‘And the woman took the two men, and hid them.'
We should probably read these as pluperfects, ‘had taken the two men and had hidden them'. (Hebrew is only interested in the fact that the thing happened, not when it happened. It has no way of indicating the different past tenses). The sharp knock on the door, so unlike her usual visitors, probably alerted her to the situation with the result that she would have hid them out of sight before she opened the door. This was an introductory comment prior to her excuse to the messengers. But why should she do so? Possibly because she knew that the city had little chance against the large Israelite army after what they had done to the Amorites, and because of the way her fellow citizens treated her. Possibly she saw a chance to start a new life. Possibly she had heard of the power of the God of Israel and had a yearning within her for something new, and a sense that here might be the answer. For the truth is that God was at work.
“Hid them.” Literally ‘hid him'. Either seeing the two men as one, or meaning ‘each one', possibly hiding them in different places.
Joshua 2:4-5 (4b-5)
‘And she said, “True, the men did come to me, but I did not know where they came from. And so it was that about the time of the shutting of the gate, when it was dark, the men went out. Where the men went I do not know. Chase after them quickly, for you will overtake them.”
Her excuse was first that she had not realised who the men were, and secondly that they had left in time to get away before the shutting of the gate, just as it was getting dark. The suggestion was that they had escaped, and that the best thing therefore was for them to chase after them to catch them before it was too late.
Rahab is often criticised for lying. This raises an interesting moral question. When only two courses are open to someone, both ‘sinful', does that mean that they have no alternative but to sin? The truth is that one of the two actions must be the right one in the circumstances, and therefore morally right in that particular case. Here the truth would have immediately sentenced these brave men, who were there in the service of God, to death. That would have been sinful. Was it more sinful to lie? One of the courses had to be chosen, thus one was right (silence would have been just as bad). To be the direct cause of the men's death would have been grossly wrong. If we accept that, then the lie was right in this particular case. Her contemporaries would not have cavilled about that. Rather they would have thought that her greater sin was her treason.