Rebekah: Women of Genesis (20 page)

Rebekah’s only practice was in her tent, alone with Deborah, and Deborah always burst out laughing before Rebekah was more than a few sentences into her Mother imitation. “You sound
just like her,
” Deborah always said. “It’s so
funny.
” Which told Rebekah that she didn’t sound just like Mother—she just sounded like somebody
trying
to sound just like her. Because if she
did
sound just like Mother, then Deborah would be charmed. Not amused.

That winter the rains were few and far between. It meant that all next year would be spent searching for pasture ever higher and farther abroad—and so would all the other herding families. “The desert grows,” Bethuel said, “the grass doesn’t. Wells go dry, and we’ll be fighting more and more over those that remain.”

It was just Father, Mother, Laban, Rebekah, and Pillel at this meeting in Father’s tent. Only Mother looked unworried.

“We have two choices,” Father said. “Because we always do, when times are hard. We can strike camp and go out wandering, negotiating with the locals at every well, fighting when we have to. Or we can sell some of the animals in the city and try to keep the balance between the land we traditionally use and the size of the herds that can live on them. The danger in that is that wandering families that make the other choice will be coming
here,
and we have to keep constant vigilance to protect our lands.”

Father and Pillel went back and forth on this for a while, with Pillel warning that if they were to sell too many animals, too fast, the local price would drop, and Father countering that they could sell off small groups of animals in more distant cities. Until Mother finally sighed and entered the conversation. “Write for me, will you, Rebekah?”

Mother could write for herself now, but she was still slow and had to concentrate on it. So when she wanted to say something complicated, she still needed help, and Rebekah didn’t mind.

“There’s another choice,” she said.

Rebekah wrote it.

Father rolled his eyes. Apparently this was an old argument.

“We’ve been camped here so long that it’s only a small step to moving into town,” said Mother.

“A small step,” said Father. “Let’s see. We free all the herdsmen, which reduces them to beggary and puts their families at the edge of starvation. Or we sell them to another household. And we move into the city where I do . . . what?”

Mother was not fazed. “We build a real house here, and we gradually train more and more of the herdsmen as farmers. We use land along the stream and channel the water onto the fields.”

“When there’s water,” said Pillel.

“And when real drought comes,” said Father, “instead of having herds we can move somewhere else in search of water and pasture, we have a farm that consists of dust and sand and starving farmers.”

“And yet the villages thrive,” said Mother.

“For a whole generation, Canaan has been virtually uninhabited,” said Father. “The people had to move out of the villages during the great drought. Only instead of going wandering as grandfather did, as Uncle Abraham did, they had nowhere to go except to sell themselves into slavery as if they had been conquered. Half the families in our household entered into service at that time. That’s what you want for us?”

Mother shrugged, but it was obvious to Rebekah that the argument wasn’t over yet. For the first time Rebekah realized that Mother really wasn’t born to the desert life and still, after all these years, didn’t like it.

So during one of their chats, Rebekah tried to draw her out about it.

“Yes, I grew up in Ugarit,” said Mother. “My grandfather was an Amorite prince who came out of the desert on a raid but realized that the city life was better and came back and bought his way into citizenship. He kept his herds, but gradually shifted to vineyards and olives. I never saw three sheep together until I married your father.”

“So why didn’t you marry someone from the city?”

“These desert people,” she said. “They’ll
live
in the city, but they won’t marry there. Father wouldn’t even consider any suitors from Ugarit. He wanted me to marry a man who worshiped the god with no name.”

“He has a name,” said Rebekah, almost by habit. “We just don’t say it.”

“No, you just don’t
know
it,” said Mother.

“Which is how we can be sure not to say it,” said Rebekah.

“You can bet your father knows the name of God, and he’ll tell Laban. Or write it down.”

But Rebekah was thinking of something much more important. “So you grew up in a house that served the God of Abraham.”

“I grew up in a house that served the god of getting rich,” said Mother. “Which meant going to all the religious festivals in the city, no matter what the god was, so that everyone would accept my father as a true citizen instead of a foreigner who bought his way in.”

“The way the Hittites do, worshiping whatever god the locals worship.”

“Except my father would come home from the festival and laugh about the stupid beliefs of the local people. ‘How ignorant they are, to think that their stone god can do anything other than bruise your head if you bump into it.’”

Rebekah laughed, but realized Mother wasn’t much amused by it. “My father and I didn’t get along,” Mother said. “He was a hypocrite, pretending to serve one god while secretly serving another. Only it seemed to me that he served neither and denied both. That’s why I say he worshiped wealth. He cared about nothing else. That’s why I ended up married to your father. He had the biggest bride-gift.”

“That’s
all?
”

“Well, of course he was from a lofty family. Terah’s boys made quite a name for themselves, and not just Abraham. So nobody could criticize Father for marrying me off to a man who had once been Abraham’s heir.”

“But you chose to worship Asherah,” said Rebekah.

“I didn’t choose Asherah,” said Mother. “She chose me.”

Rebekah waited for more explanation.

“I promised your father never to talk to you about Asherah.”

“Why? Does he think you’ll convert me?”

“Yes,” said Mother. “For a man who doesn’t think Asherah is really a god, he has a very healthy respect for her powers of influence.”

“Or for yours,” said Rebekah.

Mother made a display of exaggerated innocence. “Mine? Powers of influence? I couldn’t influence a locust to eat a leaf.”

Rebekah laughed. “All the same,” she said, “you have to tell me.”

