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The story of Rahab
According to SWOP:
a collage of quotes

The Hebrews, an escaped band of slaves from Egypt, wander in the desert for forty years. While there, they gather to themselves all the disaffected populations who had been exploited in Canaan and forced to live as outsiders in unoccupied places. They lived by banditry and occasionally were hired as mercenaries. At the end of this long period of homelessness they decide it is time to go in and take over the land of Canaan. Preliminary to this, Joshua the leader of the Israelite coalition and successor to Moses, sends spies into the border town of Jericho to check out the situation. The spies go to the house of Rahab, the prostitute. O.K. Here she is this prostitute that opens the door, just like we all do, to anybody. Because whoever has the money gets in, right? So she opens the door to these guys and all of a sudden she comes in and they tell her who they are. And she has heard of them, she knows who they are. So all of a sudden she is in total fear, that they are going to destroy her and her entire village, that’s what’s going to happen, that’s what they tell her, ‘we’ve come to seek what’s going on.’ Just think about what this is. Imagine we’re sitting in our house in Berkeley and we get a phone call from these 2 guys and we say ‘all right come on in.’ They’ve got $500.00 or $250.00, so they come on over, they knock on the door. Alright, we have had a good time, they’re sitting around, and they say, ‘We really came, ya know, we were sent, to scope out the city because we’re going to kick some ass here.’ She already knew: those guys with cut schmeckels. They were circumcised and the rest of her clients weren’t. She heard all these fantastic stories about these poor people who were being persecuted yet all these fabulous things were happening to them by someone who had come down to help out the poor and the downtrodden…the lowest of the low, right? And she is surrounded by these fat rich pigs who are eating up everything and coming in and treating her like shit, ya know? O.K so she’s hating all the people around her, she is despising her world and the people who live in it and she is willing to have them annihilated. She didn’t love these people. She sold out easily out of fear that they would all be killed, but also that she was given a chance. Oh come on you guys! I’m sorry but I would have a hard time selling out Berkeley.

Well, because she was a prostitute, her people probably persecuted her so they really weren’t her people in the first place. She was a woman who knew what was valuable to her and she chose that over people who thought little of them or what she valued and the lengths she went to make sure that all was well. What higher calling is there than to take care of and love your family? What higher calling is there than that….to sacrifice all for your family? I don’t know about anyone else but if I do nothing else right in life I want to be a good mother, and a good daughter. She is saying ‘Please! Just spare the lives of me and my family. Family means everything all we have is each other, this is who I struggle everyday to take care of, they are everything to me, give me the lives of my family.’ They asked her to join their revolution and told her to put out a red cord in the window so that they would know to pass over her house. They explained to Rahab the significance of the red: ‘We already painted our front doors red and that’s how we got here, that’s how we got out of Egypt.’ She was told, hang the crimson cord out, because she was a true believer because she believed that if she didn’t hang that rope out and have all those people in her house that day she was going to die, so trust me, she had a choice. She could have said, ‘oh you guys are full of it, nothing is going to happen to me, you are not going to come and do this stuff.’ But instead she believed that they were and that these were the right guys to come in and do this. We don’t know if Rahab was previously sympathetic to this, philosophy, the Israelite philosophy. I think she was doing what she needed to do to protect herself so she wouldn’t be harmed. Maybe she thought ‘I’m looking at better opportunities for my next generation to give them opportunities that I was never allotted because of this label that I have been given before I even stepped, breathed life on this earth because of either my gender or my color’...we have to assume Rahab is an intelligent woman who decided to count up the cost. The truth is, back in those days, the ‘winning team’ was bunch of losers who, they were the weirdos, they were the underdogs….we’re the losers, just like the Berkeley measure Q. You have to realize that the government’s bad people Poor measure Q people, and there’s a whole bunch of other measure Q people out there who just come to your house and they show up and they say ‘hey look.’…And she knew that and she said ‘hell, I am going to help, bring this war on.’ She started the revolution!”

The other Hebrews back at the camp were potentially the first audience of the story, like an audience of ‘we have to educate these people and tell them that whores are not all bad.’ We were speaking to our own here, right? Writing to our own community? Were not writing to the Christians, Christianity did not exist. They were trying to write and educate their own, like, ‘look you guys, we’re into whores!’ Nice Jewish guys and they, they really try to promote the prostitutes here and I’ll go for that, like you know, the nice Jewish guys and they like the prostitutes and they are writing her as a hero and she is the mother of blah blah….Right, I don’t like it personally but yeah I can see where people would like that. I don’t like it cuz of the whole male deity thing. It just offends me deeply, the singular male deity, but I would just go for the nice Jewish guys who promote the prostitutes. So give em a pat on the back, be a good prostitute, they’re good nice Jewish guys. Rahab was no doubt vilified by the fellow inhabitants of Jericho but she was exalted by the Israelite God. Seems like the conquerors would enjoy elevating someone that was despised by their enemies.

The military uses prostitutes….they’re going after the prostitutes to have free sex, I mean sorry, to have sex. Perhaps they will want it for free, if they are the invading force, but they are not going to get rid of the prostitutes, they are going to save them! And say: ‘you can come over to our camp and we’ll give you a very nice house and get out of the way while we mow down the city.’ After Joshua, whatever, is there, they burn the city, they go back to their camp to celebrate, what they didn’t add, which I am sure happened is the soldiers had sex with the prostitutes, because that is what happens, you protect the prostitutes, that’s their business. It’s not demeaning to them. They’re not going to kill these women unless someone is deranged. And then they celebrated by having sex with these women who probably gave it to them for free for sparing their lives. We couldn’t have had that in the bible though, oh, no. In today's world, she would be in jail just for being a prostitute- jailed by the same Bible reading gang that makes her a hero for the Jews! But that's usually what happens- first, a prostitute is called upon to help cops/ military/ Jewish scouts- then once the situation has resolved itself, the prostitute is still the outlaw- and off she goes to jail- or gets murdered- for her efforts!