Rebekah: Women of Genesis (8 page)

He made as if to leave with her at once. She would not have that.

“As soon as you have finished disposing of the business at hand,” she said, then stepped aside and bowed her head again, to wait for him. It left him no choice but to finish giving instructions to the servant he had been talking to, and to watch as dripping haunches, shoulders, loins, and heads of the beasts were spitted.

Rebekah saw that he was not instructing the men to take the meat to the firepits, and became annoyed. “The firepits are ready for the spits,” she said. “The fires are banked and tended, and the women know their work.”

At once Pillel waved a hand and the men holding the spits took off at a run.

Why was Pillel so annoyed with her? It was not unheard of for her to need to talk to him in the midst of his work.

He turned and gazed at her with a face devoid of expression.

“Pillel, there are rumors that the visit of Ezbaal may have something to do with me.”

He said nothing.

“I need to know,” she went on. “Is his name a just one? Does he worship Ba’al?”

“I know nothing of his gods,” said Pillel.

“Nor I. Nor, I think, does Father,” said Rebekah. “So Father might need to be reminded that his daughter will never serve Ba’al or any other god of stone.”

Almost at once Pillel’s face changed, from one unreadable expression to another. Rebekah could not begin to guess what went on in her father’s steward’s mind.

“If you could find a discreet moment,” she said, “to remind him of this, before he agrees to anything that would be impossible for me to fulfill . . .”

She left the words dangling.

Pillel nodded, then raised one hand a little. It was a familiar gesture—the one he used whenever he thought Father was making a decision without having thought everything through. It was at once obsequious in its slightness and firm in its negativity.

“I have never heard my master speak against Ba’al,” said Pillel.

“Why would he?” asked Rebekah. “But he takes part in no worship of Ba’al or Asherah, and gives no tithes to their priests or temples. Everyone knows he worships the God of Abraham.”

“Forgive me for saying it, but as far as I’m aware, no one outside this camp knows that.”

“Well, of course he doesn’t announce it, but Abraham is his uncle, and our family is the family of the birthright.”

“Which will pass to one of Abraham’s sons,” said Pillel. “What has that to do with Bethuel? If he wanted it known that he served Abraham’s god, would he not have said so to all he meets, as Abraham does?”

For a moment Rebekah wanted to blurt out, Have you met Abraham? Face to face? What kind of man is he? Has he really seen the face of angels?

But there was a more important matter here than her curiosity. Pillel was resisting her and she did not yet know why.

“Pillel, regardless of what Father has or has not said, he cannot give me in marriage to a man who would expect me to join him in worshiping Ba’al or Asherah. I will serve the one true God and only him as long as I live, and the man I marry must do so also.”

Now Pillel looked truly shocked. “Your father will not be happy to hear such a defiant tone.”

“I’m not being defiant in saying that,” said Rebekah, becoming annoyed. “I’m being obedient. Pillel, you have served my father all my life, and you don’t know that we are true to the one true God?”

Pillel actually looked confused. “I knew that you stayed aloof from the priests of the cities and paid no tithes to them, and I knew that your gods were small images so that they could be carried around with you—”

Those wretched little god-images! Rebekah wanted to scream in frustration: Father always ignored her when she suggested that they shouldn’t use them, and Laban laughed at her for being so particular, but the images
did
confuse people. “Pillel, those images are only to help the servants understand that our God is not the same god they worship in the cities, and to help them think of the true God when they pray.”

“I am one of the servants,” said Pillel. “And all gods are God.”

“All gods are
not
God,” said Rebekah. “Only God is God, and we do not worship an image.”

“I see my master Bethuel bow down before stone images to pray,” said Pillel, “and I bow behind him, and his son and daughter bow beside him also.”

“But the stone is
not
God.” She could not contain her frustration any longer. “I
told
Father that nothing good would come of his using those images. Just because great-grandfather Terah made them does not make it right or good. It only confuses people—the way it’s confused you.”

Pillel looked at her coldly. “I am not the one who is confused.”

“Go to Father and tell him what I said,” Rebekah replied. “You’ll see who is confused. I will not bow down to the image of a false god. I wish I had never bowed down to an image at all, because the true God needs no images.”

“How can I go to my master and tell him that his daughter refuses to worship with her husband as I have seen her worship with her father all her life?”

“Now that I have told you,” said Rebekah firmly, “how can you
not
tell him?”

As if explaining things to a little child, Pillel said, “A woman worships the gods of her father and then she worships the gods of her husband.”

“After all these years in my father’s house,” said Rebekah, in a tone just as condescending, “you still remain a stranger who does not understand what he sees.”

She should not have said it. It could only hurt him and make him angry, at a time when she did not need anyone working against her.

“Pillel,” she said at once, “I’m sorry, I spoke falsely and in anger.”

He did not reply at all.

“You are not a stranger here.”

“Of course I’m a stranger,” he said. “The line between family and servant is always clear in my mind and I have never been confused.”

“But not a stranger. I only meant to say that if you think we actually worship the stone images Father keeps, and if you think he would have me marry a man who would require me to worship false gods . . .”

“I know what you meant,” said Pillel. “But I don’t know how to say what should be obvious to you without giving offense.”

“Say it and I swear I will not be offended.”

