RAHAB.—The mother of Boaz, and thus an ancestress of our Lord (Matthew 1:5).
‘These names [those of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba] are probably introduced as those of women in whose case circumstances were overruled by the Divine providence which, as it might have seemed, should have excluded them from a place in the ancestral line of the Messiah. They were in a sense forerunners of the Virgin Mary’ (W. C. Allen, Com. ad loc.).
The ‘faith’ of Rahab is extolled in Hebrews 11:31, and her ‘works’ in James 2:25.