Joshua and the Woman with the Scarlet Cord

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Full script

It is the middle of the night, and a woman is standing on a flat roof, in the dark, in a city with a wall around it, and she is looking at a pile of flax.

Flax is the plant that linen is made from. She has spread it out on the roof to dry, in tidy stalks, in long rows. It is not a very interesting pile. It is certainly not the sort of pile you would think to search. And under it, flat on their backs, trying not to sneeze, there are two young men, and down in the street there are soldiers knocking on her door.

She has about as long as it takes to climb a flight of stairs to decide what kind of person she is going to be.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story comes from the book of Joshua, chapters two to six, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few of the small conversations, and the weather, and what people on a wall might have said to one another while waiting, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us start with the people on the wrong side of the river.

You may remember that the people of Israel had been wandering in the wilderness for forty years. That is a long time to be going somewhere. A child born at the start of the journey would have been a grown man with children of his own by the end of it. The old generation, the one that had come out of Egypt, had mostly died, and the book is gentle about that, and says only that the Lord had not let them see the land. Even Moses, who had led them all that way, had climbed a mountain at the end of his life, and looked across, and been shown the whole country from a distance, and had gone home to God without setting foot in it.

Which left a problem. Somebody had to go in.

The somebody was a man called Joshua, the son of Nun. If you have heard the stories of Moses, you have met him already. He was the young man who used to stay behind in the tent of meeting after everyone else had gone home, because he did not want to leave. He had fought the first battle against the Amalekites, with Moses holding up his arms on the hill. And forty years earlier, he had been one of the twelve men sent to look at this very land, and one of only two who came back and said, we can do it, because the Lord is with us. The other one was called Caleb, and he is still around in our story, by the book's own count nearly eighty and still cheerfully ready to climb a mountain, which I find very encouraging.

So Joshua was no longer young. He was the man who had waited forty years to be allowed to do what he had wanted to do all along. And the first thing the Lord said to him, when Moses was gone, was not, go and conquer. It was: be strong, and be courageous. I will be with you. Do not be afraid, and do not be dismayed.

I think that is worth saying twice. The Lord says it to Joshua more than once in the first chapter of his book, which tells you something about how Joshua was feeling. Being the successor of a very great man is, I am told, harder than being the great man. Everybody remembers how Moses did it.

Now, in front of Joshua there was a river and on the other side of the river there was a city.

The river was the Jordan. It was spring, the time of the barley harvest, and the book tells us, in a little aside, that the Jordan overflows its banks at that time of year. So it was not a pleasant stream with stepping stones. It was wide and brown and fast, with the snow-melt from the mountains in it. On our side, tents as far as you could see. On the other side, a little way beyond a strip of green and a strip of dry ground, a city called Jericho.

Jericho is a very old city. It is an oasis, which means that in a dry country it has water coming up out of the ground, and so it has palm trees, and fruit, and shade, and it is known in the Bible as the city of palms. People had been living there, one way or another, for a very long time. It had high walls, and a gate, and a king. And it sat directly in the road of anyone who wanted to go up into the hills beyond. If you were going to cross into the country, Jericho was the door, and the door was shut.

The first thing Joshua did, as any sensible general would do, was send two men to have a look.

The book says he sent them quietly. It says, in the words of the old translation, secretly, and I like to picture him choosing two young men who could keep their mouths shut and their heads down and who looked, with a bit of mud on them, like men who were just passing through. He said: go, look at the land, especially Jericho.

They crossed the river, which I would like to hear more about, but the book does not say how, and they walked up through the strip of green towards the city, and went in, among all the carts and donkeys and sellers of figs and dates, and wandered about being unremarkable. They did this quite well, for a little while.

And then, as evening came on, they needed somewhere to sleep.

Now, there is a thing the book tells us here, quite plainly, and I am going to tell it to you plainly too. The place they chose was the house of a woman called Rahab. And the book says that she was a woman who kept a kind of inn, and that the old word for what she was is one that it does not dress up. Her house was on the city wall. It was built right into it, so that one of her windows looked out over the outside, and I think we can see why two men who wished not to be noticed would go to a house on the edge of town where strangers were not unusual.