“I was drawn to Asherah anyway,” said Mother. “Because the only worshipers of your God that I knew were insincere, while the girls I grew up with in the city, all my friends, took Asherah very seriously and prayed to her fervently, to make them attractive to their husbands so they would put babies in them.”

“That’s a prayer that’s sure to get granted,” said Rebekah.

“Well, you’d think so,” said Mother. “Only in Ugarit there were real problems for a time—few babies were conceived and fewer born alive. The people were sure that they had offended a god, of course, and Father sneered at them for that. But I suspect that’s part of the reason he wanted to find a husband for me from outside the city.”

“So you prayed to Asherah.”

“It was a very hard thing for me to do. But my womanhood hadn’t come upon me, and I was almost as old as you are now. I feared that I was going to be barren. I
looked
like a woman, but I was like a husk with no grain inside. I had prayed to your God many times but nothing happened. And then I went with some of my friends to Asherah and prayed.”

“And it came.”

“Not at once,” said Mother. “Not until the third time I went to her, and made a covenant with Asherah that if she made me a woman, I would serve her every day of my life.”

“And then.”

“A month later,” said Mother.

“But it might have come then whether you prayed to Asherah or not.”

“Yes, of course,” said Mother. “Just as it sometimes rains after your father prays to his God for rain, and sometimes it doesn’t, and who knows whether it would have rained anyway? But I had made a covenant, and my womanhood came, and I keep my word.”

“To Asherah.”

Mother cocked an eyebrow. “Yes, well, I did disobey your father after promising not to present you to Asherah. But my covenant with Asherah came before any covenant I ever made to your father. And besides, if you have to choose between serving a god and serving a man, how hard is it to make
that
decision?”

“But if you serve a man who serves the same god as you,” said Rebekah, “then there’s never such a choice to make.”

“Oh, my darling girl, I shudder to think of how many times in your life you’re going to have to eat
those
words. Besides, my dear, didn’t you just urge me to break my word to your father and tell you about how Asherah chose me?”

That was an embarrassing truth. “Well, you didn’t convert me to Asherah, so we didn’t violate Father’s intention,” said Rebekah.

“You
are
human, my dear,” said Mother. “Just like everybody else. And your faith in your God is no different from my faith in mine.”

Rebekah didn’t argue—what would be the point? But the truth was beyond anything Mother could have guessed. Because the God of Abraham didn’t just answer prayers in ways that could easily be coincidence, the way Asherah did. Rebekah hadn’t exactly heard the voice of God the way the stories said Uncle Abraham did, but she had been given words to say, had been given knowledge in her heart at key times in her life. Ideas had come into her mind that could only have been a gift of God.

She couldn’t tell her mother about these things, though, because Mother was so sure of herself that she would dismiss Rebekah’s experiences as being her own imaginings. You’re a clever girl, that’s what Mother would say, so you think up clever ideas and then give the credit to your God. Very modest of you, but what you really end up worshiping is yourself, don’t you think? Oh, Rebekah knew exactly how Mother’s mind worked, because didn’t she think of these doubts herself, during dark moments when her life didn’t seem to be going very well? Then she would think back and remember how it
felt.
How when these ideas from God entered her mind, they came with such surety that she simply knew them to be true and acted on them in the moment. While her own ideas came with doubt, and she had to wrestle with them before she could act. It was completely different—and impossible to explain. At least to someone like Mother, who could explain anything away with a flick of her wit.

Be honest, Rebekah told herself. I do the same thing. I did it just now, to her, explaining away the prayer that Asherah answered.

From the outside, my faith in God looks just like her faith in Asherah. But I know the difference. I have felt him touch my heart and mind, and there is no possibility of doubt for me.

When her prayer was “answered,” Mother took it to mean that she was chosen by Asherah. Has God chosen me?

Immediately she rejected the vanity implied by the question. Chosen her? What would that mean? Abraham was chosen. He had the birthright. But Rebekah? There were no great promises to her. God had never actually spoken to her, not in words.

No, God has merely answered my prayers from time to time, as he might do for anyone who does her best to serve him.

Except that Father and Laban have never spoken of having that sudden breath of knowledge like those God gave me.

Again she tried to drive the thought from her mind. She was
not
chosen above her father and brother.

“It is really quite rude,” Mother said, “to suddenly fall silent during what was supposed to be a conversation.”

“I’m sorry,” Rebekah apologized, and offered some excuse about going off into her own thoughts. When Mother asked what those thoughts might be, Rebekah evaded her and, with her newfound skills at conversation, turned the topic to something else. Mother knew what she was doing, of course, but how could she complain when she herself had taught Rebekah how to do this?

The next summer Rebekah got her first suitor in a year, and it wasn’t a real one, just a visit from a traveling merchant who sat down with Father and told him that an up-and-coming young merchant in Byblos had asked him to find out, if he could, whether Rebekah was still unmarried and what it would take, as a bride-price, to win her hand. As Laban reported the scene to Rebekah later, Father was outraged, but he contained his anger and patiently explained that concubines might be bought that way, but his daughter was not for sale. “These merchants,” Laban said, no doubt echoing Father’s sentiments, “they live by buying and selling, so they think
everything
is for sale.”

When Pillel heard the story, though, he got curious and had one of his men go to Byblos and find out about the young merchant on whose behalf the traveler had made his outrageous inquiry. It was months later that word came back, but Pillel made his report to Father and Father in turn told Laban and Rebekah about it as if it were a huge joke. “Do you know who it turned out to be?” he asked.