Rebekah: Women of Genesis (16 page)

There are desires here that in my anger I did not think of. Laban, for all his grieving,
he
saw it. But Rebekah the fool, all I could see was how they lied to
me,
how
I
had been betrayed, how
I
was humiliated. Me?
Mother
was the one who humbled herself.
Father
was the one the trick was played on; his shame was far greater than any I might feel.

Ezbaal must be so grateful that God saved him from being married to a brat like me.

“Would you like some supper?” asked Deborah.

“What?”

“You’ve been asleep,” said Deborah. “They’ve all come to the tent—your father, your mother, Laban, several of the women, even Ezbaal. But I wouldn’t let them in because you were asleep and I thought you needed to rest. You looked so peaceful lying there.”

“How can I have been . . . I’ve been awake the whole time, thinking about . . .”

“Were you just pretending? You’re really good at it, then, because I shook you and you never seemed even to know it.”

Rebekah felt her cheeks. Dry. Her eyes were still tender from crying, but her eyelashes were caked with dried-on tears, and her clothes damp with sweat and wrinkled from lying on them.

And she
was
hungry.

“Yes, I’d like to eat.”

“Good!” said Deborah. “There’s an awful lot of meat. The whole wedding feast!”

“They went ahead without me?” She felt stupid as soon as she said it. What did she expect, that the whole feast would be put off until she woke up from her nap and gave them permission to proceed?

The feast had gone on. Which meant the wedding was considered valid. Father hadn’t renounced it because of the deception. Father and Mother were married. Again. After fifteen years. After my whole life. I will finally know what it’s like to have my own mother with me.

What an odd way God has of answering prayers you didn’t even know enough to ask.

Chapter 6

Everyone was being so careful of her that Rebekah feared she might live the rest of her life confined to her tent, with no one but Deborah to speak to. Finally, by nightfall, she realized that having lashed out at everyone, if things were to be set to rights she would have to begin.

She began at the beginning. With Father.

Yes, he had lied to her. But that did not erase the love he had surrounded her with, the trust he had shown her. It did not change the fact that he had also needed her, when she and Laban reopened the door of language to him. One lie did not undo a lifetime of love. One lie, told over and over again, did not become a thousand lies. It remained the one, looming ever larger until it threatened to crush them all, but still only one, undone in a single moment of truth.

She clapped outside his tent, in case someone was with him who might hear. And, yes, the flap was opened by Akyas. Mother.

“Oh, Rebekah, thank you for coming. He can’t sleep. You have no idea how unhappy he is.”

“I know how unhappy I am.”

“You were right, Rebekah. To set up a grand moment of unveiling—it was wrong. But Ezbaal and I were afraid that if we told anyone in advance, Bethuel would send me away. We needed his oath first, in order to have a hope of restoring our family.”

“Believe me, Mother, I’ve thought this through a hundred different ways, and bad as this was, I couldn’t think of a better one.”

“This wasn’t my plan, you know. When I came. I really did come here in order to see you. To see what you had become.”

“Well, you saw me at my finest today.”

“You have a sharp tongue, that’s sure. You found exactly the words to shame everybody.”

“Now that I’ve got the punishment down, I need to work on the part about judging fairly.”

Akyas embraced her. It still felt awkward to Rebekah. Their bodies didn’t meld together out of long custom the way hers did with Deborah’s. Still, it was a start. It felt natural to call her Mother. Nothing false about it, the way it had been when Ezbaal’s stepmother tried to get Rebekah to call her by that title.

“Do you want to be alone with him?” asked Mother.

“No,” said Rebekah. “I’m glad you’re here. It’s where you should have been all along.”

“That doesn’t make it easier to have me there when you talk to him.”

“But it makes it right.” Rebekah studied Mother’s face, looking for some trace of the bitterness she must feel about all her years in exile—the bitterness that filled Rebekah’s heart. But then, Mother had had fifteen years to get used to what had happened to her.

Mother smiled at her. “Pillel said you were unusually wise for a child.”

“
Pillel
said that?”

“Well, actually he said, ‘for a girl.’”

“Was that back when he was still hoping he could get me married and out of here?”

Mother laughed. “So you don’t think he likes you, is that it?”

“Was he steward before? When you were here?”

“Yes. Face like stone. And a hard judge. But if he praises you, it counts. He said you were wise. And he said it this afternoon, while you were in your tent.”

“After I ranted at everybody.”

“I think he was trying to reassure me and Bethuel that we hadn’t created a monster.”

“Let’s not rush to judgment on that one. I’m still angry, you know. And all the other feelings. I haven’t forgiven anybody. I’m just too tired to cry any more.”

“Speaking of crying: poor Laban. He hasn’t shown his face since the wedding, either. I suppose he thinks it isn’t manly, to cry like that. But it was about things that happened to him as a child. A motherless child. That’s who was crying today, don’t you think? The child, not the man.”

“Whoever it was, it’s Laban who has to live it down,” said Rebekah. “But I’ll never goad him about it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Think of all the years I’ve missed, of the two of you together. Did you quarrel all the time?”

“Not much,” said Rebekah. “Teasing, but little quarreling. I think we clung to each other a little. Not like half the children in camp, who spend their days screaming, either from joy or rage.”

The inner curtain parted, and Father came into the front room of the tent. “I wondered why there was a cold draft,” he said. “Come inside and let the tent flap close.”

At once the conversation between women ended, and both of them sat down with Father. Rebekah took up the writing stick and began to form letters in the dirt patch. She started to apologize, and Father reached out and held her wrist. “No,” he said. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

Rebekah wrote, “You didn’t hear half of what I said.”

