Rebekah: Women of Genesis (36 page)

“So there’s no reason for me to be alive at all,” said Abraham. “I have nothing to offer, nothing that anyone wants. How tedious the burden must be, to have me still alive.”

Isaac slumped and rocked back onto his seat on the rugs. “If you don’t already know that I love you, there’s nothing I can do now to prove it.”

“Love me? When did you ever show you loved me?”

This was too outrageous for Rebekah to bear. “Every day of his life he shows you! He follows all your teachings, he serves God as you did, he shows nothing but respect for you!”

But Isaac brushed away her defense with a gesture of his hand. “I’ll tell you when I showed you I loved you, Father. When I lay there under the knife, knowing I had the strength to take it away from you and walk away free—but I loved you more than I loved my own life.”

“That was God’s command, not mine,” said Abraham.

“You were obeying God, but I was obeying you.”

Abraham’s breath became rapid and shallow. “After all these years, you rebuke me as if it were my idea. I thought you understood.”

“I did understand,” said Isaac. “To you, it was God taking your son. But to me, it was my father giving me up.”

Now, finally, Rebekah understood. The story she had heard from Ezbaal’s grandmother, who had learned it from Ishmael—it was true. There had been a time when Abraham stood ready with a knife to sacrifice Isaac. To sacrifice him to
God,
even though Abraham’s whole life had been a struggle against the sacrificing of human beings to slake the imagined bloodthirst of nonexistent gods.

“I hated it,” said Abraham. “It was the most terrible command the Lord ever gave me.”

“And yet . . . you said yes.”

“So did you,” said Abraham.

Isaac looked down. “I’m not sure,” said Isaac.

“I was an old man. You were young and strong. You let me bind you.”

“I’m not sure whether I said yes to God, or to you.”

“God was testing our faith,” said Abraham.

“How do you know he wasn’t testing our love?”

“By that standard,” said Abraham, “your love for me was perfect, and mine for you . . . failed.”

“If a man does not love God more than he loves his own sons, then he does not truly love his sons, either,” said Isaac. “I know that.”

“So why do you reproach me?”

“Because I’m human,” said Isaac. “I know I consented, but my heart has its own memory. As I lay there, I couldn’t help but think, Now I’ll be dead and he can have Ishmael back.”

“Is that why you won’t let your sons be born in Kirjath-arba?” said Abraham. “Because I didn’t choose you over God?”

Rebekah had had enough, and now she could speak her mind in a way that did not sound like an attack on Abraham alone. “Shame on all of us,” she said. “Listen to what you’ve been saying.”

“Now your wife judges her husband
and
her father-in-law,” said Abraham, not without amusement.

“Our babies aren’t born in order to fulfill
our
lives,” said Rebekah, “or to quell old fears or heal old injuries. They’ll have their own lives, and their own relationship with God, and they’ll make their own choices and create their own future. Their lives will not be about Abraham, or Isaac, or Rebekah. Their lives will be about themselves and their God. No one else stands between them. So whatever old pain you’re trying to heal, work it out between each other, but let’s keep our sons out of it.”

She rested a hand on Isaac’s head, hoping he would understands that she was sorry that she seemed to judge him. And he reached up and touched her fingers and took them gently between his own, as if to say, I love you anyway.

“I’m going to go rest now,” she said to Isaac. And to Abraham: “Your journey has worn me out.”

She waddled away toward her tent, with Deborah holding her arm.

“You were very bad to talk that way to your father-in-law,” said Deborah into her ear as they walked. “You should be more respectful.” She sounded more worried than reproachful.

Rebekah knew that she had behaved badly. That all she had really done was prove to Abraham that even if she had received a vision, she really wasn’t the sort of woman who could raise the birthright son. And yet . . . what else could she have done? He did not take polite, respectful answers as if they mattered. “He’s not the man I thought he was,” Rebekah said quietly. “He’s not the Abraham of the stories.”

“Oh, he is,” said Deborah, very seriously. “I asked long ago, when we first came here, and everybody said yes, he
is
the very same Abraham.”

Rebekah lay down on the bed from which she had arisen only a few minutes before. “I shouldn’t meet with people I disagree with when I’m tired,” she said. “I simply utter whatever comes to mind. I was awful.”

And the worst thing was, she wasn’t even right. How could she be? Her sons were a gift of God, an answer to prayer. Without God, she would have no sons. So if he wanted them to be raised by the great prophet Abraham rather than by a foolish woman like Rebekah, how dare she covet her own children and refuse to let them have the gift that God’s servant was offering them?

In her heart she offered a silent prayer: O Lord, forgive me. If it is thy will to have my sons raised by others, I will submit to thee. I beg thee not to do it, but I will bear it if that is thy will. Amen.

But then, in her most secret heart, without her even thinking of it first, a deep true prayer leapt out through her lips: “Please don’t take away my beloved sons.”

At once a thought came clear into her mind: Why do you think God gave you two sons, if not to take one of them to himself?

She rested her hands on her belly and wept. One of them would belong to God, and only the other one would be her own to raise.

But there would be the one. God was kind and merciful. She would have one son to be her own, and the other to be turned into whatever it was that Abraham wished Isaac had been.

Abraham did not even stay the night, but got up on his camel and rode back to Kirjath-arba. And Isaac—whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself.

So much of Isaac’s behavior made sense to Rebekah now. He had lived most of his life with the knowledge that, forced to choose between his child and his God, Isaac’s father had chosen God. What could Isaac do, except agree with his father? Agree to die for him. Agree that his whole life was nothing but a taw in a game between God and his prophet. Agree that he had no worth in himself, no life, no dreams, no plans, no hopes that could not be swept away as if they were nothing.

