Rebekah: Women of Genesis (30 page)

Later, though, when the whole Miriel affair was settled, Rebekah talked to Isaac about Deborah’s reaction and said, “The thing that surprised me most was that she could shed tears for her baby as if she had only lost the child yesterday.”

“To her that’s how it seems,” said Isaac.

“I suppose it’s part of her simplemindedness, that the passage of time doesn’t make the sorrow fade,” said Rebekah.

Isaac laughed ruefully. “No, I don’t think so, or all parents are simpleminded.”

“Do you mean that with all the babies that die young, their parents still mourn for them nearly twenty years later, as if they had only just died?” She thought of her mother. She must never have stopped grieving over losing her children.

“Maybe those who have other children to comfort them are better able to keep the grief at bay,” said Isaac, “but they never forget, and the memory of the child they lost is always like a knife in their heart.”

She had never felt so young and unobservant. “How are you so wise about it?” she asked.

“Because my father never got over losing Ishmael,” said Isaac.

That baffled Rebekah. “He didn’t lose Ishmael. Ishmael is very much alive and has twelve sons and is one of the great lords of the desert.”

“My mother made him send Ishmael away to keep me safe,” said Isaac, “and so Father lost him when Ishmael was twelve, and never had that boy in his life again. Only the grown man—grown and raised by his mother. Hagar was one to hold a grudge forever, I can tell you, and when he returned here as a grown man to make peace with Father, he wouldn’t speak to Mother and Mother wouldn’t let him come close to me, which made Ishmael storm off in a rage. It broke Father’s heart, to lose Ishmael. And he still mourns for the happy child Ishmael once was.”

“You can’t know what Ishmael was like. You were just a baby when it all happened.”

“I heard the story of how Ishmael was sent away. And all the rest of it I either saw for myself or heard from Father.”

“Ishmael couldn’t hate you for something that happened when you were an infant.”

“As if hate went by logic or justice,” said Isaac. “Very well, perhaps he doesn’t hate me. Perhaps when Father dies he won’t come down here with all his men and burn the tent down over our heads and kill me and you and any children we might have.”

Isaac said this very mildly, but Rebekah was shocked. “Is that something you think is possible? That he would do that?”

“That’s what Mother feared. No, expected. She was the one who insisted that all our shepherds be trained for war, even though Father was at peace with everyone.”

“But you,” said Rebekah. “What do
you
think?”

“I think the Lord will fulfill his promises to Father, and I think it will be our children through whom those promises are fulfilled.”

“But that doesn’t mean Ishmael won’t try it, is that what you’re saying?”

“Even Father only knows as much of the future as the Lord shows him.”

“Why doesn’t Ishmael hate your father then? He’s the one who sent Hagar away.”

“A man hate his own father? Make war on his father? Ishmael may have been raised on hate and vengeance, but to strike a blow against your own father would make him a monster in everyone’s eyes. He’d have no friends in the world, and only the worst of his men would continue to follow him.”

“But he might kill a brother.”

“Half-brother. Who stole his inheritance simply by being born. Rebekah, you only had the one brother; you don’t know what it’s like. There’s no one you love like a brother, and no one you hate like a brother, too.”

Which opened her eyes to an aspect of her husband that Rebekah had not thought of before that day. Just as Ishmael had been raised in hatred and vengeance, so Isaac had been raised in fear of what Ishmael would one day do to him. Both mothers had poisoned their children in the effort to protect them and teach them their place in the world. And yet Isaac could still say, There’s no one you love like a brother.

Isaac loved Ishmael. Who could have guessed it? The great desert lord, the raider and wanderer, whose herds were rumored to cover the grassland from horizon to horizon when he was on the move, whose twelve sons were said to be so mighty with the sword that each one could lead an army, so that if a nation made war against Ishmael he could conquer twelve of their cities in a single day. And Isaac, the quiet herdsman and farmer, the man whose anger showed only in his silences, who led his people with wisdom and a willingness to listen to all—Isaac loved Ishmael.

As for the holy writings, Rebekah had few chances even to ask about them. She knew that Isaac went to Kirjath-arba often in order to study with his father the writings of the birthright, and when he returned he often told her stories from the records, or recounted revelations received by prophets in times past. He told her of the great flood in the days of Noah—a story she had heard since her childhood, but without ever knowing why the Lord caused the flood to destroy Noah’s people. He told her of the great prophet Enoch, who built the city of Zion and by the power of God hid it from his enemies. He told her of Adam and Eve, of Shem, Ham, and Japheth; of the great tower built by Nimrod in the middle of the plain-between-rivers, to imitate the mountains the prophets climbed to speak to God; of the way the Lord humbled Nimrod by confusing the languages of the people he had gathered to build Babel. And there were more recent stories, of Melchizedek the king of Salem, of Abraham himself and his trials and visions, of the first Pharaoh and his false claim to have the birthright, of the way every form of writing in the world was an attempt, like Pharaoh’s, to create holy writing in imitation of that which had been kept by the servants of God since Adam’s time.

Rebekah listened to everything, fascinated yet frustrated, for always Isaac told the stories in his own language, plain and simple, and Rebekah was sure that he was leaving things out in order to keep his wife from being confused. She wanted to shake him sometimes and say, Haven’t you known me long enough to realize that I’m not Keturah? That I don’t need everything simplified in order to comprehend it?

She tried to prove her worthiness to have the full account by asking questions of such detail that he would eventually give up and say, Read it yourself! But all he said was, “Please don’t frustrate yourself trying to understand what’s out of reach. When God wants his children to know more, he tells them; but until he tells us, we have to be content with what we have.”

