Rebekah: Women of Genesis (43 page)

He had heard her offer, had thought about it, and without Abraham here to be adamant, he could see that the old rule was not helpful now, and change it.

He reached out and touched her face. “There’s one gift in my blindness, though. You’ll always be as beautiful in my eyes as you are today.”

“You’re so silly, Isaac. My beauty fled years ago, such as it was. I’m an old woman. Though of course I’m still but a child compared to
you.
”

He laughed. “Ah, but you’ve stayed beautiful. In fact, you’ve grown more beautiful with every day and year that’s passed. Even when we argue, you know, I still marvel that the Lord loved me enough to give you to me as my wife.”

“Oh, come now. You just didn’t know it, but I was the first of the plagues the Lord sent to you, blindness being by far the lesser one.”

He kissed her, and then let his lips explore her cheeks, her eyes, her brow. “I can depend on you,” he said.

“For everything.”

“You’ll be my eyes. Whatever you see, you’ll tell me.”

“I will.”

“I’ll always see truly, with you as my eyes.”

“As truly as I see. I can’t be any wiser for you than I am for myself.”

“That’s vision enough for me,” said Isaac.

“And you have the Lord to speak truth into your heart.”

“Yes. I do.”

Thus began the precious months in which Jacob and Rebekah copied the scriptures, reading aloud to Isaac as they did. He would interrupt them and explain what Abraham had told them this or that passage meant, and when they copied it out, they would add Isaac’s explanations and read them back to him. They would sometimes interrupt with questions, and Jacob often discussed doctrine with his father while Rebekah kept on writing.

It was wonderful to see Jacob and Isaac sharing the holy writings this way. To hear how Jacob’s voice was the same as Isaac’s, how his tone echoed his father’s inflections. And gradually Jacob began adding his own insights and speculations about the implications of the scriptures, as Isaac nodded encouragement or offered countersuggestions.

Through all of this, Esau came once or twice, early on, but he quickly lost patience and left, and then stopped coming in the first place. Rebekah never bothered to point out Esau’s absence to Isaac. Why provoke a quarrel, when the point was so obvious that even a blind man could see it? Especially a blind man.

But if Isaac saw, he gave no sign.

Meanwhile, Isaac’s people had prospered so much in the land near Gerar that he needed more servants to tend his flocks and fields and orchards, until he had as many servants as he had had before he sent half of them with Eliezer. The people of Gerar began to be envious, and then frightened. “How do we know they won’t decide they want to possess our city?” they said, and there began to be quarrels between men of Gerar and Isaac’s men over the use of the wells. Of course Abimelech denied any knowledge of what his citizens were doing, and of course Isaac and Rebekah pretended to believe his protestations. But they understood that Abimelech did not dare to stop his people from what they were doing, or he would be accused of already being under Isaac’s control, and one of his many rivals would rally support against him.

Since Abimelech was helpless to stop the fighting, Isaac’s answer was to send his men to dig another well farther from the city, and even as they were digging it, men of Gerar came to harass them, claiming that any water that came out of it should belong to them because it was on land within sight of the walls of Gerar. Isaac named the well Esek, meaning “strife,” and they used it for a few months, till a new well even farther away could be dug, at Sitnah.

But even that one became a point of contention, until Isaac had his men dig yet another well in poorer land that was so far from Gerar that it would take half a day for the men of Gerar to reach them to cause trouble. And at this well, Rehoboth, there was no more contention.

But of course it did not have as much water in it as the previous wells had had, and they needed yet another. Isaac rode a camel that was led in front of the others, following a winding path among hills pocked with outcroppings of rock and covered with sun-browned grass. Finally Isaac told the boy leading him to stop. The spot seemed to Rebekah to be no more inviting than any other, but Isaac said, “Tomorrow we’ll begin to dig here.”

Such was their respect for him that none of the servants said, This is just the sort of place a blind man would choose. But they had to be thinking it.

That night, sleeping in the same traveling tent with Isaac, Rebekah awoke to hear him mumbling in his sleep. It seemed not to be a nightmare, and so she did not waken him, but lay there and listened. The words surfaced in isolation and meant nothing to her. Finally he grew still, and she realized from the way he was breathing that he was no longer asleep.

“What was your dream?” she asked him.

“The Lord came to me,” said Isaac.

She became more alert, and leaned over him. In the darkness she saw nothing, yet his voice told her that he was filled with emotion. She glided her hand along his chest to his neck, then up to his cheeks. Sure enough, tears had flowed from his eyes across his temples and into his beard.

“What did he say?” asked Rebekah.

“He said he was the God of my father, and told me not to be afraid, because he’s with me. He said he would bless me and multiply my seed for Abraham’s sake, because he was such a good servant.”

Rebekah knew that even in the midst of this vision, Isaac would hear only that it was Abraham’s worthiness, not his own, that the Lord was honoring.

“Tomorrow we’ll write the Lord’s words,” said Rebekah. “I’ll be your hand, and we’ll write an account of your vision in the book of Isaac.”

“There
is
no book of Isaac,” he said.

“Didn’t you write about the Lord telling you to go to Gerar instead of Egypt?”

“It didn’t seem important. Not like the visions my father had.”

“If the Lord thinks it’s important enough to speak to you, how can you say that it isn’t important enough to write it down?”

“I can’t write anything. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m blind.”

“But you have my hands, or Jacob’s hands, if you think it has to be a man. You’ve had the vision you wanted all your life, and you have to write it down so your children and their children will know of it.”

“If the Lord wanted me to write, he wouldn’t have made me blind.”

