“Tie this bond of scarlet cord.” The color red and identity in the biblical stories of Rahab and Jezebel.

Abstract

In biblical narrative, the foreign woman is one of the biggest threats for the identity of the People of Israel. In the stories of Rahab and Jezebel, we find two different ways to cope with feminine alterity: whilst Rahab has a place inside the community, Jezebel remains the absolute other. Two iconographic elements play a relevant role in the literary construction of both characters. On one hand, the window as the place of action from which women take part in the narrative and, on the other hand, the chromatic element that seems to seal the fate of these women: both the scarlet cord (שָׁנִי) that saves Rahab during the conquest of Jericho (Josh 2:18, 21) and the blood (דָּם) that spatters on the walls when Jezebel is murdered (2 Kgs 9:33), seem to point out the life and death that await them.

The reading here proposed aims to relate both stories through an exploration of the use of the motif of the window and the color red and their possible meanings inside the inclusion and exclusion dynamics operating in the texts.