But she had brought them up to the roof of the house, and hid them with the stalks of flax, which she had laid in order upon the roof.
She had brought them up to the roof of the house, and hid them with the stalks of flax. Flax with other vegetable productions, is at a certain season spread out on the flat roofs of Eastern houses to be dried in the sun; and after lying awhile it is piled up in numerous little stacks, which, from the luxuriant growth of the flax, rise to a height of three or our feet. Behind some of these stacks Rahab concealed the spies. 'The stalks of flax had no doubt just been cut down, and she had spread them upon the roof of her house to steep and to season. It was harvest time (see the note at Joshua 3:15). It would seem that the flax and the barley were crops which ripened about the same time in Egypt; and as the climate of Canaan did not differ materially from that of Egypt, this no doubt was the case in Canaan too; so that the flax stalks must have been newly reaped. Here I see truth; yet how very minute is this incident! How very casually does it present itself to our notice! How very unimportant a matter it seems in the first instance under what the spies were hidden! Enough that, whatever it was, it answered the purpose and saved their lives. Could the historian have contemplated for one moment the effect which a trifle about a flax-stalk might have in corroboration of his account of the passage of the Jordan?' (Blunt's 'Undesigned Coincidences,' p. 106).