“There were other opinions than yours,” said Sarah, wondering if she should be a little hurt.
“Oh, your bosom was a marvel, the servants could hardly work for the thought of what must be there beneath your gowns, but it was never your best quality because nothing of the body could ever compare to the glory of your mind, and nothing of the mind could compare to the beauty of your soul.”
“Why, I believe you’re flirting with me, old man.”
“And I believe it’s working, old woman,” said Abraham. Abraham shouldered the bag of bread and cheese and carried it to where the asses waited to be loaded. Sarah walked with him, though her pace slowed him.
She followed because, through all this banter, Sarah could see that his face was sad. “You don’t want to take this journey today, do you?” said Sarah.
“No. In solemn truth, I would give my life rather than go.”
Well, that was a little dramatic. But then, he was in something of a flamboyant mood. “Why not stay, then?”
“Because it’s not my life, but my soul that depends on going,” said Abraham.
“Your soul? Because you’re checking the wells and pasturage in Moriah, and offering sacrifice there?”
“When the Lord commands a sacrifice upon a hill in Moriah,” said Abraham, “a wise man forgets what he might wish, and goes to Moriah with wood to burn and a knife for the kill.” Abraham shuddered as if he were cold.
“Dress warmly! That’s high country, and it’s still winter.”
“I’ll be warm enough. God wouldn’t be so merciful as to let me get too sick to travel.”
He really was bothered. It wasn’t just part of his flirtatious chatter with her, to pretend to want to stay at home. He really dreaded this trip. Why? Did he know something that he wasn’t telling her?
“Abraham,” said Sarah, “something is wrong, and you must tell me.”
“What could be wrong,” said Abraham, “if a man obeys the Lord?”
“Nothing,” said Sarah. “If he’s truly obedient, he gets a wife like me. And then, if he’s a man of extraordinary righteousness, he gets a son like Isaac.”
Abraham bent his head and leaned against the load he had just fastened onto the donkey’s back. “What a man is given, sometimes he doesn’t get to keep as long as he’d like.”
“Well, you’ve got me, like it or not,” said Sarah. “But why don’t you just send Isaac with Eliezer? The two of them can offer sacrifice for you. Isaac has the same priesthood as you, and Eliezer sees with your eyes.”
“When the Lord gives a man a cup to drink, the man drinks. He doesn’t pass it to his son, or his servant.”
“Abraham, you frighten me. Has the Lord told you that you’re going to die on this journey? Is this the last time I’ll ever see you?”
“No,” said Abraham. “You’ll see me again, if you want to.”
“I want to. Come home to me, and with more cheer than you have now.”
“And if I come home with even less cheer?”
“Why, I’ll be cheerful enough for both of us,” said Sarah. “I’ll squeeze one last grin out of those parchment cheeks of yours.”
In answer, he smiled, and she stood on tip-toe and kissed him without waiting for him to bend to her. “I think I know why you’re so grim about this trip,” said Sarah.
“You do?” said Abraham.
“You know where Ishmael is. You’ll be passing near him. You’re afraid you might see him and want to visit him. It’s all right with me if you do. I just want you to know that.”
Abraham laughed. “I don’t know where Ishmael is, but I know he was last seen so far to the south that I’d have to take three journeys just like this one and I’d only be halfway there.”
“He still loves you, I know he does,” said Sarah. “He accepted the herds and gifts you sent him. Even if Hagar tried to poison him against you, he was already sixteen when they left here, he already knew you for himself.”
“Yes,” said Abraham. “I’m sure my son loves me.”
“And it’s all right with me that you love him, too,” said Sarah. “I never hated him; I loved and admired him. I loved Hagar, too, as much as she let me. It was for Isaac’s sake they left.”
“I know it,” said Abraham. “Believe me, Sarah, I blame you for nothing. In all our lives together, you have done nothing but good to me and for me, and you’ve been a blessing to everyone we’ve met. Even Lot, before he died, told me that the one good thing about marrying Qira was that he got to know one good woman in his life.”
“I knew he loved her . . . somehow.”
“Don’t play the fool. He meant you.”
Isaac came bounding up, a load of wood on his back that he carried as easily as if it were a sack of smoke. “Here’s the last of it, Father,” he said. “I think we’re ready to go, and about time, we don’t want to waste any more of the warmth of the day.”
“Yes, we wouldn’t want to waste daylight on mere conversation with my wife,” said Abraham.
Isaac turned to Sarah and rolled his eyes. “Father’s been in a perverse mood ever since he announced we were going to make this trip.”
“I know,” said Sarah. “So please be extraordinarily funny on this trip so he won’t be so grim.”
“No,” said Isaac, “I’ll be extraordinarily dull so that he’ll be all the more eager to get it over with and get back to you. He’s always happy when he’s coming home to you.”
This was not Abraham’s playful banter. “Why Isaac. That’s the sweetest thing you could have said to me.”
“It’s only the simple truth. I thought you knew.” Isaac finished tying the last donkey to the one before, so they couldn’t stray apart during the journey. He whistled for the young men who were traveling with them.
