Rebekah: Women of Genesis (29 page)

“Poor Ezbaal,” said Isaac.

“The Lord chooses strong women for us, my son,” said Abraham.

“She’s already standing up to
you,
” Isaac pointed out.

Rebekah wanted to protest, but of course he was right, so what was the point of arguing?

“I’ve never had a shortage of people who stand up to me,” said Abraham. “In my old age, I wasn’t wishing for yet another.”

“The Lord sends us what we need, not what we want,” said Isaac with a smile.

“I hate it when you quote me to myself.” Abraham turned to Rebekah. “Let me tell you right now, so you know: I like you. I like everything I’ve heard about you and I like what I’ve seen. But if the Lord wants somebody else to make the decisions here, all he needs to do is take me home. I’m ready whenever he wants me back. Until then, I’ll listen to what you have to say, but I hope you’ll do me the same courtesy. At least try doing it my way before you decide I’m wrong.”

“Grandfather,” said Rebekah, “in all matters pertaining to your household, you’ll have my perfect obedience. But I, not you, am the one the Lord chose to be the mother of my children. And if he wants someone else to do that job, all he needs to do is have me die in childbirth. It happens all the time. But if I’m still here after our first son is born, then I
will
be his mother.”

Abraham studied her for a moment, smiled broadly, then turned to Isaac. “Mark my words, she’ll spoil the boy.”

Did that mean he was giving in? Rebekah thought not. He was merely choosing not to press the issue further right now.

“I’ll make sure she doesn’t,” said Isaac. “But for the moment, I’ll be content if the Lord gives us a boy in the first place. And just so you know, Father, Mother never spoiled me. She was harder on me than you ever were. Perhaps you’ve forgotten how rigorous she was.”

“I miss your mother too, you know,” said Abraham. “Every hour of every day, I have things I want to tell her. And ask her. And show her. It’s as if I lost half myself.”

Once again Isaac said nothing, and this time Rebekah knew enough to keep silent herself.

Abraham, therefore, was the one who broke the silence, explaining to Rebekah, “Isaac doesn’t like it that I took Keturah as a wife.”

“I’m perfectly happy for you,” said Isaac. “I appreciate your waiting until Mother was buried.”

His voice was completely level, not a hint of sarcasm, but Abraham recoiled as if someone had thrown something at his eyes.

“Your mother is my wife forever,” said Abraham. “Worlds without end, she’s half my self.”

Isaac said nothing.

Again, Abraham directed himself to Rebekah. “He was always with his mother like a moth around a flame, darting everywhere but never very far.”

Abraham seemed to expect some kind of answer from her, but as long as Isaac wasn’t answering, Rebekah did not want to say anything more. She had already gotten herself into enough difficulty.

But no one was speaking, and Abraham was looking at her with such intensity that she could no longer keep still. “I wish I could have known him as a child,” said Rebekah. “But I grew up hearing legends about his birth.”

“Ah, the legends, the stories,” said Abraham. “The myths, the outright lies. Gossip. Slander. Scandal.”

“Miracles, that’s all I heard,” said Rebekah.

“Truly?” asked Isaac.

“In my father’s house,” said Rebekah. “I once heard something else from visitors, but in my father’s house, there were no stories but of God’s goodness to Abraham and Sarah.”

“Then you heard the truth,” said Abraham. “God has blessed us beyond all measure.”

Again a silence fell, but at least this time it didn’t follow some jab from one of the men, or some foolish statement of Rebekah’s. It seemed contemplative.

“I wish I had known her,” said Rebekah.

They both knew she meant Sarah. “She was born to be a queen,” said Abraham.

“I thought it was her older sister who—”

Abraham interrupted her with a sharp dry laugh. “Qira. If she was a queen, so is every ewe in the flock. So much strength, but all of it devoted to getting her own way, and none of it to serving her husband or her children.”

“Father likes to tell about Qira,” said Isaac, “because it always amazes him how different two children of the same father can be.”

Again a silence fell, and for some reason Rebekah thought that this was the awkward silence following a thrust in their duel. But who did the stabbing this time? And who was stabbed?

Then she put it together. Abraham’s remarks about how soft Isaac was because Sarah was too protective of him. And now Isaac talking about how different two children of the same father could be. It was about Ishmael. Isaac was making a jab at himself. And Abraham was letting it stand.

But why? Ishmael was a great lord of the desert, everyone knew it—he was feared by anyone who might be his enemy and shunned by his rivals, who dared not face him. He went where he wanted, from well to well, and took what he needed. He was also known as a generous man, but when you can take anything you want, simply leaving people with what they already had can seem like generosity. He was ostensibly a worshiper of the God of Abraham—at least it was said that he bowed down to no other god. But he was certainly not what anyone could call a holy man, not in any of the stories Rebekah had heard.

If Abraham thought her husband was weak, surely it did not imply that he thought Ishmael was strong!

Whatever was going on here was too deep for her. If it wasn’t a war, it was some kind of struggle between father and son. Yet when they laughed together—she had never seen Father and Laban seem so close, so at one with each other.

One thing was certain. She did not dare bring up what Keturah had said, about women being forbidden to see the holy writings. If he was already talking about needing to oversee the rearing of a grandson that hadn’t even been conceived yet, the last thing she needed to do was to give him grounds for thinking of her as even less trustworthy than he already did.

So she asked for the one thing she had wished for in her and Isaac’s hurried wedding. “Grandfather,” she said, “will you bless our marriage?”

Isaac moved next to her, and she looked up to see him gazing at her. Had she said something wrong?

“My wife is wiser than I am,” said Isaac. He turned to Abraham. “Will you, Father?”

