Rahab of Jericho

A Palestinian artist who lives and works in the occupied West Bank, Khaled Jarrar is known for his provocative interventions at and around contemporary border walls. For his 2014 Whole in the Wall exhibit, Jarrar took a hammer to the Israeli-Palestinian ‘security fence,’ removing fragments of concrete which he later reconstituted as a set of sculptures expressing hope for unity in modern contexts of colonial violence.

Jarrar’s London installation of the project featured a giant concrete barrier running through the middle of the gallery: an unsightly grey mass confronting viewers with the suffocating physical and psychological effects of walling. The barrier was constructed to severely restrict access to parts of the exhibit, forcing gallery-goers to climb ungracefully through a small, Palestine-shaped hole in order to view the entire installation. In this way, Whole in the Wall confronts visitors with the dehumanizing effects of border barriers. At the same time, by breaking these structures down and giving them a new, creative purpose, his work invites the viewer to imagine a different reality: one which is expansive enough to resist the ‘insider–outsider’ dynamic of wall-building.

The Bible’s authors laboured carefully to construct walls around Rahab of Jericho, the infamous Canaanite sex-worker-turned-proselyte whose story is recorded in the book of Joshua (chapters 2 and 6). Prior to the invasion, she runs a brothel from the city’s ramparts—literally ‘on the outer side of the city wall’ (Joshua 2:15). Yet on a deeper level, this promiscuous foreign woman poses a genuine threat to Israel’s holy-war agenda (Sharp 2008: 98–99). Rahab must be contained. Thus, although she and her family escape the herem (Hebrew, ‘utter destruction’), they are ultimately resettled ‘outside the camp of Israel’ (Joshua 6:23) as ‘resident gentiles’ (Baskin 1979: 142).

Nevertheless, this unruly outsider refuses to be hemmed in. When she confesses faith in Israel’s God, Rahab speaks not as the Canaanite other, but ‘as an Israelite theologian’ (Gillmayr-Bucher 2007: 147). The paradigmatic outsider becomes an insider—and in so doing, she transgresses every boundary which is intended to keep her at a safe distance. Like Jarrar’s monumental sculptures, this larger-than-life biblical figure summons us to transcend the barriers of our imaginations and seek connection across the walls that divide.

References

Baskin, Judith. 1979. ‘The Rabbinic Transformations of Rahab the Harlot’, Notre Dame English Journal 11.2: 141–57

Gillmayr-Bucher, Susan. 2007. ‘“She Came to Test Him with Hard Questions”: Foreign Women and Their View on Israel’, Biblical Interpretation, 15.2: 135–50

Jarrar, Khaled. 2013. Whole in the Wall: The Exhibition Catalogue (London: Ayyam Gallery)

Sharp, Carolyn. 2008. Irony and Meaning in the Hebrew Bible (Bloomington: Indiana University Press)

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s artworks invite viewers into deeply personal interior spaces, conveying her experience of cultural collision in the formation of a hybrid identity.

Dwell: Aso Ebi draws us into a space resembling the Nigerian home of the artist’s youth. On the wall hangs a portrait of her parents on their wedding day, and below, a smaller picture of her and her husband. Commemorative portrait fabric adorns the wall, evoking threads of intergenerational kinship. The floor is surreally decorated with transferred photographs taken from family albums and Nigerian magazines—a personal and cultural bedrock sustaining her experience as a Nigerian-American artist.

Akunyili Crosby depicts herself in a brightly coloured modern dress with her back turned to the viewer, looking over her right shoulder at her shoe. Her hand rests casually on a table beside a green and white teacup and a traditional Nigerian teapot painted in crisp black and yellow stripes. She appears unaware of the presence of any audience. At the same time, Akunyili Crosby’s work implicitly asks the viewer to consider what we do with our inherited traditions.

Like the artist, the biblical figure of Rahab negotiates a hybrid identity. A foreign woman and sex worker, this alluring outsider poses ‘the ultimate risk’ (Sharp 2008: 98) to the Israelites’ mission. Yet her confession of faith (Joshua 2:9–11) demonstrates insider knowledge of God’s salvation history; and in helping the Hebrew spies, she earns a place within that history (Gillmayr-Bucher 2007: 145). For centuries, then, Jewish and Christian readers have lauded Rahab as a heroic outsider-turned-proselyte who renounces her wayward ways and forges a new life among the Hebrews and their capacious God.

