And it was told the king of Jericho, saying, Behold, there came men in here tonight of the children of Israel to search out the country.
All Commentaries on Joshua 2:2 Go To Joshua 2
Gregory of Elvira
AD 392
“And Joshua the son of Nun,” it says, “sent two spies from Shittim, saying to them ‘Go up and survey the land and Jericho.’ When they arrived in Jericho, the two young men entered the house of a prostitute by the name of Rahab and stayed there as guests.” Pay attention to the structure of this mystery, most beloved brothers, and ask yourselves why men as great as these, for whom the Lord had performed such marvels and miracles, entered the house of a woman of ill repute, as if they were unable to lodge elsewhere. They did this not by chance, I believe, but intentionally by prophetic design. For I find this prostitute in many places, not only as a hostess of saints but also as their bride. The most holy prophet Hosea, for instance, was commanded by the Lord to accept a harlot as his wife: “For the Lord said to me, ‘Take for your wife a prostitute and generate children of prostitution.’ ” Even our Lord and Savior himself, when he had sat down by the well in Samaria, conversed with an immoral woman to whom no one had previously spoken there. After he said to her, “You have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband,” she believed that he was the Messiah, that is, she confessed him to be the Christ. Then there was the harlot who washed the Savior’s feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair and anointed them while kissing them. Let us see, therefore, what our hostess represents. This Rahab, although she is called a prostitute, nevertheless is a sign of the virgin church, considered as a foreshadow of the coming realities at the end of the age, where she alone is preserved to life among all who are perishing. For even when it was said to the prophet Hosea, “Take for your wife a prostitute,” surely then the image of the church as coming from the Gentiles was being prefigured, given that the people were to be gathered from the harlotry of the nations and from prostitution with idols, for, it says, “they prostituted themselves to strange gods.” Indeed, she is called “the church” because the Greek word ecclesia means “gathering of the people.” And just as the apostle says, “An unfaithful wife is sanctified through her faithful husband,” so also is the church, coming from the infidelity of the Gentiles and prostitution with idols, sanctified through the body of Christ, of which we are members, as we learn from the same apostolic author. Because the church, as I have often said, gathered from the multitude of Gentiles, was then called a prostitute, therefore the church is found in the figure of Rahab, the hostess of saints.
