Those of you whose biblical knowledge isn't quite as advanced as Ellen's or Gina's might be forgiven for not knowing who "Rahab" is. Allow me to bring you up to speed.

See, the great empire of Egypt had suffered a slave revolt. Some 600,000 slaves (give or take), had called upon their mysterious faceless sky god, unleashed a sequence of terrifying supernatural plagues on their masters (culminating in a mass slaughter of children, the redirection of a major body of water and the utter destruction of the Egyptian army as they made their final escape into the wilderness). That was forty years ago.

Somehow, they had been surviving in the desert all this time, reproducing, periodically being culled based on their devotion to their faceless god's arbitrary rules, like metal being smelted and purified, or like a new breed of dog being selectively developed to specialize in unbreakable religious zealotry.

Rahab was a small-time hooker from the big city of Jericho, with a small apartment built into the city walls. She had heard stories of the sons of Israel when she was growing up, myths and legends of the bogeymen who lived out in the desert, monsters who would call upon their unfathomable god to destroy her if she didn't finish her vegetables. Now, here they were, a million strong, visible out her window as a teeming black mass swarming on the Shittim hills, a million hungry, fanatical, desert-hardened faces looking inward like a cloud of locusts poised to blot out the sun.

And these two men, these two soldiers sitting in her kitchen, eating her food, casually picking their teeth and discussing the imminent extermination of every man, woman and child (and most of the livestock) west of the Jordan, they were no bogeymen. They were spies, an advance reconnaissance team assessing the offensive and defensive capabilities of her hometown, the first Canaanite city destined to fall as part of this giant westward alien invasion.

Rahab was a patriotic Canaanite, of course, but she had a family to think about.

She knew that her choice was between rooting for the home team, or rooting for the winning team.

She had a chance here, a chance to get in on the ground floor.

She took it.

It paid off.