I do not think it matters much, for our purposes, exactly what the older Jewish and Christian writers thought she did all day. Some of them said she was an innkeeper and nothing more. Some said otherwise. What matters is what the book is about to show us, which is that the least respectable person in Jericho, a woman nobody on the council would have wanted to be seen talking to, is about to be the bravest person in it.

They had been in her house for a few hours when the king of Jericho found out.

I do not know how he found out. Perhaps someone at the gate had counted the strangers. Perhaps a man at the market had said, very casually, I saw two Israelites by the fig sellers, and somebody else had said, did you? And so, before the lamps had been burning very long, there was a knock at Rahab's door, and a voice said, in the manner of people who are used to being obeyed, bring out the men who came to you, for they have come to search out the whole country.

So the king knew exactly what the two men were. He knew they were spies. He knew they were in her house. And he sent the message to her, not to anyone else, which tells you he assumed she would simply hand them over, as anyone would. That is the first piece of evidence in the story that people in Jericho did not know Rahab very well.

What she did next took, I would guess, about a minute and a half.

She took the two men, and she led them up the stairs to the flat roof, and she hid them under the flax. The book says she had laid out the stalks in order on the roof, and the stalks of flax are long and dry, and a man can lie flat under a good layer of it and look, from a little way off, like a rather lumpy pile of flax. I imagine the spies thought it was a very good idea, and also that it was a very itchy one.

Then she went down the stairs, and she opened the door, and she said to the king's soldiers: yes, the men came to me. But I did not know where they were from. And when it was time to shut the gate, at dark, the men went out. I do not know where they went. Chase after them quickly, and you may catch them.

Now, notice what she did. She did not say, there are no men here. She said they had come and that they had gone. And she told the king's soldiers to hurry, and to go out of the gate, and to go in the direction of the river. The book tells us that they did, in fact, go straight off down the road to the fords of the Jordan, and that as soon as they had gone, the gate was shut behind them.

I will say something here that is important, and then we will move on. The book tells this part without a word of comment, and the churches have not agreed about what to make of it. Some of the Fathers said she was wrong to tell a lie, even for a good end, and that her faith was good in spite of it. Others said that what mattered was that she chose, at risk of her life, to side with strangers who were in danger against soldiers who would hurt them. The New Testament names her twice, in Hebrews and in James, and what it praises is not her cleverness at the door. It is that she received the messengers, and that she sent them out another way. That is the part we are going to keep our eyes on tonight.

So. The soldiers were away down the road to the river, and the street was quiet, and the lamp in the window was burning. And Rahab went back up the stairs to the roof, before the men had gone to sleep, and she sat down on a bundle of flax near them. And she said something that I think is one of the most remarkable speeches in the whole Old Testament.

She said: I know that the Lord has given you the land.

She said it plainly, like a person stating the weather. Then she told them why. She said: the fear of you has fallen on us, and all the people of the land are melting away before you. We have heard how the Lord dried up the waters of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt. We have heard what you did to the two kings of the Amorites beyond the Jordan. And as soon as we heard it, our hearts melted, and there was no spirit left in anyone, because of you. For the Lord your God is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath.

Now think about that for a moment. This was a woman who had grown up in Jericho. She had grown up in a city whose people had their own gods, with their own temples, and their own names, and nobody in her family, as far as anyone can tell, had ever been to the other side of the river. She had a king who would have been very interested to hear what she had just said. And she had heard, from travellers, from merchants, from the sort of people who stopped at an inn, a story about a God who had opened the sea. And she had decided, somewhere along the way, that it was true.

Forty years it had taken for that news to cross the desert. But it had reached one person in Jericho, and she believed it.

And then she asked for something. This is the other part of her speech that I love. She did not ask for gold. She did not ask for a safe road. She said: now, therefore, swear to me by the Lord that, since I have dealt kindly with you, you also will deal kindly with my father's house. And give me a sure sign. And save alive my father, and my mother, and my brothers, and my sisters, and all that they have, and deliver our lives from death.

So her whole concern was for her family. She had just put her own life in danger for two strangers, and the first thing she did was ask them to look after her mother and father.

