Joshua 2 Summary and Study Guide

Two men lie flat on a roof in Jericho, hidden under stalks of drying flax, while the king’s soldiers stand at the door below asking for them. The woman who put them up there is the only person inside Jericho whom the chapter names. This Joshua 2 summary and study guide starts on that roof, because the chapter turns on what she says next.

Setting the Stage

God had promised this land to Abraham hundreds of years earlier (Genesis 12:7), and the people who came out of Egypt were the first to reach its border. Twelve men went ahead to look at it. Ten came back saying it could not be taken, the people believed them and refused to go in, and that generation died in the desert (Numbers 13 and 14).

They are gone now, and Moses has died too. God has told Joshua to take Israel over the Jordan, and Joshua has told the officers the crossing happens within three days (Joshua 1:11). Joshua 2 falls inside those three days, and it opens with Joshua doing the same thing that went wrong last time. He sends spies.

Comprehensive Joshua 2 Summary

Joshua sends two men from the camp at Shittim to look at the land, and at Jericho in particular, the city standing between Israel and the rest of Canaan. They come into the city and stay at the house of a woman named Rahab. Word reaches the king of Jericho, and he sends to Rahab to hand the two men over.

She has already taken them up to her flat roof and covered them with the flax she had laid out to dry, and she tells the king’s men that the two left before dark and can still be caught on the road to the Jordan. The soldiers ride out after them, and the gate is shut behind the soldiers, which is why the two men will have to leave over the wall instead of through it.

Rahab climbs back up to the roof and tells them what they came to find out. She says the LORD has already given Israel the land, that the whole city is terrified, and that everyone there has heard how God dried up the Red Sea and how Israel destroyed Sihon and Og. Then she asks for an oath and a token, so that her father, mother, brothers and sisters will live when the city falls.

The two men swear it on their own lives, and they attach three conditions. She must tie the scarlet cord in her window, gather her family inside the house, and say nothing about their errand. She lowers them down the wall by that same cord, tells them to hide three days in the hills, and ties the cord up straight away. The men wait out the search, cross back over the river, and tell Joshua that Canaan is already losing its nerve.

One Word Summary

• Mercy: the conquest opens with a promise to spare one household
• Confession: Rahab says out loud what the rest of Jericho only feared
• Token: the promise had to be tied in a window before it held

In One Sentence

Joshua sends two spies into Jericho, Rahab hides them under the flax on her roof, tells them the LORD is God of heaven and earth, and trades their lives for a sworn promise that her family will be spared when the city falls.

Theme of Joshua 2

Joshua 2 is about mercy handed to one household inside a judgment already coming, and the first person to risk anything for it is the Canaanite it saves. God had promised to send fear ahead of Israel (Exodus 23:27), and what Rahab reports in verse 9 reads like that promise arriving.

A second idea runs beside it: hearing can be enough, since Rahab has witnessed none of God’s works herself and believes anyway. A third holds the last half of the chapter, that a promise has to be taken hold of, which is why the men will not leave until the cord is up and her family is indoors.

Joshua 2 Outline

• Joshua 2:1: Joshua sends two men from Shittim to view the land and Jericho, and they lodge at the house of Rahab.
• Joshua 2:2-3: The king of Jericho is told the men are in the city and orders Rahab to bring them out.
• Joshua 2:4-6: Rahab hides the two men on her roof under stalks of flax and tells the king’s messengers they have already gone.
• Joshua 2:7: The pursuers take the road to the Jordan fords, and the city gate is shut behind them.
• Joshua 2:8-11: Rahab comes up to the roof and tells the men that the LORD has given Israel the land, that Jericho has heard about the Red Sea and about Sihon and Og, and that the LORD is God in heaven and earth.
• Joshua 2:12-13: She asks them to swear by the LORD and give her a token that her father, mother, brothers, sisters and all they have will be kept alive.
• Joshua 2:14: The men answer with their own lives as the pledge, provided she keeps their errand secret.
• Joshua 2:15-16: Rahab lets them down by a cord through her window in the city wall and tells them to hide in the mountain for three days.
• Joshua 2:17-20: The men set three conditions on the oath: the scarlet line in the window, her whole household indoors, and her silence.
• Joshua 2:21: Rahab agrees, sends them away, and binds the scarlet line in the window.
• Joshua 2:22: The two hide three days in the mountain while the pursuers search the whole road and fail to find them.
• Joshua 2:23-24: They return to Joshua and report that the LORD has delivered all the land and that its people are fainting.