Then she decided to show him that she could read and write. Of course, there was a danger in it, too—after all, many years had passed between the time Father learned to write and the time he taught the letters to Laban and Rebekah, and he admitted at the time that he wasn’t sure he had all the marks correct. Nor could she remember which marks were the ones Father had doubted. So she might show nothing more than her ignorance. Still, if she could show that her writing was mostly correct, wouldn’t that convince Isaac to show her the mistakes and prepare her to read the holy writings?

She left him notes scratched in the dirt near his tent door, where he would have to see them. Later, the notes would be swept away, and he would know the information she told him, but he said nothing about the fact that she could write until finally she could stand his reticence no longer and asked him outright whether her writing was correct.

Being Isaac, he said nothing.

“You must tell me,” she said. “You seem to understand my writing. But Father was never sure he had all the letters right.”

“They’re good enough,” said Isaac, “for writing to a deaf man. But I’m not deaf.”

“I know you’re not deaf, Isaac, I just wanted you to help me learn to do it correctly.”

“You want me to make Father furious when he finds out I’ve been preparing
you
to receive the birthright.”

Rebekah was appalled. “I don’t want the birthright, I just want to read the writings myself!”

Isaac looked at her as if she had just mooed like a cow. “What do you think the birthright
is?
” he asked.

“To
have
the writings, not just to read them!”

“How do you think we protect them, except by keeping them out of other people’s hands?”

“I don’t want them in my hands,” she said. “I want them in my head.”

“And I’ve been putting them there,” said Isaac. “Story by story. I know you hunger for the words of God, and I honor you for it. I think that’s why God chose you to be the mother of my heir. But don’t reach for things that haven’t been given to you by God.”

“And how do you know the ability to read and write wasn’t given to me by God?”

“Because it was given to you by your father.”

“As yours was given to you.”

He went silent on her then, which meant he was very angry.

She hated it when he was angry. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I hungered for this all my life.”

“Adulterers hunger for adultery, too, but it doesn’t mean God wants them to have it.”

That was such an outrageously unfair, inapt comparison that she wanted to scream at him that she was not so stupid as to think those two hungers were even remotely alike, and that she hoped
he
was not that stupid, either.

Instead, she merely asked one more question. “And how do you know Father’s deafness was not caused by God precisely so that I would be able to read and write?”

Isaac said nothing, but for once that was just fine with Rebekah. It let her leave the tent with her last words hanging in the silence. Let him think about
that.

Well, if he thought about it, it made no difference, because nothing happened, nothing changed.

Such things nibbled at her during those years, making her fretful and frustrated, so that she forgot to notice that she was almost completely happy. She had a loving husband who, except for a couple of minor disagreements, gave her complete trust and freedom to rule the women of his camp. She had quickly won the respect and then the affection of the women, and the girls she brought with her, once the Miriel situation was cleared up, fit in with the household as smoothly as she could have hoped. She was free to worship without any nonsense about images to help the servants keep their minds on God. And even when she did have conflict, as with Keturah for the first few years, she was able to sidestep any kind of confrontation and live in peace.

There was only one problem she faced that was real, and that was the fact that she had no child. Yet this real problem was the one that troubled her least, for she knew that the Lord had chosen her to be mother of Isaac’s heir, and she remembered the story of Sarah, so she had no reason at all to doubt that, when the Lord was ready, she would have at least the one son required in order to preserve the birthright. So when Keturah and others offered their kind remarks meant to encourage her that she, too, would have babies, even if she never had as many as Keturah, who now was up to six sons and four daughters, Rebekah accepted their encouragement with a smile and went about her business untroubled. She did not even pester the Lord about it very often, though now and then she offered a prayer like the one she had said the evening that Eliezer came to the well at Haran: “I know you’re going to give me a son, Lord, and it occurs to me that now is as good a time as any.”

Then a month would pass without a child in her womb, and she would sigh and think about something else. And even though she sometimes felt a bit of impatience, she never doubted that eventually she would have a son.

When she wasn’t distracted by these concerns, she spent her days doing the kind of work she had done in her father’s household—but the burden was lighter. The camp at Lahai-roi was only one part of Abraham’s vast holdings, and Rebekah sometimes suspected that Abraham had made sure that the less reliable servants were assigned somewhere else. At other times, though, she thought that the reason Lahai-roi was always peaceful and harmonious was because of Isaac’s way with people. He listened to everyone and was always calm. No one could tell him a tale of some outrage committed against them and get him furious before he heard the other side—a trap that Father had sometimes fallen into. Everyone knew that with Isaac, judgment would be just. There were no favorites. And since Rebekah herself had always tried to be just as even-handed—though she was never able to keep her silence the way Isaac could—the women lived together as harmoniously as the men.

She remembered how Father’s camp had been at Haran, during the year after Mother came home, and how Mother had, without really meaning to, stirred up almost constant turmoil, and she was grateful that she and Isaac worked together so well. And it wasn’t just that they didn’t interfere with each other. She respected his judgment; she asked his advice. If he didn’t ask for hers, that was no surprise—after all, he had been doing this work as an adult before she was born. But when she made suggestions to him, he listened, and when he agreed with her, he used her advice and told the people that it was her idea. That had to be part of the reason the women had so readily accepted her—they knew she had Isaac’s respect because he showed it.

She came to believe that besides being husband and wife, they were friends, the way it was said that Abraham and Sarah had been friends, treating each other as equals.