The two men, who had been under the flax a very long time, and who were probably very glad to be sitting up, said: our life for yours. If you do not tell what our business is, then when the Lord gives us the land, we will deal kindly and faithfully with you.

That was the promise. It is a short sentence, in the book. But I think the spies knew that they had been given more than a pile of flax. They had been given their lives, and they meant it.

Now there was the matter of getting out.

The house was built into the wall, remember. So the window that opened outward was a window on the outside of Jericho, and the book says that she let them down by a cord through the window. I picture a long rope, tied to the bed or to a roof beam, and two young men going down one at a time, in the dark, with their knees against the stone, past the soldiers who had gone off the wrong way and the gate that was shut.

Before they went, she told them what to do. She said: go to the hills, so that the pursuers will not find you. Hide there three days, until they have returned, and then afterwards you may go on your way.

That was good advice. She had thought about it as carefully as she had thought about everything else that night. And the men said to her: this is how we will keep the oath you have made us swear. When we come into the land, you shall tie this cord of scarlet thread in the window through which you let us down. And you shall gather into your house your father and your mother, and your brothers, and all your father's household. If anyone goes out of the doors of your house into the street, his blood shall be on his own head. But if anyone who is with you in the house is harmed, then it is on us.

You will notice what they are asking her to do. They are asking her to tie a red cord in the window. Not a banner, or a sign on the door. A piece of red thread, the sort of thing you might find in a basket of sewing. A small thing. A thing nobody would remark on, in a town where people hung all sorts of things from their windows to dry.

She said: according to your words, so be it. And she sent them away, and they went. And then she tied the scarlet cord in the window.

The book tells us that she did that right away. She did not wait. I find that moving. She tied the cord that same night, with the soldiers still out on the road and Jericho still firmly shut. I think perhaps she wanted to see it there. I think it is easier to believe in a promise if you are looking at the sign of it every morning.

The two men did what she had said. They hid in the hills for three days. The pursuers searched the whole road and could not find them, and finally gave up and went home. And then the two men came down, and crossed the river, and went to Joshua, and told him everything that had happened to them. And at the end they said: truly the Lord has given all the land into our hands. And all the people of the country are melting away because of us.

I like that they added that. I think they had been at the roof and had heard it in her voice.

The next morning, Joshua got up early. The book likes that detail, and mentions it more than once: Joshua rose early in the morning. And everyone moved to the edge of the river and camped there, and waited three days, and then the officers went through the camp and gave the order.

The order was strange. It said: when you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the priests carrying it, then you shall set out from your place and follow it. Yet keep a distance between you and it, about two thousand cubits. Do not come near it.

Two thousand cubits is a bit under half a mile, about a kilometre. So the whole people of Israel, thousands and thousands, were to follow the ark at a distance of half a mile, so that everyone, from the back to the front, could see which way it was going. The book gives the reason very simply: that you may know the way you shall go, for you have not passed this way before.

I find that a very comforting line, and I think you might, too. You have not passed this way before. None of us has. It does not say, you will know the way. It says, you will know which way to follow.

And then the priests lifted the ark, and began to walk toward the river.

The Jordan, as I said, was in flood. It was at the top of its banks and running hard. And the priests, carrying the ark, walked down to it, and when their feet touched the water at its edge, the book says, the waters coming down from above stood and rose up in a single heap, a long way off, at a city called Adam. And the waters flowing down toward the sea were cut off. And the people crossed over opposite Jericho.

The priests stood in the middle of the dry river bed, with the ark on their shoulders, while the whole of Israel went past on dry ground. I would like to have seen the children. I would like to know whether any of them were told to be quiet and not to splash, and whether any of them did anyway.

When everybody was over, Joshua had twelve men, one from each tribe, pick up a stone from the middle of the river, where the priests had stood, and carry it to the place where the people would sleep that night. They built them into a pile. And Joshua said that when your children ask you in the time to come, what do these stones mean, you shall tell them: the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark. These stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial for ever.

I think that is a very good thing for a people to do. They did not say, remember this. They gave their children a heap of stones, and a question, and a story to answer it with.