The Oath Sworn in Rahab’s House

The middle of the chapter is a sworn agreement, and the clause that decides who lives is the one about doors:

And it shall be, that whosoever shall go out of the doors of thy house into the street, his blood shall be upon his head, and we will be guiltless: and whosoever shall be with thee in the house, his blood shall be on our head, if any hand be upon him.

Joshua 2:19

Anyone who steps out of Rahab’s house into the street is responsible for his own death, and the two men carry the responsibility for everyone who stays inside.

The word Rahab uses when she asks them to show kindness to her family is the Hebrew word hesed (2:12), which means loyalty owed inside an agreement rather than a favour asked of a stranger. She is asking two men to treat her the way partners in a covenant treat each other, and they answer her on those terms.

Israel had been told to make no covenant with the peoples of Canaan (Deuteronomy 7:1-2). These two swore one anyway, and the book never treats it as a fault; Joshua himself honours it in chapter 6. The difference seems to be that Rahab had already left her own side, so what the two men promised covered a household that had come over rather than a nation still standing against Israel.

Four chapters later the oath is paid. Joshua sends the same two men back into the ruined city, they bring the household out, “and she dwelleth in Israel even unto this day” (Joshua 6:25). Rahab lived on among the people whose God she had confessed, and the phrase “unto this day” means she was still living among them when that line was written down.

The Terms of Rahab’s Oath

Observations from Joshua 2

Nobody in This Chapter Sees Anything (2:2, 2:10, 2:23)

Every move in Joshua 2 is made on a report. Someone tells the king that Israelites have come in. Rahab tells the two men, “we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red sea for you” (2:10), which means the news reached Jericho and no one there watched it happen.

At the end the two men tell Joshua everything that befell them. A chapter about faith runs entirely on things heard second hand, which is where most people meet God’s works too.

Rahab’s Words Come Back Out of Israelite Mouths (2:9, 2:24)

Rahab says the LORD has given Israel the land and that everyone in the country faints because of them (2:9). In the last verse the two men say almost the same thing to Joshua: the LORD has delivered all the land, and the people faint because of us (2:24).

The report Joshua receives about Canaan is a Canaanite’s confession handed back to him. Readers argue over whether the two men learned anything useful militarily. What the chapter records them carrying home is the state of Jericho’s nerve, and they got that from her.

The Cord That Let Them Out Is the Cord That Saved Her (2:15, 2:18, 2:21)

Rahab lowers the men down the wall by a cord (2:15), and the men then tell her to bind “this line of scarlet thread in the window which thou didst let us down by” (2:18). The very rope she used to rescue them is the sign that keeps her household alive. She was holding the rope that would save her before she knew what it was for.

Rahab Is the Only Person in Jericho With a Name (2:1, 2:3)

The two men are never named. Neither is the king of Jericho, nor the officers he sends. Joshua is named three times, and each time he is back across the river. Inside the city one person has a name.

Rahab is named in the first verse and again in the third, and every event in the chapter follows from something she decides. A book about Israel taking Canaan gives its first story to a Canaanite woman.

Difficult Verses Explained

Did Rahab Lie, and Was She Right To?

Rahab lied to the king’s men, and the chapter reports the lie without commending it. The King James has her tell the king’s men “I wist not whence they were” and “whither the men went I wot not” (2:4-5), which is old English for claiming ignorance of where the two came from and where they had gone. They were on her roof the whole time.

When the New Testament names her, it commends her faith and her welcome of the spies in peace (Hebrews 11:31), and her works in receiving them and sending them out another way (James 2:25). Both passages pass over her words to the king, which may suggest God accepted her faith without endorsing everything she did with it. Our full study of this chapter works through the question at length: 15 Powerful Lessons from Joshua 2.

What Does “Our Life for Yours” Mean?

It is an oath in which the men put their own lives up as the security. “And the men answered her, Our life for yours, if ye utter not this our business” (2:14). They are saying that if Rahab and her household die, they are willing for the same thing to fall on them. That is why the conditions in verses 17 to 20 are so exact; a man who has staked his life wants the terms written down.

Why Would Rahab’s Family Be Guilty of Their Own Death?

The promise covered a place, and stepping outside it stepped outside the promise. The two men could keep an oath about one marked house in a city under attack, and they could not keep one about relatives scattered through the streets. So the terms say plainly that anyone who leaves carries his own blood on his own head. It reads as a limit on what the two men could deliver rather than a judgment on anyone who walked out.

Was Joshua Wrong to Send Spies at All?

Nothing in the chapter treats it as a failure of nerve. God had told Joshua the land was his and had charged him again and again to be strong and of a good courage (Joshua 1:6-9), and Joshua had already announced a crossing in three days (Joshua 1:11). Sending two men to look at the first city on the route is what a commander does inside a promise, not instead of one. He also changed the method: two men rather than twelve, sent secretly, and reporting to him alone rather than to the whole camp.

