college friends come together for the funeral of one of their old circle. One of them is a single woman who wants to have a child, and another woman decides to lend her her own husband for the night.
Thing weren’t so different with Sarah and Hagar. But the story didn’t have a happy ending, in the text and in real life too, because thoughts and feelings aren’t always the same and a good idea in the head may be really bad news in the heart, the gut, or in the genitals. So it was with those two women who from the best of friends turned into bitter rivals. Hagar left their encampment several times, came back, but finally went off to a village where some of her family had settled, which was called Lahai-roi, from which she did not ever return. (Remember the name of this place, Lahai-roi. It will become important later in the story.)
By the way, Isaac’s real name wasn’t Isaac. That was his nickname. His real name was that of his grandfather, Terah, and in naming their son after his well-traveled father, who’d made numerous trips to Canaan, Abraham was legitimizing the family’s new location and asserting its authority. But since there already was a Terah in the story, and since no one ever called Isaac that anyway, the writers of the Torah left his true birth name out of their tale.
Here’s the missing part of the story. When little baby Terah the Second came into the world and the midwife held him up to wipe him off, he had such a funny look on his face that both Sarah and the midwife started laughing, and so right from the start his nickname became Yitzhak, which is Isaac in English, and means “He who laughs” in Hebrew. His name had nothing to do with angels or with his mother laughing at God, as the story now stands, which is a lovely story indeed.
Now Ishmael, Abraham’s son with Hagar, was no more the ancestor of all the Arabs than Isaac was the ancestor of all the Hebrews, Israelites, or Jews, those three words both synonymous—and not—but that’s a whole other story, so let me get back to this one. In addition to Hagar, who was never a full wife but a concubine, Abraham had other several lovers. Baalat the sister of his very good friend and distant cousin Melchizedek the king of Salem, Mutemwiya the Egyptian, and Tekla the Hivite come to mind. Then there was his second wife, Keturah, who he married after Hagar left and who some later rabbis mistakenly identified with her. Keturah came from a Bedouin clan that Abraham frequently traded with, and was named for their bestselling brand of incense. I’m told she was a lovely woman who put up with a lot from our ancestor, with great patience and kindness, yet sadly, our present Torah has left her as nothing but a dangling footnote. The Torah says that they had six sons, but in fact they had one son, Midian whose descendants will show up in this story later on, and two daughters, Allul who married a Canaanite man and had three daughters, and Kalyah who became a priestess of Asherah in Jericho and had no children. I knew about Allul because she was a fantastic weaver and in our tent we had one of her blankets. (What I would give for one of those beautiful goatskin blankets right now, on one of those cold damp Southern California mornings that don’t fit into the mythology of what it’s supposed to be like here.) Kalyah was a leading sculptor of her time and some of her pieces can actually be found in museums in Paris, Berlin, New York, and Jerusalem, small delicate carvings, some of them in ivory, most in clay or cast in bronze. Kalyah was still quite famous when I was a girl and all of us were proud to be related to her.
This should give you more of an idea about who Abraham and Sarah were, from the stories I heard when I was growing up in my tent of goatskins, the one that belonged to my mother and her mother before her. One more thing before I go on. After they moved to Canaan, Sarah and Abraham made several return trips to Ur to visit their families and to do business. Isaac met Rebecca on one of those trips and not the way you heard about it in the Bible. It’s a lovely story, one that I’ve always enjoyed, about the camels and the well, but it isn’t the truth. However, Rebecca’s father Bethuel was Abraham’s nephew, the son of his brother Nahor, just as the text says.
This custom of family intermarriage continued in the next generation as well. In fact, it’s still common in that part of the world. Recently, in an old file folder in my desk I came upon an article I cut out of the New York Times on May 1, 2003, which stated that up to 25 percent of all the marriages in Saudi Arabia are between close relatives, often first cousins, which was true in the past as well. This intermarriage causes many genetic problems today, and it did the same in the past. I’m thinking of my always-angry uncles Reuben and Simeon, and my cousin Initi, Uncle Gad’s daughter, who murdered her husband Baalil with a cudgel in a fit of rage. And the results might have been worse, but after Jacob and Esau’s generation, our family’s links with the north were severed, so that pattern was largely broken.
Chapter Three
In which you will learn the long-forgotten
story of what really happened to Isaac
The story of Isaac in your Torah is very brief compared to the tales of his father Abraham and his son Jacob. Almost all we know about Isaac relates to his father almost sacrificing him to God, the way that his marriage was arranged, and the manner in which his wife Rebecca and their younger son Jacob tricked him into blessing Jacob rather than his older twin brother Esau, who was Isaac’s favorite. The rabbis of the past speculated on why we are told so little about him and concluded that his near-sacrifice was so traumatic that he never quite recovered and accomplished very little in his life. As in many things, the truth is other than that, as I shall tell you in short order. But before I do there are a few other matters that need to be attended to.
Your Torah, (and please pardon me if I keep calling it that. Kindly remember how many torahs I’ve seen in my time) is very much the story of a people’s relationship with God. Up till now I’ve left God out of the story, so let me backtrack and fill in a few vital points here, which will illuminate your understanding of the text and perhaps infuse your spiritual life with some radiance, if we both are lucky.
People of your time tend to view people of my time as if we were little children, imagining us to be primitive, unsophisticated hicks wandering about in the desert looking at the sky, waiting for a miracle. You fail to credit us with any level of intelligence or sensitivity and don’t realize that our world was interconnected in amazing ways. Did you know, for example, that the tin used in the Middle East to make bronze came from the British Isles, or that the ancient Mesopotamians traveled by sea to India to trade for spices, and by land to China as well? Some of the words for different spices in Hebrew come from ancient Sanskrit and our people have loved Chinese food for many centuries. It’s encoded in our DNA. And we had trade routes that extended all the way to the tip of Africa, but I’m sure you didn’t know that. And you also think, I am certain, that our religions were primitive and highly superstitious. So before I go on I want to fill you in on the basics of religious faith three thousand years ago.
The Bible is filled with talk about idols and idolatry, and you perhaps believe that the little statues we kept in our homes, and the large images installed in shrines and temples, which represented this and that goddess or god, really were those deities in our hearts and minds. Well, the truth is, some of us did believe that, but most of us didn’t. Archaeologists have found female statues and figurines in every level of excavation, all over the Middle East. In fact, there are more of these statuettes than anything else. They assume that they were goddesses and that they were worshipped. Not entirely.
People then were not so very different than people are now. You go off on vacation. We went off on vacation. You visit Paris and come back with a tee shirt of the Eiffel Tower and with post cards of the Arc de Triomphe and Notre-Dame. Or you visit New York City, take the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, and come back with a little copper statue of it, which you keep on the windowsill in your bathroom. And two thousand years from now, when archaeologists dig up the remains of your home, they’ll find that little statue and say of you, “The 21st century inhabitants of this domicile worshipped a mother goddess, a fusion of two earlier goddesses, whose attributes she carried. One was the guardian of enlightenment, hence the torch she was holding aloft, while the other was the patron deity of scribes, indicated
