Dante's Rahab

Abstract

Dante's Rahab Peter S. Hawkins (bio) When I first fell under John Freccero's spell in 1973, I was a Yale doctoral student seeking refuge from the English department. I was brought to the first meeting of his year-long Dante course by a refugee from French, but unlike her, I vowed only to sit in on the opening day: I was to be a one-time interloper in Corby Court. Yet by the end of that September day Dante—and his prophet, John Freccero—had me not only for the rest of that academic year but ever since. I have tried a few times in print to express my general gratitude to John for helping me find my life's work.1 In this essay I want to give tribute more particularly to the way he taught me to savor Dante's relationship to the Bible. How to summarize this complex relationship? On the one hand, the poet read the sacred text in a tradition of other readings: patristic, medieval, liturgical—a cloud of earlier witnesses. On the other hand, he invariably left his mark on inherited materials, made them distinctly his own, offered (to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens) "a new account of everything old."2 Take, for instance, what Dante does with Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, who makes a brief and wordless appearance in Paradiso IX. Dante would have known her primarily from the Book of Joshua. She is the brothel keeper who saves two Hebrew spies in Canaan by hiding them on her rooftop and then letting them escape through her window in the city walls (Joshua 2. 1–24). From that window she suspends a crimson cord, a reminder of her mercy to them and a pledge of [End Page S70] their protection when the walls come tumbling down. Joshua not only spares her from that destruction but brings her and her household into Israel (6: 15–25). It is not clear if Dante knew what the rabbis made of this story. Was he aware that they saw her as the archetypal proselyte, married her off to Joshua, made her into a matriarch of Israel—ancestress of eight prophets, including Huldah and Jeremiah?3 But surely he would have known her as one of Israel's matriarchs from her mention in the first chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, which opens with an Old Testament-like genealogy that includes women in what had been traditionally a masculine preserve. Among the three sets of fourteen generations that Matthew constructs for the time stretching between Abraham and Jesus, he names Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and "the wife of Uriah" (Bathsheba). Early Christian commentators on Matthew recognized that the four Old Testament women conspicuous in the list of the Messiah's male ancestors were not the obvious matriarchal choices: Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel. In fact, it became a point of honor for the Fathers to draw attention to skeletons in the family closet—to insist that the Savior's foremothers were women who could at one time have been prostitutes (like Rahab) or at least played the part when the occasion warranted (like Tamar); could be women who had dubious ethnic origins (like the Moabite Ruth) or who had engaged in illicit sexual activity (Bathsheba). According to Jerome, "it should be noted that none of the holy women [of Israel] are taken into the Savior's genealogy, but rather such as Scripture has condemned, that he who came for sinners being born of sinners might so put away the sins of all" (cit. in Aquinas 19–20). The two other mentions of Rahab in the Christian Testament do not concern her place in Jesus' family tree. Instead, she embodies a distinctive virtue—different in each case. For the author of Hebrews, she is a witness to faith; in the Epistle of James, a doer of good deeds—a heroine at once of faith and works. The Church Fathers developed their version of Rahab against this rich and varied background of Scriptural text. Her identity as a former prostitute was embraced as a sign that given repentance, all could be forgiven. According to Jerome, "She...