Rebekah: Women of Genesis (25 page)

As her own camel lurched forward—the second in the caravan, and the first with a rider—she heard Laban call out to her. She turned as best she could, in her awkward perch on the camel’s hump, and saw him running toward her.

“Rebekah!” he cried out. “You are my sister, but now you’ll be the mother of thousands of millions! Let your seed possess the gates of all those who hate them!”

Laban’s blessing rang in her ears as they moved away into the hills. The mother of nations—is that what she would be? But that was the promise of Sarah, wasn’t it?

Mine now. Because I am marrying the heir of the covenant between God and Abraham.

Possess the gates of all those who hate them. That sent a chill through her, when she thought about it. Yes, her children would become a great nation—but great nations have enemies who hate them and want to destroy them.

In our little encampment in the hills just outside Haran, who hated us? Our name is known, but no one resented us here. We were never important enough. But my children will be the chosen of God, and all those who hate the Lord will hate them.

O God of my father, she prayed, watch over my family. The family I leave behind, and the family my new husband and I will create. Let them have as much joy in their lives as I have had. And let them have no more sorrow than I have suffered. For surely none of thy daughters has ever been more blessed than I.

It seemed to her that she wept halfway to Damascus, but Deborah assured her later that she was smiling and happy during the whole trip.

Chapter 9

Rebekah was surprised at how new the land seemed as their caravan made its way through the hills of Canaan. Everywhere, it seemed, people were tending to new olive trees and grape stalks, or building new houses. And the coastal cities that they could glimpse, now and then, when through a break in the hills the plain along the shore of the Great Sea came into view, seemed to gleam bright and new in the sun.

Eliezer seemed to have seen everything. The hill country had been so desiccated during the great drought of the past few generations that the villages were empty ruins, and only a few villages managed to hold on to life. The rest of the land belonged to the great nomad princes in those days. But now, with the rains more dependable again—though nothing like it had been before the drought, Eliezer assured her—the people could come back. “And where water is, people follow,” he said.

“You could not possibly be old enough to remember how things were before the drought.”

“Even my master isn’t that old,” said Eliezer. “But it was written down in the scrolls. The great plain between the rivers was all grass as high as your head, with clumps of trees everywhere. Elephants roamed free then, before the great hunters like Nimrod killed them all. These hills were heavily forested—all of them, not just the great cypress forests of Lebanon. But during the drought, trees did not grow back when the old ones were cut down, and the soil turned to dust and blew away. Great clouds of it, so it was dark for days at a time, the sun just a faint yellow disk in the dirty sky.”

It was hard to imagine such a cataclysm. But Eliezer assured her that the drought was nothing compared to Noah’s flood.

“It wasn’t just the rains or the rivers rising, the way that we see every year with the Nile or the Euphrates.”

Rebekah almost laughed at that—as if she had ever seen the Nile, or lived close enough to the Euphrates to know the seasons of the river.

“The great ocean was broken up and leapt over its shores.”

“How could that be?” she asked him. “The waters pouring upward?”

“All things are possible with God,” said Eliezer.

“But there has to be more to the story than that.”

“Isaac will read it to you sometime, I’m sure of it. There are two different versions of the story, but one of them was written in Noah’s own hand, and he saw it, so it must be true.”

He also explained that the cities of the coast were new. “There used to be nothing but fishing villages along the Canaan shore. But then traders came from islands out in the Great Sea, and merchants began to prosper from the trade. Abraham understood at once. These foreign merchants were tired of having to deal with the seafaring traders of Sidon and Tyre. They’re hoping to establish these cities of the Canaanite coast as rivals to the Phoenician cities. But it will never work, not the way they’re doing it.”

“Why not?”

“Because there has to be someone to trade with,” said Eliezer. “Sidon and Tyre, Byblos, Ugarit—all the great cities of the north—they’re in the perfect position, between the sea and the great kingdoms of the plain-between-the-rivers. Huge caravans go from the coast toward Babylon, Sumer, Ur-of-the-South, and even beyond, to the Medes, the Elamites, the Persians, and kingdoms so far we’ve never heard of them. But here, what lies behind the coast? Great kingdoms? That’s laughable. You can see these hill villages that are being reestablished, and beyond these hills is the valley of the Jordan, which is prosperous enough these days. But then comes nothing but savanna and desert, a land for wandering herders like us, but there aren’t enough of us. We buy what we buy, but you can’t build a city from the profits of trading with us.”

Rebekah had never heard anyone speak like this, viewing the world as a great whole, not just individual cities and their hinterlands.

“My master sees more than that,” said Eliezer, chuckling. “He knows the names of the stars, including the one closest to where God dwells.”

“God lives on a star?”

“Near a star. The stars are suns, like the great fire in our sky, only very far away. And they have worlds around them also. God made them all.”

Rebekah looked up at the stars for several nights after that, wondering at the thought that the world she knew was only one of many hundreds, even thousands, each possessed of its own star. Do they see our sun shining in their sky? Do they know we live?

God knew, whether anyone else did or not. God saw her world, God saw
her,
and cared enough about her to choose her to be the mother of the next generation of the birthright. There was nothing so large that God could not see it all, and nothing so small that God would not notice it. For the first time she began to realize why people clung to their idols. A god you could touch, one you made with your own hands, was somehow safer, closer. You could talk to a god that you had right in your house, or in the temple or the grove, and hope that it might hear you.

