Rebekah: Women of Genesis (6 page)

She wasn’t sure what kind of answer God would give. At least she got no warning
not
to do it, and in moments she had Deborah helping her search for her veil.

“Is there a storm coming?” asked Deborah.

“I’m keeping storms away,” said Rebekah. And now she had the veil in her hands, then over her head and tied at her neck. “Look, am I pretty?”

“Silly, of course you are,” said Deborah.

“I mean, can anybody
see
whether I’m pretty?”

“Take off the veil so I can see.”

“I mean with the veil
on.
”

Deborah was a little impatient with her for not knowing. “Nobody can see anything with a veil on, of course.”

“That’s how I like it,” said Rebekah. “I’m going to wear this always, whenever I’m out of my tent. So you won’t have to fix my hair up anymore, because no one will ever see it.”

Deborah burst into tears. “Why won’t you let me fix your hair?”

“Of course you
can,
” said Rebekah. “You just don’t have to.”

“But I want to.”

“Then you will,” said Rebekah. “Don’t you fret.”

“Take your veil off, then, so I can fix it.”

“No, I’m going to wear this veil all the time, so get used to it.”

“It’s time to do your hair,” said Deborah. “Don’t be a brat.”

So Rebekah took off the veil.

“Doesn’t that feel better? Don’t wear that silly veil.”

“I will,” said Rebekah. “Because that’s what God wants me to do.”

“Did he tell you?”

“He didn’t tell me not to,” said Rebekah.

Deborah thought about this as she ran a brush through Rebekah’s hair. “You mean if God doesn’t tell me not to fly, I can fly?”

“No, but I prayed and . . . never mind, Deborah. I’m
going
to wear the veil until I lift it for my husband.”

“I hate wearing veils. They’re heavy and they make me sweat.”

“Me too,” said Rebekah. “But I’d rather sweat than show my face.”

“What else isn’t God telling you not to do so you can go ahead and do it?”

Rebekah looked at her sharply, sure that this had to be ironic. But it was Deborah saying it, so there was no irony in it.

“I don’t know,” said Rebekah.

With her mind on God, as Deborah kept on brushing, Rebekah began to pray silently, the words forming on her lips but making no sound. “Let me not marry a man who wants me just because I’m beautiful,” she prayed. “Let me live my life with a man who cares nothing for beauty, but who serves thee. Like Sarai, the princess from the ancient lineage of Ur, who married Abram, the desert priest. Abram loved her through all the years that she was barren. Loved her even when she was old and had lost all her beauty. Let me be loved like that, by a man who will not replace me with concubines when I’m old and ugly. Let me be loved by a man who loves God more than me.”

“So?” asked Deborah, when she was done.

“What?” asked Rebekah.

“You talked to God, what did he say?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I said, If I am to have a husband, let him be a man like Abraham. And since there’s nobody much around here, if I’m going to have a husband like Abraham, God will have to bring him to me, however far the journey is.”

Chapter 2

Father hated the veil she wore, and for the first few weeks it was a struggle between them. But when he forbade her to wear it, she refused to leave her tent. When he commanded her to leave the tent—without the veil—she covered her face with her hands. When he commanded her to take her hands from her face, she sank to the ground and wept into the hem of her skirt, with Deborah bending over her, doubling the noise of her weeping with her own.

Finally he gave in, but not without a sermon about how it was an affront to God to reject the beauty he had seen fit to bestow on her.

Laban, though he ridiculed her veil, soon became her ally in the struggle with Father. It was Laban who finally persuaded Father that it was not worth the struggle, that in fact the veil would create an air of mystery.

“It will make people think we have something to hide,” said Father. “Some disfiguring disease. Leprosy. Scars. Pockmarks. A steady drool.”

In reply Laban wrote, “It will show she is modest and will not flaunt her beauty.”

“It will show she is disobedient and self-willed.”

“Only if you continue to forbid the veil. And how beautiful will she be, perpetually in tears?”

“Tears dry up,” said Bethuel. “Even my tears for your mother.”

“But sullenness and frowning only become hardened into the face,” wrote Laban. “Like Pillel.”

Perhaps it was the thought of Rebekah coming to look like Pillel that finally tipped the scale. In any event, Father laughed and told Laban to tell Rebekah that she could wear her veil, though perhaps she could substitute one of looser weave so she could see well enough to sew a straight stitch.

It wasn’t long before some of the servant women began to dress
their
daughters with veils. Laban wanted to ask Father to forbid it. “They’re mocking you, Rebekah.”

“Perhaps they’ve learned that it’s good not to tempt men to wicked thoughts,” said Rebekah.

“Or else their mothers simply want people to think their girls are as beautiful as you.”

Rebekah wanted to ask, Are they? Am I the most beautiful? But she recognized this as pure vanity and left the words unspoken. “I don’t mind if people think they’re
more
beautiful,” she said, praying silently for God to help her make this statement true.

“More likely people will think the whole camp was scarred by the pox,” Laban muttered. But when Father spoke to him about all this veil-wearing, Laban wrote what Rebekah had said. “Let it be known that our young women are modest, not vain like the city girls. Let it be seen as humility before God.” And, once again, Father gave in.

“Armies may tremble before a man’s mighty sword, but no man can stand before a household of women,” said Bethuel. Often.

So passed the months and years, as Laban learned how to manage great herds and how to lead men in battle, and Rebekah learned how to manage a household, with all the weaving and cooking and planting and harvesting and preserving that filled each day from dawn to dusk. She learned to judge the ripeness of beans and the strength of thread, how to help a woman give birth and how to turn milk into cheese or ferment it into yogurt, how to make bread rise and how to season and cook a lamb so it would have the robust flavor of wild deer.

