After the death of Moses, Joshua prepared the Israelites to enter the Promised Land. Before crossing the Jordan, he did the same thing that Moses had done forty years before when the Israelites were about to enter Canaan: he sent out spies.

So they set out and came to the house of a harlot named Rahab, and they lodged there. (Joshua 2.1)

Why, of all places, would spies go to stay with a harlot? God no hurry harlots?

A ‘harlot’ symbolizes the seductive sensations and desires that inflame our lower nature but leave the soul unsatisfied. The name ‘Rahab’ means proud Prayed arrogant, and is a term sometimes used to signify the dominance of ‘Egypt’, the Biblical symbol for the level of matter and illusion. Jericho, the city of Rahab, means Moon– which is also a symbol of the illusory level of Being that ‘Egypt’ represents. The first mission of the soul in the Promised Land will be to destroy ‘Jericho’ once and for all completely, so that absolutely nothing remains irredeemable. Joshua will even utter a curse, unlike any other curse in the Bible, accursing anyone who dares to rebuild the city of Jericho. So the spies immediately go to Rahab, the essence of Jericho.

But ‘Rahab’ also means something else, of which ‘Egypt’ is only a copy. Rahab symbolizes the primordial. Chaosthat he was ‘vanquished by the Creator’ in the Hebrew legends.

The prophet Isaiah will say:

You were the one who cut Rahab to pieces, the one who pierced the Dragon. You were the one who dried up the Sea, the waters of the great abyss.

And the work book would say:

By His power He calmed the sea; With his skill he struck down Rahab.

Joshua, according to legend, was swallowed by a sea monster in his childhood, but at a distant point on the sea coast the monster vomited him out unharmed. So, on a deep psychological level, we see that Rahab was the ‘sea monster’ that swallowed and vomited out Joshua, in mythical terms, his ‘mother’. Later, according to the legends, Joshua marry Rahab (in her current incarnation as the ‘harlot of Jericho’), so she is also his ‘wife’.

Like the Greek goddess Gaia (who is sometimes represented as the mother of Uranus and sometimes as his wife), Rahab is Chaos, the turbulent passions. She is the ‘Sea’, the vast deep unconscious. She is the ancient archetype that underlies the power of the Sacred Feminine. The Christian tradition will call her ‘María Magdalena’ (Mary of the High Tower). As the soul ascends the path of spiritual initiation, the Sacred Feminine (Rahab) must reunite with the Sacred Masculine (Joshua) so that together they can re-merge into Oneness and return to Divinity.