can decide if she’s worth what she’s asking. There are nods and smiles.…
The proprietor leads Rahab to his couch…. He is more than satisfied that she can honour her bargain. Money changes hands. She has won. The family who mean more to her than her own life are safe…. Just as importantly, she has kept them together.
As long as they are alive and together there is always hope of rescue. Joshua will conquer this land before long. They will go back to their people. This house on the wall will be like a nightmare that fades when the sun rises.
One day two strangers come in. Something about them makes her wonder. Dare she ask them who they are and where they’re from? Could they possibly be Joshua’s men?
She dare not speak to them in Hebrew. The house is full of local clients and local girls. One wrong word and the strangers — if they are Joshua’s men — will be captured. Her persistent hope of rescue will be disappointed. One of the men beckons and smiles. Money changes hands. She takes him to her room. As they undress she sees that he is circumcized. Now they are alone she dares to whisper in Hebrew. His eyes brighten. He smiles warmly. He answers her in Hebrew. She tells him her story. He tells her why he and his brother are there.
The attack on Jericho will not be long delayed. They talk urgently about the present danger to him and the imminent danger to her and her family when the great attack begins. In the heat of battle, no Israeli soldier will have time to stay his sword stroke at the urgent pleading of a girl dressed as a Jericho harlot.
Rahab is already very concerned that someone will have reported the spies’ presence in the city … even reported that they are in her house on the wall…. It will be best if she hides them among the flax.…
They are no sooner safely hidden than messengers arrive from the king. She plans her story quickly. She’s quick-witted as well as beautiful. That’s what saved her family after the slavers brought them all to Jericho. Yes, of course, the men were here. One of them was her client. They left soon afterward. She’s almost certain that they’ve left the city. If the king’s soldiers pursue them swiftly it should not be difficult to overtake them. It is an honour to be of service to the king.
As soon as it is dark enough, she lowers the men down the same strong red cord that hangs from the window to tell the world what the house on the wall has to offer, the same scarlet cord that is destined to save her life.…
So her integrity is absolute, and so is theirs. It is a life for a life, an infinite trust for an infinite trust.
The collapsing walls leave Jericho totally vulnerable. The invincible Israeli army storms through from all directions. The two spies race for the house on the wall. Rahab’s family are gathered with her. All are safe. Her courage and intelligence have saved them a second time. The spy she spoke with has his arms protectively around her lovely young shoulders — but not for money this time. There is a powerful bond between people who have saved each other’s lives.
So there is a fairy-tale happy ending. They marry. They raise a family.
And at the time when the book of Joshua was written, Rahab’s descendants were thriving among their fellow Israelites. Hopefully, they still are.
4 MYSTERIES OF LAKES, SEAS, AND OCEANS
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), son of the famous Thomas Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby School, graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, and spent more than thirty years as a school inspector. During those decades he also wrote a great deal of excellent and memorable poetry, and was at one time a professor of poetry at Oxford.
His poem “The Forsaken Merman” tells the poignant story of a merman who had married an Earth-girl, who subsequently — so it seems from Arnold’s version — left him and their children and returned to her humankind on land. Arnold’s poem begins,
Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below!
Now my brothers call from the bay,
Now the great winds shoreward blow,
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chaff and toss in the spray.
Children dear, let us away!
This way, this way …
… Call her once before you go —
Call once yet!
In a voice that she will know:
“Margaret! Margaret!”
In Arnold’s version of the story, however, the faithless Margaret never returns to her Merman and their children. His version ends,
… Singing: “There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she!
She left lonely forever
The kings of the sea.”
When myths and legends are as persistent as the many stories of mermaids told and retold over thousands of years in song and story, they cannot be dismissed without serious investigation and analysis. A few years before Matthew Arnold was born, another educationalist, William Munro, a schoolmaster from Scotland, wrote a letter to the Times, in which he described in great detail a sighting that he himself had made of “a figure resembling an unclothed human female, sitting upon a rock extending into the sea, and apparently in the action of combing its hair, which flowed around its shoulders, and was of a light brown colour …” Munro watched the strange being for some three or four minutes before it slid off its rock and down into the sea. He continued watching carefully, but it never reappeared.
The London Mirror of November 16, 1822, reported that John McIsaac from Corphine in Kintyre, Scotland, had made a very similar sighting in 1811. Like the creature that Munro saw, McIsaac’s mermaid had long hair which it tended to continually.
Were dugongs like this ever mistaken for mermaids?
Other early-nineteenth-century mermaid observers included a girl named Mackay, whose description of what she had seen along the Caithness coast tallied closely with William Munro’s account in his letter to the Times.
In co-author Lionel’s poetry anthology, Earth, Sea and Sky, there is a different, happier conclusion to the merman’s story, entitled “The Merman’s Wife Returns”:
There was an answer to the merman’s call,
A faltering step towards the beckoning sea.
“Wait for me, children. Husband, wait for me.”
The voice they knew and loved, but faint with pain;
Her children skim the waves to reach the shore.
Her merman husband bounds across the sands,
Sweeps her into his arms