Yet it did not matter whether
you
could see your god, if your god could not see you. And those real, tangible, safe, close gods were as blind and deaf and dead as the stones or stumps they were carved from. While the living God, faraway as he was, could reach into the heart of anyone who prayed to him and listened for his answers and obeyed him when the answers came.

They wound their way farther south into rougher country, and here there were no villages being built or cities visible in the distance. The closest sea was not the Great Sea to the west, but rather the Sea of Salt to the east, and instead of the great wheeling fisherbirds, the most common flying things were locusts skimming over the ground from bush to bush. The men also grew more vigilant than ever, keeping watch all night. They lit no fires now, but lived on unleavened bread, cheese, and the wine they carried with them. “This won’t go on for long,” said Eliezer to the girls when they complained. “We’re nearly there.”

“But why does Abraham choose to live in such a forbidding land?”

“It’s not quite as bad at Kirjath-arba, where my master keeps his camp. And among these hills there are springs and wells, and plenty of grass. Still, you’re right, it seems a miracle that a great herding family could become wealthy in this land—but then, it
is
a miracle, for God blesses my master to prosper in a place where anyone else would starve. Here he is left alone—he doesn’t have to send his men out to war the way Ezbaal and Ishmael and others who live in more desirable lands have to do. My master has had his times of war, but now is a time of peace, for him and his son.”

“And Isaac—is he also a man of peace?”

“Yes,” said Eliezer. “He’s even more devoted to the holy writings than my master is. I think that if he didn’t have duties that forced him out into the fields and pastures, he’d spend all day reading. It’s the great joy of his life.” Then Eliezer smiled. “Or was, until now.”

“What’s different now?” And then she realized how stupid she was—of course he was referring to her arrival. “Oh. We’ll see how long it takes before I drive him even deeper into the writings.”

Eliezer just laughed. “No one is
that
attuned to God.”

They came out of a particularly rough passage on paths that seemed invisible, they were so stony, though Eliezer and his men gave no sign of having to search for the way through—they walked it as surely as she walked the path from Father’s camp to the well of Haran. Before them was an oasis, a green place with orchards and bean fields and vineyards, as well as pens for animals and several tents. Still, the tents seemed few for the camp of a great lord, and so she asked doubtfully, “Is
this
the camp of Abraham?”

“Oh, no,” said Eliezer with a laugh. “You’ll know my master’s camp when you see it. This is the well of Lahai-roi. These fields belong to my master, of course. But any land given over to tents is land you can’t farm, and so we keep this place empty of people except for those actually working the soil and tending the trees and vines.”

“Who is that man walking through the fields? He seems to be coming to greet us.”

Eliezer looked where she was pointing, and then gave a grunt of surprise. “It is the son of my master.”

“My husband?” she asked, suddenly breathless.

“I didn’t know he’d be at Lahai-roi.” Eliezer looked at her as she tried to arrange her hair. “It’s no use,” he said. “No matter what you do, you still look beautiful.”

“I do not,” said Rebekah. “His first sight of me should not be like this, filthy from traveling.”

“Too late, don’t you think?” said Eliezer.

“Make my camel kneel, please,” said Rebekah.

At Eliezer’s command the caravan came to a halt and Rebekah’s camel went to its knees. Eliezer reached to help her down, but she had done this often enough to know how to alight from a camel on her own. Lightly she sprang to the ground, and, keeping the camel between her and Isaac, she quickly found what she needed. She pulled the veil from the sack where she had packed it, and put it over her head.

“What are you doing?” asked Eliezer.

“My husband’s first sight of me is not going to be looking like this.”

“So it’s better he sees you with a sack over your head?”

“A veil.”

“I know it’s a veil, you wore it during the windstorm on the third day of our journey.”

Deborah was also off her camel, and she helped Rebekah tie the veil in place.

“He’ll think I found him a woman so ugly she has to be hidden from view,” said Eliezer.

“He’ll think what he thinks,” said Rebekah.

“Then again,” said Eliezer, “if he saw you looking as lovely as you did atop that dromedary, he might think that I chose you for beauty alone. This way, he’ll know you couldn’t possibly have been chosen by anyone but God.”

Rebekah knew he was gibing with her, but she could not banter in reply. She was too frightened. This was not how it was supposed to be. She was supposed to come into camp and have a day in her tent before she had to emerge to meet anyone. It was not supposed to be in a field, with him covered with the sweat and dirt of the day’s work, and her grimy with travel, her hair windblown, the inextinguishable stink of camel permeating her clothes.

And yet . . . this had not been an ordinary courtship by any standard. She had accepted him without seeing him, without even hearing his name mentioned, because she knew that it was God’s will. Would he not be just as obedient to the Lord?

I don’t want him to marry me because of obedience, she realized. I want him to marry me for love.

But that was absurd. What was prettiness? Hadn’t she hidden her face for years because she did
not
want to be loved for a face that happened to have no oversized or misplaced features?

She didn’t know what was right. She only knew that she was afraid, and in the veil she felt safer.

She stood beside Eliezer as Isaac passed among the bean plants. He was a tall man, and slender, though he had the arms of a shepherd—arms that could carry a goat or restrain a sheep for shearing. He was not as young as Ezbaal, but there was no white in his beard or his hair, and he moved with the vigor of youth, leaping over as many rows as he stepped through.  But despite his smile, she saw something sad in his eyes. Why should that be? What sorrow had he known, this man who was born as a miracle?

“Why is he so sorrowful?” she whispered to Eliezer.

“Sorrowful?” he answered. So apparently he didn’t see what she saw in her husband.

“Eliezer,” called Isaac. His voice was deep and rich, his word clear.