Rahab a personal story: "When the dust settled"

By Rahab

The city is gone.

Rahab-a-personal-story

The air tastes like ash and crushed stone. Smoke curls from broken timber and shattered brick. It doesn’t even look like Jericho anymore. The walls—those proud, thick things that wrapped our city like a clenched fist—are nothing but torn earth and rubble.

Except my house.

I still don’t understand how it stands.

The wall fell everywhere but here. My home, the one no one wanted, the one they whispered about—the house in the wall—remains. Like a lone tooth in a shattered jaw.

I feel my family behind me. My father hasn’t said a word since the trumpet blasts. My mother keeps her hand on my shoulder now, like she’s trying to make up for all the times she didn’t. My youngest brother, barely more than a boy, watches everything with wide, hollow eyes.

We are alive.

Because of a cord. Because of a promise. Because I believed.

And now I wait.

The Israelite army moves like a tide through the wreckage—methodical, grim. I should be afraid. I know what they’ve done to other cities and nations beyond the river. I’ve heard the stories.

But I’m not afraid.

Because I remember what the spies said: You and your household will be spared. Because I saw truth in their eyes. Because something in me changed that day—something permanent.

Then I see him.

He’s not wearing armor, though the men around him do. His robes are clean, simple. His eyes scan the crowd of survivors, searching. For something. For someone.

Then they find me.

He walks toward me with a calm certainty, as if this meeting was always going to happen.

“You’re Rahab,” he says.

I nod. My throat is tight. My shawl still smells like smoke and fear.

“I’m Salmon,” he says. “Of the tribe of Judah.”

He doesn’t look at me the way men used to. There’s no hunger, no pity, no judgment in his gaze. Just… recognition. As if he knows what it is to start over. As if he can see something in me I didn’t know was visible.

“You were brave,” he says. “And you believed.”

I don’t know what to say to that. No one’s ever called me brave before. Not when I was sent away. Not when I opened my door to strangers. Not when I walked into the fire for people who didn’t want me.

He looks at my family. “You brought them all out.”

“Yes,” I whisper. “Even when I wasn’t sure they’d come.”

He smiles. “They’re safe because of you. And now, so are you.”

I feel it before I understand it—this strange, unbearable thought:

I don’t have to go back to who I was.

The walls are gone. The life I lived inside them—the shame, the survival, the silence—is buried in dust. And here stands a man of Israel, speaking to me not as a rescuer to a beggar, but as a man to a woman. As an equal. As if God could write a new story with my name at the beginning.

“Come with me,” he says.

And I do.

M. Joseph Hutzler,

Eschatologist