And Abraham thought that God had been testing
him.

Rebekah hardly emerged from her tent in the days and weeks to come, wondering in the shadows of her cloth-walled chamber what God was trying to do with their lives, where it all might lead.

Is it thy plan for every parent to be willing to give up their child?

And if that
is
thy plan, why didst thou create us to have so much love for them?

These quarrelsome, troublesome boys who wrestle with each other here just under my heart—why didst thou make me so my heart breaks with love for them before I’ve even seen them?

I am being asked to do no worse a thing than my mother was forced to do. No, a much easier thing, because I won’t be cut off from my sons, I can be right there with them. Only my stubbornness and selfishness, my irritation with Keturah, my resentment of Abraham’s treatment of my husband—only these low, petty human feelings kept me from peacefully accepting Uncle Abraham’s invitation and moving to Kirjath-arba to have my babies.

So by the time the babies were born, by the time she felt them shove their way out between her thighs with the lusty selfishness of infants, she had already reconciled herself to the will of God. Or maybe just the will of Abraham, but either way, she knew what she had to do.

“The first is covered all over with red hair!” cried Deborah during the birthing.

“And look,” said the midwife. “The second one’s hand came out gripping the heel of the first. You little usurper, what do you think, you can pull your brother back into the womb and come out first yourself?”

“Supplanter,” said Rebekah as she leaned back and gave the last push that sent her second child into the world. “I name him Jacob.”

“And the first?” asked the midwife.

“Red hair,” said Rebekah. “And the birthright is his. I name him Esau.”

“Name him what you will, you know they’ll end up calling him Edom,” said the midwife. It’s what redheads always ended up being called.

“What’s that to me?” said Rebekah. “I told you the names. Now go tell their father he has two sons. And eight days from now we’ll take them to Kirjath-arba.”

“Why?” asked Deborah.

“For the circumcision, of course,” said the midwife.

“No,” said Rebekah. “We’re going to live there now. So these boys can grow up in the household of Abraham.”

Part V

Blessings

Chapter 13

Keturah had arranged for two wetnurses to be sent to Lahai-roi so they could begin to suckle the babies as soon as they were born. But Rebekah refused to give them to someone else to be nursed. “I’ll do it myself,” she said.

“Two babies,” said the midwife. “You won’t have enough milk.”

“God gave me just enough breasts for the babies,” she said. “Or are you saying he can’t count?”

“What about your responsibility to produce more children for the young master? If you’re nursing, you won’t conceive a child for years.”

“He has two sons already,” said Rebekah. “He can wait a few years to see his first daughter.”

When the women finally allowed Isaac to come see her, he agreed with her. “Keep the children close. Since you’ve consented to move to Kirjath-arba, you won’t have any duties with the women, so why shouldn’t you suckle your own babies?”

Because the babies were both just a little smaller than normal, the birth had not been particularly bad—there had been no tearing, and Rebekah recovered quickly. In fact, the nursing caused her more pain. No one had warned her how much it could hurt, to have a baby fasten onto her tender nipples like a wolf onto a donkey’s leg. Of the two, Jacob was the one she got used to most quickly, for once he was locked in place, he set to sucking away as placidly as could be, his cheeks pumping in and out, his breathing heavy, his eyes closed.

Esau, on the other hand, kept looking around, and would frequently stop sucking and let the breast fall away from his mouth. In moments, though, he would protest as if someone else had done this to him, and then reattach savagely, gnawing on the nipple to punish it, Rebekah supposed, for not having followed when he turned his head. It got so that she dreaded nursing Esau, and even though she understood that a baby that age had no idea of the pain it might cause someone else, she spent more time scolding him than singing to him.

So it was Jacob who heard all her songs every time she nursed him, and Esau who heard her complaints. “Don’t do that, you silly selfish greedy little boy,” she said. “I haven’t committed any sins worthy of
that
punishment.” She tried to be pleasant-sounding even as she scolded him, but in later years, when Esau drifted away from her while Jacob remained close, she wondered if the seeds of that had not been planted in those earliest days of their lives. Or was it the other way around? Esau’s tendency to look away, to constantly search for something better to look at than his mother’s breast, was it the first expression of his need to roam, his unwillingness to bend his will to someone else’s?

Abraham came out to meet them when they arrived at Kirjath-arba, and when Isaac took Esau from her arms, he gave the child to Abraham to hold. Then he went to the kneeling camel on which Deborah sat, and took Jacob from her, and brought him also to Abraham, and the old man nodded. But he did not relinquish Esau or even touch Jacob. As Rebekah clambered down from the camel, she realized that this must be what the Lord intended. Abraham’s heart would belong to the heir. The other son would be hers to raise. She grieved at the thought of Esau being drawn away from her as he got older; but at least God in his mercy had seen to it that she would not be left without a son to raise herself.

Abraham called to her. “Daughter!” he said. “You’ve made this old man’s heart glad, to hold this child in my arms today.”

“May he grow to be a man of God like his father and grandfather,” said Rebekah.

Now that she was closer, Abraham spoke more softly. “I know how hard this was for you. It shows the greatness of your heart, that you could find compassion for me.” There were tears in his eyes.

Rebekah was surprised and a little ashamed. He was not, in fact, the stubborn enemy that she had supposed him to be. He was an old man who wanted to be sure his life’s work had not been in vain. Who wanted to be a part of his own family’s life. She was almost glad, in that moment, that she had decided to bend to his will.