Common Misunderstandings

• That Rahab was only an innkeeper. Some older commentaries soften her trade this way. Joshua 2:1 calls her a harlot, and both New Testament passages that name her use the Greek word for a prostitute (Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25). Removing the detail removes the point of the story.
• That the two men chose her house because brothels kept secrets. Retellings often give this reason. Joshua 2 gives no reason at all. At most, strangers coming and going from such a house would draw less notice, and even that is an inference.
• That Rahab mentions Israel crossing the Jordan. She names the Red Sea (2:10). Israel has not crossed the Jordan yet; that happens in Joshua 3.
• That Salmon was one of the two spies. Jewish tradition says so and some study guides repeat it. Matthew 1:5 says only that Salmon was Rahab’s husband, and Joshua 2 never names either man.

Christ Connection

A Canaanite prostitute asks a condemned city’s invaders for mercy, is given a sign to display, and lives. That shape is the gospel in advance: judgment is coming, the person under it has nothing to bargain with, and what saves her is a promise she believes and a mark she puts up where it can be seen. The New Testament names her three times, in Matthew, in Hebrews and in James.

• Rahab stands in the family line of Jesus. Matthew opens his Gospel with the genealogy of Christ and puts her in it: “Salmon begat Booz of Rachab” (Matthew 1:5). A woman from Jericho is named in the family record of the Messiah.
• Rahab is listed among the faithful. “By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace” (Hebrews 11:31). She was not destroyed alongside the people who refused to believe, because she trusted God and took the two men in.
• Rahab is the example that faith acts. James asks whether she was not “justified by works, when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way” (James 2:25). Her belief showed itself in what she did with two men in her house.
• The marked house echoes the Passover. In Egypt God said, “when I see the blood, I will pass over you” (Exodus 12:13), meaning the mark on the door decided whether judgment fell on that home. Christians have long read the scarlet cord the same way, and the New Testament fills in what such a mark points toward: not silver and gold, but “the precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18-19).
• An outsider is brought inside. Paul writes that those who were once “strangers from the covenants of promise” are “made nigh by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:12-13). People with no claim on God’s promises are brought close through the death of Jesus. Rahab is what that looks like in one woman.

The scarlet cord is where care is needed. Scripture never says the cord stands for the blood of Jesus, and the chapter itself only says that it marked the house. What Scripture does supply is the pattern: a household kept alive because a visible sign was displayed and everyone stayed inside it. Read that way, Rahab’s window points toward the cross without the post claiming more than the Bible says.

When, Where, and Why

• When: As Israel came out of the wilderness to the edge of Canaan, after Moses had died and before the Jordan was crossed. It falls inside the three days Joshua announced in Joshua 1:11. The flax drying on Rahab’s roof suggests a harvest season, likely late spring, which would fit the Jordan being in flood a chapter later (Joshua 3:15).
• Where: Israel is camped at Shittim on the plains of Moab, east of the Jordan. Jericho lies across the river to the west, guarding the passes that lead up into the rest of Canaan, which is why Joshua asks about that city in particular. Rahab’s house is built into the town wall (2:15), so her window opens on open country, and the hill country she sends the men into lies west of the city and is full of caves.
• Why: The writer of Joshua is showing how God kept the promise Israel forfeited a generation earlier. Before a wall falls or a sword is drawn, he puts on record that the fear God promised to send ahead of His people had already arrived, and that mercy was there for the one person inside the doomed city who asked for it. Rahab is the evidence for both.

Key Verses

And she said unto the men, I know that the LORD hath given you the land, and that your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint because of you.

Joshua 2:9

Rahab tells the two men that she knows God has handed Israel the country, that dread of them has settled on Jericho, and that everyone in the land has lost heart. This is the hinge of the chapter. She speaks about a promise Israel has not yet acted on as though it were already finished, and she is the first person in the book to say it.

And as soon as we had heard these things, our hearts did melt, neither did there remain any more courage in any man, because of you: for the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath.

Joshua 2:11

When the news reached them their courage drained away, and nobody in the city had any fight left, because the God of Israel rules heaven and earth alike. Everyone in Jericho reached the first half of that sentence. Rahab is the only one who goes on to the second.

Behold, when we come into the land, thou shalt bind this line of scarlet thread in the window which thou didst let us down by.

Joshua 2:18

When the army arrives, she is to tie the scarlet rope into the window she used to lower them. Her rescue is attached to something she has to do, and it is a thing she could still have left undone.

And she said, According unto your words, so be it. And she sent them away, and they departed: and she bound the scarlet line in the window.