Tears came to Abraham’s eyes. “The old man still has a few blessings in him,” he said. “Come here, children. Kneel before me. Hold hands, yes, like that.” And there on the spot he gave them a blessing such as she had never heard Father give in all the marriages he had blessed. Abraham promised them great blessings in life and after they died as well, and he placed them under the covenant that he himself had made with God, that as long as they obeyed the Lord they would be blessed with progeny as numerous as the sands of the sea or the stars in the sky.

At the end of it, Abraham put a hand on her shoulder and said, “I love most in all the world the kind of people who put themselves in the Lord’s hands with perfect trust. Eliezer told me that you were that kind of person. As long as you bend to the Lord’s will, I can put up with a little defiance of mine. Not a lot, but a little.” He smiled. “My son deserves to be happy. I think, with you, he will be.”

Rebekah found herself weeping. This was the Abraham she had longed to meet, not the old man gibing at his grown son, but the voice that pierced her to the heart with the words of God. She could feel the power of what he was saying; it was the way she felt when God had filled her with the knowledge of what she was to do. Peace and perfect trust, that’s what it was, knowing that God held her in his gaze for this moment, and knew her, and loved her, and wanted her to be happy.

That night there was feasting, and all the next day Rebekah was introduced to Abraham’s servants, and to friends and visitors who had come from nearby to meet the wife of Abraham’s heir. There was singing and dancing. The food was magnificent, the stories enthralling. They could not have shown her more honor.

But none of it could still the fire that burned in her from having Abraham rest his hand upon hers and Isaac’s and blessing their marriage to last forever, like his own marriage with Sarah, even beyond the gateway of the grave.

She did not even mind so much the disappointment of not having seen the holy writings.

After all, someday they would be Isaac’s, and he would make his own rules about who could and could not see them.

Chapter 11

At the time, her life seemed full of worries and little disasters—a quarrel with Keturah that led to a spiteful silence that lasted nearly a month before Abraham finally intervened; Miriel running off with a boy from a nearby village, only to come back two months later, tearful and pregnant; Isaac’s refusal to ask his father to let Rebekah look at the holy writings, or even to explain to her why he wouldn’t. Years later, however, looking back at these first years of her marriage, Rebekah would think of them as an idyllic time and yearn for the simplicity of her life then.

After all, these problems were solved easily enough. Keturah’s constant efforts to provoke a quarrel and get Abraham to side with her against Rebekah ended soon after the birth of Keturah’s second son, when Rebekah had not yet conceived any child at all. That was victory enough, and when after only five years she was nursing Medan and Midian while Zimran and Jokshan played at her feet, she could finally afford to be magnanimous to her poor barren stepdaughter-in-law. What threat could a childless Rebekah possibly be to Keturah? Instead of finding reasons to prevent Rebekah from visiting Abraham’s camp, Keturah issued an endless stream of invitations, to Isaac’s and Rebekah’s amusement. They might even have been irritated at how Keturah loved to play the matriarch and display her children, but it was so much more pleasant now that the one-sided war between her and Rebekah was over that neither of them could complain.

As for Miriel, Rebekah and Isaac together approached a worthy man among the farmers of Lahai-roi and offered him his freedom, and Miriel’s too, if he would marry her and raise her child as his own. Eliezer had a few caustic words to say about how, with rewards like that, they’d soon find all the girls in the camp pregnant, but Rebekah pointed out that none of the girls envied Miriel or wanted to emulate her. And Rebekah’s other handmaids served much more happily now that Miriel was not among them, constantly complaining and goading them to be resentful of everything along with her.

In a way, the person most affected by the whole incident with Miriel was Deborah. When the girl came back pregnant, this of course stirred Deborah’s memories of the young man who had seduced her in her youth, and her first reaction was to announce cheerfully to Rebekah, “Now Miriel can be nurse to
your
baby!”

“Deborah,” Rebekah said, “even if I
had
a baby, which I don’t, Miriel would be my last choice to nurse her.”

This disturbed Deborah to the point of tears, and it took hours of tender questioning before Rebekah could finally help Deborah figure out why this had made her so sad. Finally the words came, as much a surprise to Deborah as to Rebekah: “You hate Miriel because she’s just like me!”

Rebekah was so surprised that she laughed, which sent Deborah into a new fit of crying until Rebekah could explain to her that Miriel was nothing at all like Deborah. “Miriel’s careless and complaining and lazy and irresponsible, while you’re the opposite—careful and patient and hard-working and dependable all the time.”

“But she was bad and had a baby when she wasn’t married, and so was I.”

“You were both young at the time, but you were an innocent child who was deceived by a man, while Miriel was definitely
not
innocent and asked for what she got.”

“Eliezer said that she should be stoned to death,” said Deborah.

“That’s the law, but nobody uses it against young unmarried girls like Miriel. That’s for married women who betray their husbands.”

“I would never do that,” said Deborah.

“I’m glad they made you my nurse,” said Rebekah, “and if there were a girl here just like you were in those days, then if I
had
a baby she could be the nurse. Because I couldn’t imagine a better gift for my children than to have a nurse like you as they grow up.”

Yet Deborah burst into tears again, and this time they were deep, wracking sobs. It was not hard to find out why she was crying this time, though. “I miss my baby so much,” she said. “Why didn’t they find me a husband like Isaac’s going to find for Miriel?”

“
Try
to find,” said Rebekah. How could she explain to Deborah that she had been doubly unmarriageable because of the simpleness of her mind? “And maybe they would have, only that was when
I
needed you, and they gave me to you instead. I’m sorry you only had me when you would rather have had a husband.”

It was a shameless manipulation, but it had the desired effect, as Deborah hastened to reassure Rebekah that she’d rather have been her nurse than have a hundred husbands.