Sarah took one last opportunity to speak to Abraham alone. “Be happy to come home to me, Abraham,” she said. “For the greatest joy in my life is to see you. And Isaac, of course. Tell me you’ll be glad to see me when you come back.”
In answer, Abraham took her in his arms and kissed her. Not the passionate kiss of youth—that sort of thing he had always kept in private, where none could see. No, this was a kiss of simple love. It lingered because both of them were loath for the kiss to end. It was good to be connected, body to body, just as their hearts were joined.
Sarah watched them as Abraham mounted the first donkey and Isaac and the other young men took their places, leading the animals down to the road. Here the road was wide, but in the mountains it would grow narrow, with many a passage between the rocks so strait that they might have to unload the animals just to pass. But they would reach the place the Lord had commanded Abraham to go, just as they had reached every other place that was promised them.
As Sarah watched them move briskly along, she thought of the whole journey behind her. Her childhood in Ur-of-the-North, the temple of Asherah, her father’s house, the Euphrates in flood and in a dry season. She thought of Abraham arriving with his extravagant dowry of impossibly large herds, and then of those early years as they watched the drought deplete their animals and their hope. The journey to Egypt, and the fear she felt when they were told to lie about who she was. She thought of Pharaoh and of Sehtepibre, of the great game they were playing on the magnificent stage of the most ancient and lofty kingdom in the world—and how petty and mean it turned out to be. She thought of Hagar in those early years together, when Sarah thought of her as almost a friend, they grew so close. The nastiness she set aside; there was no reason to dwell on that. But two sons had been born to Abraham, one by each of these women. That made them sisters, of a kind, even if they could not be friends. And thinking of sisters reminded her of Qira, and her tragic blindness to anything that mattered. Qira was almost as blessed as I was, thought Sarah, but she never knew it, and kept trying to get joy from those who had none to give, and rejecting it from the only ones who knew how it could be obtained. And she died because she couldn’t let go of the very things that the
dead always leave behind, and couldn’t hold to the only things that the dead can carry with them.
The love of a good man for a good woman. The love of good friends for each other. The love of parents for children, and children for parents. The love of brothers and sisters. The memory of joy and grief, which all becomes joy when enough time has passed. This is the treasure that I have won through all the years of my journey through this life, thought Sarah. And every bit of it I’ll take with me beyond the grave. I’ll meet God then, Abraham promises I will, and I will take all these treasures and lay them out before his feet, for God can see them easily even if mortal men cannot. And I’ll kneel before the treasures and say, “O God, I thank thee for giving these to me during my life on Earth. No daughter has been better loved than I, nor any wife, nor any mother. I never deserved them. They were not mine by right. But I hope that, having been given such gifts so undeservingly, I used them well, and gave back to thee a life that was worthy.”
She had the thought of saying these things to God just as Abraham went out of sight, with Isaac walking beside him. They carry my treasures in their hearts, too, small treasures I suppose, but the best I had to give them.
The stars are great hot fires in a distant sky, so bright a gift from God that they can be seen by everyone on Earth. But when you take my love out of your secret hiding place, my husband, my son, and look at it, you’ll see that even though it’s as small and dull as a pebble compared to the stars, I have polished my love so long and fervently, and you hold it now so close, that surely, surely it must shine.
Afterword
In dealing with scripture, particularly stories from Genesis, it is a source of both freedom and frustration that the scripture is our only source. Archaeology and contemporary documents from other cultures and languages can be of great help in clarifying points of confusion—but they can also be annoying distractions, because to a nonscholar like me, such information is available only in secondary sources, filtered through the mindset of scholars and translators.
And therein lies the rub, for biblical scholarship and translation seem to come in only two varieties: apologist and rejectionist. The rejectionists’ writings are poisoned by their fierce determination to deny that Abraham or Sarah or practically anybody else ever existed, let alone did any of the things that are claimed for them. While the apologists are unreliable because, almost without exception, they grimly set about gathering and bending every shred of evidence to form “proofs” that are usually specious and often downright fraudulent and aggrandizing.
That’s why the story of Moses is always dated to the time of Ramses, even though culturally and historically the account makes no sense in that period—because Ramses built really fancy monuments that later Israelites wanted to claim as having been built by their ancestors. And with Moses dated so impossibly late, Abraham is also usually pushed forward as well, when in fact the Genesis account clearly belongs in the period of devastating climatic change that left Canaan virtually depopulated, flooded Egypt with Asiatic refugees, and fits, over and over again—the little details that can so easily go unnoticed but that could not have been invented by later writers.
(Contrast the story of Abraham in Genesis with the story of Joseph. Abraham’s tale fits in the period from 2100 to 1900 b.c., reflecting information that no scribe from, say, 800 b.c. could possibly know. By contrast, Joseph’s story is filled with “just-so” suppositions and poetic flourishes, and is filled with evidence of the cultural expectations of a much later time. This doesn’t imply that Joseph did not exist or his story did not happen. What it most likely suggests is that a truer, simpler account, just as tied to its own time as Abraham’s is, was replaced by a much more poetic treatment that had become popular in part because of those flourishes that gave Joseph credit for, among other things, inventing a system of grain storage that had actually existed generations before the first Pharaohs united Upper and Lower Egypt. The scribes who decided on the “fuller” account had no idea that its very fullness made it of doubtful authenticity—and besides, they loved the “cool stuff” that the account we now have is filled with.)