Then they camped at a place called Gilgal. It was the first night they had spent on the right side of the river, in the Promised Land, after forty years. And the book tells us what they did. They did not put up a wall. They did not post a guard. They kept the Passover, on the fourteenth day of the month, in the evening, on the plains of Jericho. And the next day they ate the produce of the land: unleavened bread, and roasted grain.

And on that day the manna stopped.

I have always found that a small, moving sentence. For forty years there had been bread on the ground every morning, a strange white flake they had to gather, and they had had to eat it all the way across the desert, and they had complained about it a great deal. And on the day they ate the first of the grain of the land, there was no more manna. The book says only: the manna ceased. They had arrived. They did not need it. But I think there must have been someone in Israel, an old woman perhaps, who went out that morning, out of habit, to the place where it used to be, and stood and looked at the empty ground, and said, well, that was good bread.

Now, it is a very good idea, when you are about to attack a walled city, to know who is in command. And the book gives us a short, strange moment here, which I do not want to hurry past.

Joshua was out walking near Jericho, by himself, looking at the walls, and no doubt trying to work out how a people without siege engines or ladders was going to get in. And he looked up, and there was a man standing in front of him, with a drawn sword in his hand.

Joshua, who was an old soldier, went right up to him and said what a soldier says. He said: are you for us, or for our adversaries?

And the man said: no.

I have always thought that was the best answer in the book. Not for you, and not for them. He said: but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.

And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshipped, and said: what does my lord say to his servant?

And the commander of the Lord's army said to Joshua: take off your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy. And Joshua did so.

You may have heard those words before. It is exactly what the Lord said to Moses at the burning bush. And the book does not say the stranger's name, and the Fathers wondered about it for centuries, and many of them have said that this was an angel, and some have said it was something more than that. We will leave it where the text leaves it. But I want to say what the moment does. It tells Joshua, and it tells us, that this is not Joshua's war, and not Israel's war, and not anyone's war to be won by being clever. The commander does not take a side. He says: I have come. The question, he tells Joshua, is not whether God is on your side. The question is whether you are on his.

And then, I imagine, he gave Joshua the plan. And Joshua, who had spent forty years learning to obey, listened to the whole of it. And I think it must have been the strangest set of military instructions ever given to a general.

Here is what Joshua was told to do.

The whole army of Israel, all the men of war, were to march around the city. Once. Then go home. They were to do that every day for six days. And seven priests, with seven trumpets made of rams' horns, were to go before the ark, and the ark would be carried in the middle of the whole procession. The armed men would go in front, and a rear guard behind. And on the seventh day, they were to march around the city seven times, and the priests were to blow the trumpets. And when they made a long blast with the ram's horn, and the people heard it, all the people were to shout with a great shout. And the wall of the city would fall down flat.

That was the plan. There was nothing else in it.

Think about how that looked to the people of Jericho.

Because it is a thing the book is careful to tell us: Jericho was shut up inside and outside because of the people of Israel. None went out and none came in. They had seen the Jordan stop. They had heard about the sea. Their hearts, as Rahab said, had melted. The whole city was holding its breath. And on the first morning, they looked down from the wall, and there was the army of Israel in the plain.

I picture them all on the wall, in their best armour, with their spears, looking down very seriously. And I picture the army of Israel walking, in good order, with the priests blowing the horns in front, and the ark behind, around the wall, once. All the way around. No siege towers. No ladders. No battering ram. And then, as soon as they had gone around once, they turned, and went back to their camp, and the horns stopped, and they went in and presumably had their dinner.

I would love to know what the men of Jericho said to each other. I think the first morning they said: what was that? And the second morning they said: they are doing it again. And somewhere about the third morning, somebody said, perhaps they are just going to do this every day. And somebody else said, well, it is not very threatening. And on the fourth morning the people on the wall brought chairs.

But the book adds one detail, which I think is the point. Joshua had told the people before they set out: you shall not shout. You shall not let your voice be heard, neither shall any word go out of your mouth, until the day I tell you to shout. Then you shall shout.

So all the time, as they marched, there was the sound of the horns and the sound of feet, and nothing else. Thousands of people, walking all the way around a city, and not one of them saying a word.

