The Hero and the Slut

You may recall that Joshua, the son of Nun, who inherited the mantle of leadership of the Israelites after the death of Moses, started out with the name Hoshea (Numbers 13:16).

There's not much of a name-change here, as both names are very similar in Hebrew. Hoshea means "Salvation", whereas Yahshua (Joshua, Jesus) means "Yah is Salvation" (Yah being short for YHWH, as in Hallelujah! (= "Praise Yah!")).

Although the Tanakh (Old Testament) does not record this tidbit, Jewish tradition makes the claim that Joshua married Rahab, a former prostitute.

Assuming this to be true, it's interesting that approximately 7 centuries later, another man named Hosea (variant of Hoshea) married a prostitute (Hosea 1:2-3).

And finally, about 7 centuries after that, a third man named Yahshua became engaged to a former prostitute. This Yahshua is better known by his Americanized name, Jesus, and the cleaned-up prostitute to which he is engaged is us, the church (Eph. 5:8, 25ff & the general sense of sinners, of which we once were, going "whoring after [our] own inventions"- Ps 106:39 KJV, &tc).

I just found the foreshadowing/parallelism of three Hosheas/Joshuas marrying prostitutes interesting.