There is a middle ground between hostile skeptics who refuse to accept any evidence that suggests the biblical account is real and the fervent apologists who have never found a “proof” they didn’t love. The virtue of this middle ground is not that it somehow averages the errors of both extremes, but rather that it fits the evidence far better and is less likely to lead to foolish self-blindedness. The middle ground is this: The biblical accounts are all authentic in that those who wrote them, those who copied them, and those who included them in later compilations all believed them to be true and sacred.
This isn’t a very hard concept to swallow. After all, Homer’s account of the Trojan War and its aftermath, while obviously embellished, nevertheless faithfully records the culture of the era when the tale was first told—which may be very near to the epoch in which the events the tale was based on first happened. And when those details were checked, they were found to be echoed in the archaeological record. It’s easy to forget now that the same sort of critic who today claims that the biblical stories were all made up by scribes after 1000 b.c. and usually far later have their roots in the same scholarly tradition that insisted that all of Homer was a work of fiction barely older than the first plays of Aeschylus.
As a Mormon, I take the Bible very seriously, as a vehicle for giving us, with varying degrees of accuracy, true stories of God’s dealings with human beings. But I believe in the Bible so seriously that I think it really is what it claims to be—a record, written by men, of stories that seemed important and truthful to them at the time of writing, using the standards of truth available to them at the time. This means that the idea of inerrancy of biblical scripture is silly on its face. It was written by human beings, limited by our finite understanding and subject to all the errors of transmission that inevitably corrupt all manuscripts. Our task, in reading the scriptures, is not to read it blindly as if God were dictating it to his secretary, but to read it faithfully, trying to understand what truths are being shown to us by means of, or in spite of, the words used to tell the tale.
In short, my purpose is pious—I believe there really was a woman named Sarai who married a man named Abram and that they very probably did all the things, or almost all the things, attributed to them. I believe that Abraham was a prophet and received the word of God, and that Sarah was also obedient to the same God.
But when we have two very similar events happening to Sarah and Abraham at different times—passing Sarah off as Abraham’s sister in order to keep a king they’re visiting from killing Abraham to get at his wife—I have no problem remaining completely ambivalent. Hugh Nibley has shown quite convincingly that the same thing might well have happened twice—three times, if you count the identical events happening to Isaac and Rebecca, and with one of the same kings, no less! At the same time, I think it’s at least as likely that the story was orally transmitted and got attributed to two different patriarchs and two different kings, but it really happened only once. I won’t be upset whichever one turns out to be true, on that happy day when we get independent evidence beyond the scripture itself. But for the purpose of this story, including two nearly identical incidents would have been bad fiction, and so I went with Plan B and had the event happen only once, in Egypt. Some would say I chose wrong, because having Abimelech as the king is much more plausible than the idea that a Pharaoh would care two hoots about a desert wanderer; but I say that having Sarah at age 90 or older, as she is in the Abimelech account, strains credulity far more. And I think Hugh Nibley is right in pointing us to a picture of Abraham as a very important man in the culture of the Middle East at that time. He would quite possibly have a very important wife as well.
Sarah means “princess.” Her original name, Sarai, is deemed to be merely a variant of the same name—but that makes the name change meaningless. What if Sarai is merely a false cognate from
another language? Perhaps even an unrelated one—perhaps even Sumerian. My guess is as good as anyone’s. But to make Sarah a real princess of a historical royal house is not much of a stretch, given her name and the high prestige that Abraham obviously has in the culture depicted in the Genesis account.
There are a few other points where some readers might quibble with my choices. I didn’t like the idea of Abram having his earliest adventures in “Ur of the Chaldees.” The name is obviously spurious, having been inserted much later for the obvious reason that at the time of Abraham and for many centuries afterward, the people who gave Chaldea its name did not even live in the area or, if they did, were apparently unnoticed by any of the people who did live there. Furthermore, Ur “of the Chaldees”—in this book called Ur-of-Sumeria, the original Ur—was ruled in that period by conquering Amorite kings who had invaded Mesopotamia during the period of devastating drought and had toppled and supplanted the old kingly lines in many or most of the great cities of the area.
Ur-of-the-North, however, founded quite probably as a colony by the original Ur, was not very far from Haran, where Abram’s father and brothers came to live. Furthermore, the cities in that area were, in exactly this period, susceptible to much Egyptian influence. Abram could more easily have become acquainted with—and butted heads with—priests of the Pharaonic religion who were doing what Christian missionaries did in Africa and the Pacific, spreading the “true” culture and opening the door to control by imperial merchants and soldiers coming behind them. The road from Ur-of-Sumeria to Egypt is strewn with historical and archaeological obstacles; the road from Ur-of-the-North to Egypt is smooth sailing. Again, if I turn out to be wrong, so what? I have done my best with the information that we have.
Sarah: Women of Genesis: 1 (Women of Genesis (Forge)) Page 33