“Believe me,” he answered, “I’ve had every word of it repeated to me since, and even though you weren’t very generous in your reading of events, you weren’t wrong, either. You never have to apologize for telling the truth.”

Rebekah snorted and wrote, “Come now, Father.”

“All right,” he said. “Half the apologies we have to make in life are precisely for telling the truth, but right now, anyway, don’t waste time apologizing to me. I’m the one who has to apologize to you.”

She agreed completely, of course, but out of courtesy started to protest that he didn’t need to. Again he stopped her. “It’s late, and I’m a tired old man with a new bride, so let me get straight to the point. I owe you an explanation. More important than a mere apology. You need to know why your father would do the things I did.”

Rebekah nodded, set down the stick, and turned to face him more directly. She would listen, answering with her face instead of written words.

“I loved your mother more than anything or anyone in the world, until you and Laban were born,” said Father. “And then a strange thing happened. It brought me closer to her than ever, but there could be no doubt of it—I loved my children more than my wife, more than anything. And I feared for you, all the things that could go wrong. All the dangers in the world. Wild animals. Marauders. Disease. Famine. Storms. Things I could protect you from, and things I could do nothing about. You could fall in a stream and drown. You could climb a rock and fall. Whatever I did, wherever I went, there it was in the back of my mind, this constant worry about you. I never felt that about your mother. She was a strong, wise woman, even if she
was
city-born, and she had taken to life in the camp quite naturally. So I didn’t worry about her. I knew she’d be all right.”

Father took a deep breath. “But your mother never understood God. She worshiped with me, as a good wife should. But she couldn’t see why it was any of my business that she worshiped other gods as well. Especially Asherah. It drove me mad sometimes. I wanted so much for her to understand that the God of heaven is real—so real that you don’t have to pretend to see him or make an image to look at.”

Rebekah refrained from looking at the little gods that sat on a low table in the corner.

But he must have seen her stop herself from glancing that way. “Let’s not have that argument again, not right now,” he said. “Let’s just say that even as I took every precaution I could against all the other dangers in the world, the one thing I feared most—that you would grow up without respect for the true and living God—the greatest danger to you came, not from some outside threat, but from your own mother.”

Rebekah glanced at Mother to see how she was taking this. Maybe having her present wasn’t such a good idea. But she didn’t seem to mind hearing Father say these things.

“We argued about it. Back and forth. Wasn’t I going to dedicate my children with the priests in the city? She finally gave up with Laban, figuring that it was men’s business, whether he was to be presented before Ba’al or not. But when it came to you, she wouldn’t let the question rest. ‘She must be presented to Asherah.’ ‘Asherah needs to know her name.’ And I wouldn’t let her take you. And then one day I came in when I was supposed to be away for the whole day, and found her with a priestess she had smuggled into the camp, along with a tiny figure of Asherah to which they were in the midst of presenting you. Of course I was furious, at the deception, at the offering to an idol, and at myself for not realizing that just because I said a thing didn’t mean it was going to be obeyed. If God’s commandments are disobeyed all the time, why should I expect mine to be treated with more respect?”

Again Rebekah looked at Mother. But Akyas continued to gaze steadily—no, raptly—at Father’s face. Had she truly forgiven him completely for all this? Or was she merely pretending, so that she could be back with her family? And what about that very issue—Rebekah well knew that Mother still worshiped Asherah and had brought an idol into the camp. Was Father going to tolerate it? Father was talking about these issues as if they were ancient history, but it seemed to Rebekah that the same problems remained even now.

“I couldn’t see a solution,” Father went on. “At the moment, in my rage, I declared our marriage over and ordered her to pack and leave, taking her dowry with her.”

“It wasn’t much of a dowry,” said Mother. “My family was poor. It was my face that won me such a husband. My face and my prayers to Asherah.”

Father was watching her. Rebekah made as if to translate, but Father shook his head. “She was beautiful, but she still thought it was her goddess that had brought her a rich husband.”

Rebekah laughed. “Fifteen years apart, and he still knows just what you’re going to say? You don’t need to learn to write.”

Mother laughed. “I wish.”

It was the laughter that got to Bethuel. “All right, tell me what was said that made you laugh.”

When Rebekah had written out her summary, Bethuel chuckled, too, but rather grimly. “Well, I’m wrong as often as I’m right, and half the time I’m right, I think I’m wrong, and half the time I’m wrong, I think I’m right, so what do you do? Anyway, all that night before she left, I went back and forth in my own mind. I was not too proud to rescind the divorce and take her back. I didn’t want her to go. I loved her desperately.

“But it came down to this: I had to know you would be raised to love and honor God. And with your mother here, I could never be sure. It wouldn’t take much to raise doubts in your hearts—the very fact that she didn’t believe the same things I did would be obvious even if she never said a thing. I realized that it had been a mistake to marry a woman from the city, no matter how much I loved her. You have to choose a wife who will teach the most important things to the children when they’re small. Little children live in their mother’s world, not their father’s.

“So as much as I loved your mother, I did what had to be done. I sent her away. And much as I’ve missed her, as hard as it has been for you and Laban, I still think that was the right thing. Laban’s a good boy, a true servant of the Lord as I’ve tried to be. But you, Rebekah, your faith goes beyond that. I think God speaks to you. I think that’s why you say things that are wiser than you should ever know, at your age.”

Still Mother sat there, not arguing as he declared himself to be right in their ancient, family-wrecking argument.