You know what that sounds like? It sounds like a church. It sounds like a very large congregation, walking in silence behind a procession, with a single instrument, in the cool of the early morning. It must have been, for those who were walking, a kind of prayer. And I think it must have been terrifying, for those who were watching.

Six days they did it. One time around, and home. The same road, the same dust, the same silence. And Joshua rose early each morning, and the priests took up the ark, and the horns sounded.

On the seventh day they got up at dawn, and marched around the city, the same way. But this time they did not go home. They went around again. Two times. Three. I imagine that somewhere about the fourth time the people on the wall stopped looking bored.

Four. Five. Six.

The book says that when they came around the seventh time, the priests blew the trumpets, and Joshua said to the people: shout, for the Lord has given you the city.

And they shouted.

I have always wondered what that sounded like, after a week of silence. All those thousands of people, who had not said a word aloud for seven days, drawing one breath and letting it out. It must have been a sound like a wave breaking on a beach. It must have gone on and on. And the book says only: so the people shouted, and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpet, they raised a great shout, and the wall fell down flat.

The old Hebrew has a lovely little phrase there. The wall fell down under itself. As if it simply sat down.

And the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took it.

Now. I am going to stop for a moment, because there is a hard part of this story, and it would not be fair to a listener, young or old, to pretend there was not.

The book of Joshua says that the city was devoted to the Lord, which is an old word meaning that nothing was to be taken for themselves, and that the city and what lived in it were given up. It says it plainly, and it does not make the telling pretty. The people of Israel were told that the whole city was to be given up, and so it was. This is one of the places in the Bible that Christians have found hard, and have said they found hard, for nearly two thousand years. We will not make it softer than the book, and we will not stay in it. We will say what the notes at the end will say: that the Church has never told this part as a model for how anyone should treat any people. And we will keep our eyes where the book keeps its own, on the woman at the window.

Because before the people went up into the city, Joshua had said to the two men who had been spies: go into the woman's house, the prostitute's house, and bring out the woman and all who belong to her, as you swore to her.

So the two young men went in. The book calls them young men, as if to remind us that these were the same ones who had spent the night under the flax. And I would like to think that they walked up the same stairs, under the same roof. And in the window of the house in the wall, now standing alone, with the rest of the wall lying down around it, there was a red cord, tied in a small bow.

They brought out Rahab. They brought out her father, and her mother, and her brothers, and all who belonged to her. They brought out all her relatives. The book says that they brought out all her kindred, and put them outside the camp of Israel. Not one of them was left behind. Not a cousin, not an aunt, not a great-uncle who had been asleep in the back room and had to be woken up.

I think that is the line that breaks my heart, a little, in the best way. Every person she had asked for, every single one, came out.

And then the book says, at the end of the chapter, one of the shortest and loveliest sentences in the whole book of Joshua. It says: but Rahab the prostitute, and her father's household, and all who belonged to her, Joshua saved alive. And she has lived in Israel to this day.

To this day. The writer of the book, who is writing a long time afterward, looks around and says: her family is still here. You can meet them. They are among us.

That is where the story proper stops. But there is a little more, and it is the part I would like you to take with you into the night.

Because we know what became of Rahab.

The Gospel according to Matthew begins with a list of the ancestors of Jesus. It begins, you may remember, with Abraham, and it goes through Isaac and Jacob and Judah, and on down the generations. And most of the people on the list are men. But there are a few women, five in all, mentioned by name, and one of them is in the fifth verse. It says: Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab.

Rahab. The woman from Jericho. Not a woman of Israel by birth, and not a woman with a respectable name. There she is in the family tree of the Messiah. And Boaz, her son, is the same Boaz who, in the story of Ruth, a few generations later, noticed a foreign woman gleaning barley in his field at Bethlehem and told his men to leave her a little extra. If you have heard the episode about Ruth and the barley harvest, you will see what I mean. A woman who was a stranger, taken in by Israel. And her son, years later, who knew what it was to be the child of one.

I do not think that is an accident. I think the Gospel wants us to notice it. And then there are the two other places in the New Testament where she is named. The Letter to the Hebrews says: by faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given a friendly welcome to the spies. And the Letter of James says: was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way?