“If the Lord wanted you not to write, he would have taken you home. He hasn’t, so you’re still here, and as long as you’re here, you’re the only one who
can
write, or cause your words to be written down by another.
Your
words, Isaac. That’s what matters, not whose hand makes the actual letters on the parchment.”

He was silent for a moment. “You’ll write faithfully the words I say.”

“Of course.”

“But I don’t know how to say it.”

“Just tell what happened. Tell what the Lord said. You don’t have to write eloquently. You’re not giving a speech to an army, urging them to battle. You’re telling what the Lord did. Tonight in your sleep he came and spoke to you. That’s all you have to say.”

“To you it’s easy, because the responsibility isn’t yours. There won’t be copyists year after year, writing down the same ill-sorted words and thinking, ‘Isaac—his writing is nothing like his father’s.’”

“They won’t think such a foolish thing, and even if they did, would you let pride or shame stop you from writing? What do you care what they think of
you,
as long as they know of what the Lord has said and done?”

“I don’t care. I mean, I’d never let that stop me. But it’s all right for me to hate the fact that I’m no good at this.”

“The Lord will make you as good a speaker as you need to be, as long as you have the faith to speak in his name.”

“As good as I need to be,” said Isaac. “But never as good as I want to be. I’m ashamed that the Lord always has to make do with me. I’m an ordinary man who keeps the records between the great prophets, a place holder.”

“Place holders aren’t visited in the night by the Lord.”

“He visited me for my father’s sake.”

“But he didn’t visit Ishmael or any of the sons of Keturah, and they have the same father.”

“Enough,” said Isaac. “You’ve comforted me, now go back to sleep.”

What Rebekah didn’t understand was why a man who had just received a vision from God should even need comforting. But to Isaac, the vision only left him feeling more keenly aware of his unworthiness.

Perhaps that was why the Lord did not come to him more. Out of mercy, because it made him so miserable.

It was on the third day of working on the new well that Abimelech himself came out to them with a party of soldiers, bringing gifts to show that he wanted nothing but friendship to prevail between the people of Isaac and the citizens of Gerar.

Rebekah wanted to say something brutally honest about what friendship with Abimelech was worth, but of course she said nothing, merely listening as Isaac spoke to Abimelech as if they were good friends. Isaac had Jacob give Abimelech gifts of twice the value, and sent him on his way with firm assurances of what mattered most to Abimelech—that Isaac wasn’t angry and wouldn’t seek vengeance against him or his city, even though the orchards and fields Isaac had planted were now in the possession of the people of Gerar.

“Poor Abimelech,” said Rebekah after he was gone. “He doesn’t understand that fields that produced a hundredfold for the servant of God will be ordinary soil for the servants of Molech.”

By the time Abimelech was gone, it was nearly time to stop work on well-digging for the day, and Jacob had gone to tell the men that, when he suddenly returned at a run. “Water!” he cried. “They’ve struck water!”

“Impossible,” said Isaac. “They haven’t dug deep enough yet.”

“It’s close to the surface here,” said Jacob. “There’ll be plenty of water.”

“Then this is where we’ll stay,” said Isaac. “Call the place the Well of Shebah. Beersheba. This is our camping place now.”

“Who can doubt that the Lord loves the house of Isaac?” said Rebekah.

“No one doubts it,” said Isaac. “And may they never doubt that the house of Isaac loves the Lord.”

Then he had her lead him to where the workmen were celebrating, so he could commend them and then give a prayer of thanks and a burnt offering to the Lord for having blessed them yet one more time.

Chapter 15

From Beersheba, wild mountain country was never far away, and Esau had found he had a taste for testing himself against the rocks and the sun and the animals that dwelt among the crags and canyons. Rebekah worried about him every time he went, but since there was no stopping him, she learned to stop begging him not to go, and instead prayed for his safety and kept her mind on the work that surrounded her in Beersheba.

Much of the burden of the camp now fell on their shoulders, since Isaac could no longer inspect the animals or oversee any tasks. He still made the decisions and heard everyone’s reports, and except for a tendency to be a little impatient with people whose storytelling style meandered too much, he showed remarkable patience with his affliction. Still, what he lived for were the hours he spent listening to Jacob or Rebekah read aloud from the scriptures as they copied them. As a result, they not only made one new copy of everything, but by the end of the third year of Isaac’s blindness they had made a second complete set.

It was Isaac’s idea to have someone outside his household keep the duplicate copies. “You were right all along, Rebekah,” he said. “There’s more safety in having several people read these writings than in keeping it with just one. Father kept them hidden to keep enemies from stealing them. But there could be a fire, or they could become waterlogged, or mice could get at them, and then where would we be, if all the copies are in the same place?”

After some thought, they decided to invite Keturah’s fourth son, Midian, to stay with them for a year in order to learn how to read and write. At the end of the year he would become the keeper of the second set of writings. “It’s not the birthright,” Isaac was careful to explain to both Midian and Keturah. “There’s more to it than that. But you should keep the parchments and copy them every generation, and pass them along father to son. It’s a priestly responsibility, so I’ll ordain you, when the time comes.”

Midian took the responsibility seriously. More than once during the year he was with them, Rebekah found herself wishing that Esau had chosen Midian to be his companion on his adventures. Midian took the commandments seriously and studied the scriptures zealously, so he’d be sure to understand them well enough not to make foolish errors in copying. He and Jacob became good friends, able to laugh and be outrageously silly when they had no pressing duties, and then drop the frivolity and become intensely serious when the time came.

As far as Rebekah knew, Esau barely noticed that Midian was in the camp. He was so disconnected from the holy writings now that Rebekah sometimes wondered if he still remembered how to read.