Nephi explained the conquest of Canaan in meritocratic terms:
Do ye suppose that the children of this land, who were in the land of promise, who were driven out by our fathers, do ye suppose that they were righteous? Behold, I say unto you, Nay.
1 Nephi 17:33-35
Do ye suppose that our fathers would have been more choice than they if they had been righteous? I say unto you, Nay.
Behold, the Lord esteemeth all flesh in one; he that is righteous is favored of God. But behold, this people had rejected every word of God, and they were ripe in iniquity; and the fulness of the wrath of God was upon them; and the Lord did curse the land against them, and bless it unto our fathers; yea, he did curse it against them unto their destruction, and he did bless it unto our fathers unto their obtaining power over it.
This passage is likely influenced by Moses’s warning against self-righteousness:
Speak not thou in thine heart, after that the Lord thy God hath cast them out from before thee, saying, For my righteousness the Lord hath brought me in to possess this land: but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord doth drive them out from before thee.
Deuteronomy 9:4-6
Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may perform the word which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Understand therefore, that the Lord thy God giveth thee not this good land to possess it for thy righteousness; for thou art a stiffnecked people.
Like Moses, Nephi emphasizes the wickedness of the people of Canaan as the reason for their destruction. Nephi goes so far as to say that God had given them many opportunities to receive his word, and that they had repeatedly rejected it, until they are “ripe in iniquity,” ready for the harvest of God’s judgment. But Nephi adds an important nuance to the story. Collectively the people may have been unrighteous, but “the Lord esteemeth all flesh in one; he that is righteous is favored of God.” What happens if God finds a righteous person in the middle of an iniquitous city, like Sodom (see Genesis 18:23-32; 19:12-22)?
Enter the story of Rahab. As the Israelites approached the city of Jericho, Joshua sent two spies into the city. A harlot named Rahab whose house was on the wall gave them shelter and protected them from the king’s soldiers. She let them down the wall by a rope and gave them instructions to evade the soldiers, but not without extracting a promise from them to spare her and her immediate family when they attacked the city (Joshua 2). The men escaped, and true to their word, they extracted Rahab and her family from the city before it was destroyed (Joshua 6:23).
Rahab said to the men, “I know that the Lord hath given you the land” (Joshua 2:9). Her conviction is based on reports of the crossing of the Red Sea and the Israelites’ victory over two kings on the other side of the river Jordan. In other words, she seems to have been convinced of the power of Israel’s God before their arrival, much like Abish in the Book of Mormon, who had been “converted unto the Lord” many years before Ammon’s arrival in her land (Alma 19:16).
Like Abraham’s nephew, Lot, who lived in Sodom, Rahab hosted messengers when the rest of the city was unreceptive to their message. Those messengers rescued her from the city’s destruction, prescribing a symbol reminiscent of Passover: a scarlet thread in her window (Joshua 2:18). This simple act of obedience indicated her allegiance and distinguished her from her compatriots. The same pattern appears in the Book of Mormon: the Lord separated the righteous from the wicked, or in other words the receptive from the unreceptive, in the Book of Mormon city of Ammonihah, before destroying it in a single day (Alma 16:1-3, 9-11).
Rahab’s courage was a manifestation of her faith (see Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25). As Amy H. Fisher has pointed out, she lived on the wall of Jericho, symbolic of being on the margins of her city. But after her conversion, she dwelt “in Israel” (Joshua 6:25). The Hebrew word qereb (קֶרֶב), translated simply as “in”, means literally in the center, “utterly embedded within the people, a far cry from her marginal existence in Jericho” (“Rahab and the Perpetuation of Deliverance,” Religious Educator 25, no. 1 [2024]).
Her central role within Israel becomes more vivid when we learn that Matthew identified her as the mother of Boaz, and therefore the mother-in-law of Ruth, and therefore the great-great-grandmother of King David and an ancestor of Jesus. Rahab not only adopted the faith of Israel; she became one of its most important adherents.
The name Rahab (רָחָב) means “broad” in Hebrew. Her deliverance and integration with God’s people exemplifies Nephi’s teaching that “the Lord esteemeth all flesh in one” (1 Nephi 17:35) and that “he denieth none that come unto him” (2 Nephi 26:33).
Today I will stand firm in my faith, regardless of the behavior of those around me. I will remember the example of Rahab, who acted on her nascent faith in God, resisting intimidation by the powerful men in her city.
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