By the age of fifteen she knew the names of all the women and men of the household, and all the children, too, as surely as Father and Laban knew every bearing ewe and every new kid and calf. “The women and children are
my
flock,” she once told Laban, when he seemed surprised that she bothered to learn the names of useless children. “Where do you think tomorrow’s shepherds will come from? They’re the children I teach to water and weed the garden. If they come to you knowing how to work hard and take responsibility even when no one is watching, it’s because someone like me has done her job well.”

Laban repeated her words to Father, to his friends, to everyone who would listen. “What woman has ever been as wise a mistress of a household as Rebekah? Her veil conceals a beautiful face, but her face conceals wisdom and virtue. So the veil, by hiding the distraction of her beauty, becomes the window to her soul.”

When Rebekah learned that Laban was saying such things about her—not just in the camp, but in town when he went there to sell woollen cloth, cheese, and leather—she forbade him to praise her so immodestly. “All women do these things, foolish boy,” she said—though of course he was three hands taller than her, with a surprisingly thick beard for a man of only seventeen years. “The only reason it surprises
you
is because you never saw our mother doing it.”

“Well, there you are,” he said, as if this proved his point. “You never saw her either, and yet you learned it.”

“I saw what needed doing and did it,” she said. “You’d think I had saved a kingdom or healed a leper or found a spring in the desert.”

“All right, I’ll tell people you’re lazy and all your cooking tastes like dung, so nobody will marry you and we can keep you running things here forever.”

“Yes, your wife would love to have me around all her life.”

“I don’t have a wife, and as long as you’re here, I can’t think of any reason why I should get one.”

At which Rebekah rolled her eyes, since she knew and Laban knew that he had already fallen in love three times—with completely unsuitable girls, of course—and wherever he went, well-favored daughters were trotted out and their needlework shown to him and their cooking fed to him.

For that matter, whenever a visitor came to Bethuel’s tent, he was fed Rebekah’s cooking and shown Rebekah’s workmanship—not just weaving and sewing, but fields of beans and vegetables, and stores of cheeses, smoked meats, and oils and wines that had been acquired in trade for the wovenwork of the women who toiled under her guidance. But Father knew better than to try to show
her.
Instead, the visitors merely glimpsed her, veiled, as she went about her business. And because she did not have to hear what was said about her, she was able to pretend that she did not know it was said, or that many a visitor’s main business in Father’s tent was to offer fine gifts for him to pass along to her. Father always declined the gifts, of course, but he turned their visits into profitable trade when he could. He did not trouble her with tales that would only make her upset.

But now that she was of a marriageable age, it was inevitable that one of the supplicants would so please Father that he would begin to think that perhaps this man or that one might be a good son-in-law.

Through it all, however, Rebekah grew less and less interested in the prospect of marriage. Didn’t she already have all the work of a wife? Except the actual bearing of children, and she’d helped with enough births to know just how pleasant
that
could be. She loved children and was good with them, but there was no shortage of children among the servants in her father’s household, and if she wasn’t the mother of any of them, she was, in a sense, the mother of all, since she ruled over the household women and all the children still at breast or knee. So what would marriage bring her, except the pain of childbirth and the loneliness of being taken away from all she knew and all she loved?

In her husband’s house she would be a stranger. She had no experience with that. She had seen how it was for new servants brought into the house, men who had to prove themselves by the strength of their arm and their way with beasts, women who had to earn their place by more subtle contests, and who even then could never rise within the hierarchy of the household the way new men could. Naturally, as wife she would be at the head of the household women—for even if her face had been ugly as a toad’s back, Father would have seen to it her dowry was enough to place her as first wife. But Rebekah knew perfectly well that being nominal head and actually being the leader of the women were two different things. Here, she had grown up among the women, pampered because she was the youngest, the daughter of the house, and motherless as well. Finally, after Father became deaf, she asserted herself as mistress of the house of Bethuel and the women understood that she needed to take that role. They did not resist her. But she had always known these women and they knew her, too. She was never, not for a moment of her life, a stranger.

“I don’t want to leave home,” she told Deborah.

Deborah nodded wisely. “It’s hard to leave home, even to go to your uncle’s house.”

“But you did it,” said Rebekah.

“There was a baby who needed me.”

“There’s none who need
me.
”

“There will be, silly,” said Deborah. “That’s why you
get
married, so you can have babies you can
keep.
”

“What kind of man will marry me, Deborah? A man from a great herding household? Then I’ll always be pitching a tent and packing it up again, or if they settle down near a town, they’ll have a house there, and what do I know about tending a place with hard walls and a roof, and neighbors living just steps from the door?”

“Maybe you’ll marry somebody like your father, who stays in one place but lives in a tent.”

“There’s hardly anyone like Father.”

“I’ve never been to a town,” said Deborah.

“You haven’t missed a thing,” said Rebekah.

The few times she had gone into a city, she had not liked it. The hearty stink of animal dung, the nauseating smells of human waste and rotting food, the acrid odors of tanning and dyeing. And the crowds—the jostling, the noise, people shouting and cursing or even cheerfully greeting each other without seeming to care that dozens of strangers could hear them bellow. Yet perhaps the hardest thing for her in town was the lack of a horizon. Walls everywhere, blocking your view—to Rebekah it was like perpetually being trapped in a canyon. She had been trained all her life to keep in mind where she could run, if danger threatened—bandits, a lion, a bear. True, lions and bears generally stayed out of villages, and the large towns kept a wall, but when the wall failed, when a town fell, what had been built as their protection became their trap, leaving the townspeople at the mercy of marauders with no hope of escaping into the open. Cowering in their houses, that’s what all the town people were doing, however bold a face they might wear in the street.