However, recent scholarly wisdom suggests that the narrative can be read from another angle, with Rahab as ‘the paradigmatic victim of violent colonization’ (Sharp 2012: 623). According to the postcolonial view, she willingly conspires with Israel against her own people. In return, Rahab and her family are relegated to a liminal position ‘outside the camp of Israel’ (Joshua 6:23).

Rahab’s name in Hebrew means ‘broad’—a reminder that she, like the creator of this artwork, cannot be understood apart from her hybridity. Seeing Rahab clearly requires holding our inherited traditions of biblical interpretation in tension with contemporary critical voices. How might we, as readers of Scripture, follow Akunyili Crosby’s example in creating a hospitable space broad enough to encompass the many dimensions of this fascinating biblical character?

References

Gillmayr-Bucher, Susan. 2007. ‘“She Came to Test Him with Hard Questions”: Foreign Women and Their View on Israel’, Biblical Interpretation, 15.2: 135–50

Sharp, Carolyn. 2008. Irony and Meaning in the Hebrew Bible (Bloomington: Indiana University Press)

______. 2012. ‘“Are You For Us, or For Our Adversaries?”: A Feminist and Postcolonial Interrogation of Joshua 2–12 for the Contemporary Church’, Interpretation 66.2: 141–52

Rahab, Die Jerichonitin (Rahab, of Jericho) is one of several engravings created by created by Ephraim Mose Lilien (1874–1925), a Jewish artist born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to accompany a series of Jewish-themed ballads composed by his friend, Börries von Münchhausen. Like their poetic source material, these illustrations celebrate ‘the epic-heroic qualities of the ancient Hebrews, their courage, strength, and natural beauty’ (Gossman 2004: 49) through fresh interpretations of the Jewish Scriptures.

The poem which inspired this engraving is loosely based on the biblical account of Rahab, the enigmatic zonah (Hebrew, usually translated ‘prostitute’) of Jericho who helps the Israelite spies escape in exchange for her family’s safety. Importantly, Münchhausen’s poem reimagines a key detail: the crimson cord—a symbol of deliverance in the book of Joshua (2:18)—becomes a noose on which Rahab hangs for betraying her people.

This cord occupies a central position in Lilien’s illustration. Poised above Rahab’s head, it takes on new meaning as an omen of judgment and retribution. At the same time, the artist adds his own interpretation by rendering the biblical heroine as the ideal of female obeisance and the object of male sexual conquest.

Lilien depicts Rahab as a beautiful young woman lying prostrate before a dominant male figure holding an enormous sword. Its tip seems to rest on the ground behind her, yet the blade intersects visually with her naked body, underscoring a threat of violence. Rahab hides her face in her hands, and her long, dark hair drapes over the crown of her head toward the rubble of Jericho. There is a strong evocation of sexual domination as the nearly nude male figure gazes downward upon the subjugated woman. He is the embodiment of a revitalized Jewish nation: beautiful, strong, dignified, free. One might even discern a hint of celestial authority. While most likely a palm tree, the large feather-like mass overshadowing the scene might also suggest a pair of angel’s wings.

Throughout history, Jewish and Christian readers have lauded Rahab as an unlikely Gentile heroine and faithful convert whose courage is justly rewarded. Münchhausen’s poem provided Lilien with a different interpretive lens—one which reinscribes the violence of the biblical narrative even as it defies the violence of prevailing anti-Semitic visual tropes. The result is an artwork that asks us to sit with Scripture even to the point of discomfort.

References

Gossman, Lionel. 2004. ‘Jugendstil in Firestone: The Jewish Illustrator E.M. Lilien (1874–1925)’, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 66: 11–76

Sharp, Carolyn. 2004. ‘The Formation of Godly Community: Old Testament Hermeneutics in the Presence of the Other’, Anglican Theological Review, 86: 623–36