Joshua 2:21

She accepts the terms exactly as given, sends the men off, and ties the scarlet rope up. She does it while the Israelite army is still on the far side of the river and no one is coming.

Key Lessons from Joshua 2

• Rahab acted on a report about the Red Sea that was roughly forty years old by the time she staked her life on it (2:10).
• What she asked for first, after her own life, was her family’s (2:13).
• She took the terms exactly as the two men gave them instead of bargaining for easier ones (2:21).
• God had said He would send fear ahead of Israel, and Rahab reports it as something already happening (Exodus 23:27; Joshua 2:9).

To go deeper into what this chapter asks of a reader, read our full study: 15 Powerful Lessons from Joshua 2.

Bible Study Questions

1. In verse 6 the writer tells the reader something the king’s men were never told. What difference does it make to read the scene knowing where the two men were?
2. Rahab says “I know” in verse 9. Going by verse 10, what did she actually have to go on?
3. Hebrews 11:31 says Rahab did not perish “with them that believed not”. What separated her from the rest of the city, given that they had all heard the same thing?
4. Rahab asks for a token in verse 12 as well as an oath. What did the token give her that the promise on its own did not?
5. Why do the two men insist in verses 18 and 19 that her whole family be inside the house?
6. Verse 24 repeats verse 9 almost word for word. What does that say about what the two men brought back?
7. Rahab put the scarlet line up before there was anything to see (2:21). Where does obeying God ahead of the pressure look like that in your own week?

Frequently Asked Questions

Joshua 2, The Full Text (KJV)

Read the full chapter below for reference. You can also read Joshua 2 in the KJV at Bible Gateway.

1 And Joshua the son of Nun sent out of Shittim two men to spy secretly, saying, Go view the land, even Jericho. And they went, and came into an harlot’s house, named Rahab, and lodged there.

2 And it was told the king of Jericho, saying, Behold, there came men in hither to night of the children of Israel to search out the country.

3 And the king of Jericho sent unto Rahab, saying, Bring forth the men that are come to thee, which are entered into thine house: for they be come to search out all the country.

4 And the woman took the two men, and hid them, and said thus, There came men unto me, but I wist not whence they were:

5 And it came to pass about the time of shutting of the gate, when it was dark, that the men went out: whither the men went I wot not: pursue after them quickly; for ye shall overtake them.

6 But she had brought them up to the roof of the house, and hid them with the stalks of flax, which she had laid in order upon the roof.

7 And the men pursued after them the way to Jordan unto the fords: and as soon as they which pursued after them were gone out, they shut the gate.

8 And before they were laid down, she came up unto them upon the roof;

9 And she said unto the men, I know that the LORD hath given you the land, and that your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint because of you.

10 For we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red sea for you, when ye came out of Egypt; and what ye did unto the two kings of the Amorites, that were on the other side Jordan, Sihon and Og, whom ye utterly destroyed.

11 And as soon as we had heard these things, our hearts did melt, neither did there remain any more courage in any man, because of you: for the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath.

12 Now therefore, I pray you, swear unto me by the LORD, since I have shewed you kindness, that ye will also shew kindness unto my father’s house, and give me a true token:

13 And that ye will save alive my father, and my mother, and my brethren, and my sisters, and all that they have, and deliver our lives from death.

14 And the men answered her, Our life for yours, if ye utter not this our business. And it shall be, when the LORD hath given us the land, that we will deal kindly and truly with thee.

15 Then she let them down by a cord through the window: for her house was upon the town wall, and she dwelt upon the wall.

16 And she said unto them, Get you to the mountain, lest the pursuers meet you; and hide yourselves there three days, until the pursuers be returned: and afterward may ye go your way.

17 And the men said unto her, We will be blameless of this thine oath which thou hast made us swear.

18 Behold, when we come into the land, thou shalt bind this line of scarlet 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.

19 And it shall be, that whosoever shall go out of the doors of thy house into the street, his blood shall be upon his head, and we will be guiltless: and whosoever shall be with thee in the house, his blood shall be on our head, if any hand be upon him.

20 And if thou utter this our business, then we will be quit of thine oath which thou hast made us to swear.

21 And she said, According unto your words, so be it. And she sent them away, and they departed: and she bound the scarlet line in the window.

22 And they went, and came unto the mountain, and abode there three days, until the pursuers were returned: and the pursuers sought them throughout all the way, but found them not.

23 So the two men returned, and descended from the mountain, and passed over, and came to Joshua the son of Nun, and told him all things that befell them:

24 And they said unto Joshua, Truly the LORD hath delivered into our hands all the land; for even all the inhabitants of the country do faint because of us.