The Church has loved her for it ever since. Very early, a pope, or bishop of Rome, named Clement, wrote a letter to the Christians of Corinth, which we still have, and he told them about Rahab, and he said that the scarlet cord was a sign that through the blood of the Lord, all who hope in God will be redeemed. It is one of the oldest ways of reading the story. You do not have to read it that way. But a great many people have, for a very long time, and I think you can see why. A small red cord, in a window, on the one house that was not harmed. A promise made by strangers, and kept.

And the other old reading is about the name. In Hebrew, Joshua's name is Yehoshua, and in the Greek of the Septuagint, it comes out as Iesous. The same name, exactly, as the name of Jesus. And so the Fathers of the Church, particularly a teacher called Origen, who preached whole sermons on the book of Joshua, said that Joshua leading the people over the Jordan and into the land was a picture of another Joshua, who would lead his people through water into something better. You can hear that in the Church's baptism. Whether or not you hear it that way, it is a beautiful thing to find in an old book.

Now, let us go slowly, because it is late.

Let us go back, one last time, to the roof.

It is the night before the spies leave. The soldiers have gone down the road to the river and found nothing. The street is quiet. The flax is in neat rows. And Rahab is sitting on the roof, in the dark, next to two young men who are not yet sure whether to believe her, and she has just said the thing that took her all of forty years' worth of news to arrive at.

She is not a saint yet. She has not done anything yet that would be remembered in a church. She is a woman on a roof with a rope, and a family she is worried about, and a window that looks out on the whole wide world. And she has just decided, in the dark, that she believes in the God of a people she has never met.

And somewhere down the road, past the last sleepy houses, in a camp of tents on the other side of the river, an old man who has waited forty years is lying awake. He is thinking about a river he will have to cross. He is thinking about a wall he will have to walk around. And he is remembering, I would imagine, what the Lord said to him: be strong, and be courageous. I will be with you.

And on the roof, a woman is untying the last of the cord. And the night is quiet. And the stars, which are the same stars, are out over Jericho and over the river and over the camp, and over the hills where, if you listen, two young men are lying very still, and waiting for the dawn.

Nothing more is needed tonight. The red thread is in the window. The promise has been made. The rest, as the old stories say, is for the morning.

Some notes for the curious. The whole story we have told comes from the book of Joshua, chapters two to six, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture. The woman, the spies, the flax, the cord, the crossing of the Jordan, the twelve stones, the manna that stopped, the stranger with the sword, the seven days and the seven priests, and the saving of Rahab's household are all in the text. The weather, the smell of the flax, the talk of the men on the wall, the chairs on the fourth morning, and most of the little conversations, are ours.

Three things are worth being careful about. First, the lie at the door. The book tells it without comment. Some of the Fathers thought she was wrong and God was merciful, and others thought she was right to protect the innocent, and the New Testament praises her welcome and her faith. We have not tried to settle it.

Second, the hard part of the story, the giving up of the city. It is written in the language of the ancient world, and the Church has never taken it as a command for any later age. Many of the Fathers read the whole book of Joshua in a spiritual way, as the story of the struggle of the soul, and Origen does exactly that. Scholars also disagree about when Jericho fell, and about what the ruins at the site show, and we do not claim to know. What the book plainly keeps in view is the woman who was spared and the family she asked for.

Third, the readings of the scarlet cord and of Joshua's name. Those are old traditions of interpretation, from Clement and from Origen, and we have called them that.

Joshua son of Nun is honoured by both traditions as a righteous man. Rahab is honoured in the New Testament, and many Christians have counted her among the saints; we will not give a calendar date we cannot vouch for.

That's the story of Joshua and Rahab for tonight. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you have, tonight, a window with a small red thread in it, the sign of a promise that somebody kept. May the walls you have been walking around for a long time sit down quietly in their own time. May you be given courage by one who says, do not be afraid, and may you not have to hurry. May you be taken in, in the end, with everyone you love, every cousin and every great-uncle, none left behind. May you be as brave as the one on the roof. May you remember that the Lord is with you wherever you go. And may the God who saved Rahab and her house keep you and yours, tonight and always.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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