“Mistress,” said Pillel, “I have worked beside your father longer than you have been alive, and I swear to you that it is you, not I, who does not understand what your father worships, and what he will expect of you.”

His words stopped her cold. Was it possible that he was right? Didn’t Father reject the gods of the cities and towns? Did he think that the images he prayed to were actually somehow God himself and his Servant or Son, rather than being mere depictions, puppets they used when they acted out the story of creation?

It was too great a mystery to be sorted out. How could Rebekah have come to understand what she understood, if Father believed something so different? Who would have taught her? Of course the way she understood things to be was the way things really were. It was Pillel who was wrong.

But he meant no harm by resisting her—indeed, by his lights, he was trying to save her from embarrassment.

“Say this, then,” she told him. “Say that he must talk to me before promising anything, because I must be able to worship God all my life, in the way that God must be worshiped.”

“I will say what my mistress requires of me.”

“All I need is for him to talk to me before he gives his word.”

“And if he gives his word without talking to you?” asked Pillel. “And Ezbaal turns out to be a fervent worshiper of Ba’al and Asherah who requires his entire household to bow down to them and dance and celebrate before the images?”

“Then Father will either break his word or he will have to live on, knowing that he sent his daughter to live with a husband who will hate her, because I will never bow down or dance or sing or tithe or do any kind of worship before an image of Ba’al or Asherah. Before I did such a thing, I would die.”

A smile came to the corners of Pillel’s mouth. “It is easy for a child to speak of dying before obeying. But when the father of your children demands that you—”

“I will bear no children to a man who does not serve God,” said Rebekah.

Pillel’s face darkened. “You may be sure,” he said, “that I will report this conversation to your father.”

“That is all I ever asked of you,” said Rebekah.

Pillel made no move to leave.

“Well?” asked Rebekah.

“Well what?” asked Pillel.

“Aren’t you going to go tell Father what I said?”

“There is no urgency,” said Pillel. “They can’t begin discussing you until after they’ve feasted, and almost certainly not until the next morning. I’ll take an opportunity to speak to him privately, before the matter can come up.”

That was all she had ever asked him to do, but now it sounded like a threat. Pillel clearly thought less of her for this.

Was he right? Had she somehow misunderstood what Father believed?

With no one else to turn to, she finally resorted to talking with Deborah. After the meat was roasting, Rebekah left the women to do their work and returned to her tent for Deborah to dress her hair and help her into her finest clothing. No matter how things turned out, if she was to be seen she had to look her best so as not to shame Father.

“Deborah,” said Rebekah, “what do you know about God?”

“He made everything,” said Deborah. “He is king of the whole world. Even the lions and bears.”

“You know they have gods of stone in the cities. We never bow down to those.”

“No, never,” Deborah agreed.

“Do you know why?”

“No,” said Deborah, wonderingly, as if she sensed she were about to be let in on a great secret.

“No, I mean really,
do
you know why?”

Deborah looked puzzled and thought long and hard. “Because we have better gods here?”

Better gods. The stone images Terah made. But then what else would a simple-minded woman like Deborah think? She could not possibly understand the complicated reasoning that allowed Bethuel’s house to bow down before stone images of God while refusing to bow down before stone images of Ba’al, who was, supposedly, the very same God, merely with different priests.

For that matter, you didn’t have to be simpleminded for the distinction to seem meaningless. Once you knelt before an image of stone, the stone began to be your god, and not the God the stone supposedly represented. It was that simple and always had been. That was why Abraham did not claim Terah’s images along with the birthright. He knew the images were false by their very nature, and could never be anything else. The keeper of the birthright knew that every stone of the earth showed the power of God, but none could contain his image.

Father has been wrong, just as his father was wrong, and Terah before him.

How do I know these things? How can I be so sure? If my father is wrong, then who taught me the true religion that I feel here in my heart? Not my mother, surely—none of her words, no sound of her voice remains in my memory. Not my nurse—Deborah understands nothing. How did I learn these things with such certainty that I know I’m right even if both Father and Pillel stand against me?

From Abraham.

From a man she had never met. All she had of him were stories, what he did, a few things he said. The way he faced death at the hands of a priest of Pharaoh in Ur-of-the-North, and God sent an earthquake to knock down the idols of the temple and save his life. The way he refused any reward when he saved the kings of the cities of the plain, lest anyone think that these kings had made him rich, for the only wealth he had was what had been given him by God. The way he trusted in the promise of God that he would have children as numberless as the sands of the sea, as the stars of heaven, even though his wife was as barren as a dried-out stick. The way he refused to take the gods his father had carved to represent the God of heaven and his Servant, by whose word all his creations were made.

She had learned her religion from the stories of Abraham and Sarah, and then assumed that her father understood things the same way. And he did! He had to! He was not a fool, he had to have learned the same things from these stories that Rebekah had. Pillel was wrong. Father would agree at once when he was reminded that no marriage could be entered into without protecting her right to worship the God of Abraham, and him alone.

“You don’t look happy,” said Deborah.

“I’m worried a little, that’s all.”

“If he doesn’t make you happy, I don’t want you to marry him, no matter how rich he is,” said Deborah.

“And I won’t, either,” said Rebekah. “If he doesn’t make me happy.”

“Oh, silly,” said Deborah. “You’re not like me. You’re a good girl. You’ll do what your father says.”