century German criticism and its progeny, but has nothing to do with how Christianity has traditionally received, interpreted, and understood Scripture.
I’m not sure it is so peculiar. A Christian comes to the Old Testament by way of the New, not the other way round. Take away Christ and the Old Testament has, for a gentile, no more authority than any other old book. Take away Christ and it is just Jewish mythology. Add Christ, on the other hand, and it is becomes interesting but kind of redundant. Doesn’t faith mean that I do not require additional evidence?
Corrected: That’s Marcionite-adjacent. Is more or less alien to traditional pre-Protestant Christian orthodoxy. That you subjectively do not claim a need for additional evidence does not mean God has NOT given it in Revelation, which includes the Hebrew Scriptures.
You are probably right. I think the Old Testament came with more costs than benefits. When modern Infidelity was getting started, they had a field day forcing Christians to defend the bloody massacres of the Old Testament, and a strong case can be made that there would have been no Protestants (or at least no Puritans) without the OT. But before you start gathering faggots to burn this heretic, let me at least partly agree with your last line. One can find evidence for Christ in Hebrew scripture, but a gentile will not accept that evidence as evidence unless he has already accepted the conclusion that evidence points to.
I don’t gather faggots to put heretics to the fire. The other thing is that your and my being gentiles is ultimately irrelevant to our faith. The Body of Christ was seeded in the bosom of Abrahamic faith and remains rooted in that soil.
I appreciate your position and have no inclination to quarrel against it. My own view is that Abraham fades into relative insignificance once God incarnate comes to earth. I don’t say this to belittle Abraham or any other OT character. But one naturally loses interest in the heralds when the King arrives.
Umm… Rahab the prostitute is listed among the heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11.
JMSmith, you seem to get your kicks out of throwing little jabs at orthodox Christianity and subverting traditional scriptural interpretations.
To say that I am motivated by a desire for “kicks” is to say that I am frivolous, perhaps even a mischief maker. I assure you that I am entirely serious, although I am not always solemn, and that I do not say things simply to shock people and get a reaction. I have long said that Orthosphere is a misnomer, since, apart from Bonald, everyone who writes here has been more or less unorthodox. If we were perfectly orthodox, we would have very little to write about.
I do not write with a plan. I wake up very early in the morning (it is now just after 2:00 a.m.), and if I have a notion, I try to write it down before it is time to go to work. I do, however, write with a very strong and urgent sense that the faith is dying, and that what you call orthodoxy will not bring it back to life. Christ’s church was never meant to be a museum. Christians were never meant to be actors following the script of an old play. That’s why I think some things need to be laughed at and smashed. We dote on our wineskins and wonder what became of the wine!
Paul raises the faith of Rahab the Harlot in Hebrews because he is writing to Hebrews. More particularly, he is trying to persuade these Jewish Christians not to do what we know they will eventually do, which is revert to ritualistic Judaism. So I begin with the understanding that Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews is a letter that failed. When I read Hebrews in a Bible study a few years ago, I complained that I wished I could read Paul’s Letter to the hairy barbarians north of the Alps, because this letter certainly was not written to anyone like me. My point is that this letter was written to a very particular audience, and with a very particular purpose, and the purpose of chapter 11 is to persuade that audience that the heroes of their old ancestral cult were in fact exemplars of Christian faith. It was a worthy undertaking, but it did not persuade the Hebrews and it does not persuade me.
But in this case, what you are laughing at and smashing is sacred inspired scripture.
What’s left of Christianity after you’ve done all your laughing and smashing?
About ten years ago, I pushed my way through Richard Hooker’s On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Hooker was an Anglican bishop around 1600 and Eric Voegelin and C. S. Lewis both admired him and this book. Hooker’s wrote Laws to (1) defend the Church of England, (2) condemn the Puritans and separatists. In other words, to defend what we might call a limited Reformation but prevent that Reformation going too far. Hooker thought the house needed to be cleaned, but he understood that those who set out to clean the house might end up burning it down.
To make his case, Hooker makes a distinction between matters of Faith and Polity, the first being essential to salvation and the latter being merely “convenient” (in other words, they serve the purpose of salvation, but that purpose could be served in another way if that other way became more convenient. So, for example, baptism is essential but stained glass windows are convenient; faith in Christ is essential, singing hymns is convenient. Matters of Faith could not be changed by anyone. They were “sacred.” Matters of Polity could be changed, although Hooker said they should be changed by bishops and not by ordinary Christians.
Hooker says that the Church is prone to two errors. The first is to treat a matter of Polity as if it were a matter of faith–what I call doting on wineskins and forgetting the wine. This is superstition, and Hooker says it is the typical error of Rome. The second is to strip Christianity down to matters of Faith that can be grounded in Scripture/ This is the error of the Puritans and it yields a faith that is too stripped down to function in this world.
So, on the one hand a superstitions church that is cluttered with old bric-a-brac because it cannot throw anything away, on the other hand an iconoclastic church that is stripped bare and may shortly begin to discard even matters of Faith.
Now none of this settles whether any particular practice is a matter of Faith or a Superstition (a matter of polity that is treated as a matter of Faith), but I think Hooker’s distinction is very, very important. We have to walk a knife-edge between superstition and iconoclasm, and that means laughing at, and smashing, the right things. It means clearing out old rubbish without burning down the house.
Because the compiler of the Diatessaron left out the genealogy, he was later accused of all sorts of nasty heresies. But it may be that at the time he compiled it, the genealogy was not yet widely considered part of the gospel of Matthew. It does seem somewhat out of place.
The only thing I would disagree with Hooker on is that the bishops are the ones who should be discerning what is essential and what isn’t. Nowadays bishops are more likely to want to place the bric-a-brac (social justice activism) at the center of Christianity, and to try to push things essential to the gospel (supersessionism) right out of the church. Lay people need to have a voice, and a big one, in the process of discernment. Bishops –including popes– aren’t all-wise little gods walking around on the earth.
As with everything else, we know bishops by their fruits and not their hats. And as you say, most modern bishops are worldly men who are not all that different than the bureaucrats who run NGO’s. In fact, I don’t think it is a gross exaggeration to say that most bishops see their churches as NGO’s with cool uniforms and (sometimes) better architecture.
The bottom line is that we live in an age of zero authority. We have no shortage of people pointing to their hats (or diplomas, or election results) and shouting, “I’m an authority! I’m an authority!” We also have a growing amount of naked authoritarianism–“conform to my doctrine or lose your job, your bank account, your children, etc.” But there is effectively no authority, particularly in matters of religion. So, as you say, all questions go to the laity. They may decide that they agree with the man in the extravagant hat, but they will ignore him if they do not. There are exceptions, but one only has to look at the size of the families sitting in the pews of Catholic churches to see that this is so.
I think Hooker’s basic categories are correct and important, but I do not share his faith in a bench of bishops. Time has shown that bishops can be iconoclastic and superstitious at the same time. “We must dump out the wine to save the wineskin,” to use one of my favorite scriptural allusions. They fall in love with old buildings and costumes and rituals, and will destroy the essential purpose of these instruments in order to save these instruments.