another matter, so let me get back to my story, the many versions of which—if you are wondering—I memorized three millennia ago and have not yet forgotten. (I’ve spent many the night sitting around a campfire telling others—or just myself—these stories.)
Isaac and his father were not speaking to each other when they returned. Sarah and her daughters did their best to reconcile the two, without success. Father and son could scarcely tolerate each other. Mealtime was a nightmare and as soon as he came of age Isaac took off from his father’s camp and lived for some time in Hagar’s village. You can see this yourself if you read the Torah. Hagar called her village Lahai-roi, and that’s where Isaac was living before he was married. Eventually the family reconciled, thanks to Hagar, who let Isaac know how much his father and mother loved him and missed him. And as with many of us, especially when we’re younger, rage in Isaac turned into guilt at the way he’d treated his parents, and from that guilt and the obedience he imposed upon himself, the next chapter of his life unfolded, after he moved back to live with them.
It was Sarah who suggested to Abraham that they all go up to Haran for a visit. Their eldest daughter Atirat had already returned and gotten married there and she and Isaac had always been close. Sarah knew that her husband and son always got along best when they were traveling. It took a while for her to get the two of them to agree, but in the end they went. The trip was tense, and you have to remember that on camel, donkey, and by foot, it was a very long trip, a trip of many months. (A nomadic band can travel anywhere between ten and twenty-five miles a day.) When they finally got back to Haran they stayed with Sarah’s family, which made life even more difficult. Isaac sulked and spent as much time as he could alone, which only gave Sarah’s sisters more ammunition for their criticism of her.
About two weeks after they arrived Sarah finally persuaded Isaac to join the rest of the family when they went to visit Abraham’s nephew Bethuel and his family. Bethuel and his wife Kahinah had a son Laban, and a daughter Rebecca, plus an older daughter named Ezob, who has fallen out of the story. Rebecca and Isaac were close in age and they had a lot in common. She too was that day’s version of a hippie, a rebellious child who was also interested in the old ways, although from all I’ve heard the spiritual content of the goddess revival groups back then was as new as that disseminated by most of the ones that are popular today.
Isaac and Rebecca hit it off. (Does it bother you that I’m using colloquial expressions? I enjoy them. English is my twenty-seventh language, and there is much to be said for it, some of which I may go into later on.) Anyway, the relationship between those two young people was not romantic. It began as friendship, the two of them linked by shared values. Seeing what was happening, and hoping for more, Sarah took Rebecca aside and gently encouraged her. Rebecca was the one who proposed. She genuinely liked her cousin and saw him as a good catch. Abraham and Sarah’s business in Canaan was doing very well. She knew that she’d be comfortable there, while under her father’s control the old family business was faltering. And Isaac, knowing that his parents approved, and needing their approval as much as he needed to rebel against them, because he was still too ashamed to go back to Luz—although he wanted to in his heart of hearts—decided instead to marry his cousin and new friend Rebecca.
It took a while for Sarah to persuade Rebecca’s mother Kahinah to let her daughter travel back to Canaan with them. But like Sarah, Rebecca was a younger daughter, not her mother’s heir, and so she was willing to allow Rebecca to marry her troubled but rich and charming cousin. I can’t say that things were ever smooth after that between Abraham and Isaac. To the day that Isaac died, my father told me, he never quite forgave his father for dragging him away from the temple at Luz and embarrassing him in front of his new friends. But Isaac loved his wife, never took another wife, nor had any concubines like most of the rest of the men in our family at that time. Instead he fully entered into the family business and maintained an awkward truce with Abraham.
From time to time, when tempers threatened to flare up again, Sarah would find a sly way to remind Isaac, “If your father hadn’t brought you home that day you would never have met Rebecca. And you know she’s the best thing that ever happened to our family. Where would we all be without her?” After their twin sons Esau and Jacob were born, Isaac mellowed a bit, and Abraham, now having male heirs, was able to finally forgive him. At night, in bed, on those nights when they shared a tent, Sarah would sometimes whisper to Abraham, “Isn’t it nice how things worked out? Even better than we could have hoped for, all those long years ago when we set out from Ur with nothing to call our own. And look at us now, with children and grandchildren and flocks and herds and friends to share our joy with.”
Chapter Four
In which the author reveals one of
the major lost secrets of her people
My grandmother Zilpah named her first son after the god Gad, who was one of the Elohim or gods, that we believed in, one of Asherah and Yahweh’s sons. My father Asher was her second son. Expecting a daughter that time she named him after the goddess herself, but I’m getting ahead of my tale. So let’s go back to Isaac.
The family business was flourishing, largely because of Rebecca, who was a natural businesswoman. Merchants were always stopping by her tent to see what she was selling. She and Davah her sister-in-law ran the whole concern after Abraham died. Rebecca was often on the road herself, visiting local princes and the petty kings and few remaining queens who ruled the city-states that dotted Canaan, bartering and trading. After Sarah and Abraham both died and were buried in the cave that they bought from Sarah’s lover Efron, Rebecca began to visit Hagar and Ishmael at Lahai-roi, the village they lived in, for she’d met an older woman named Suvah at Abraham’s funeral, liked her and liked spending time with her.
Usually Isaac stayed home in Beersheba when his wife traveled, watching over their sons and playing music. He was a very fine composer and had a lovely voice, which I inherited, as I was often told. He and Davah were both fond of a game that’s the ancestor of backgammon, and the two of them would play for hours, while servants looked after Esau and Jacob. One spring, however, Isaac decided to join Rebecca when she traveled out to visit Lahai-roi. Which leads me to another subject.
In my youth we had none, but in this day and age I find that there are three main taboo subjects—death, God, and sex. Death I know nothing about, personally, although I’ve witnessed it far more times than even an emergency room medic in the worst war zone or inner city hospital, so I’m quite an authority on it. I’ve seen people die in more ways than anyone else I’ve ever met. And I’ve seen people kill and get killed in more ways than a person ever should. On that one subject alone I could write an entire book. But I won’t. God is a subject that I have spoken about already. This seems like a good time to talk about sex, that other potent three-letter word.
A few years ago I read an article in a women’s magazine about how to heal yourself from the toxic values of a sex-negative culture. The author proposed that we remember the days when there were sacred prostitutes, and reinstitute them as sexual healers. I had to laugh, having grown up with what you call sacred prostitutes and counting several among my friends and family, our family. But, and I speak with authority here—you can’t have sacred prostitutes in a sex-negative culture. They can only exist in a place and time when sex is considered holy, when people are conceived in joy, raised in joy, and come to their own sexuality in that way—joyfully. You can’t reinstitute sacred prostitutes any more than the founders of the first kibbutzim could raise non-authoritarian non-bourgeois non-ghettoized children by mandating and enforcing new childrearing practices. In other words, you can’t turn a dog back into a puppy, or a sex-constrained adult into someone who’s free in their body and hasn’t ever felt any shame.
When I was a girl we had sacred prostitutes, although that’s not what we called them. We called them Holy Ones, “holy” from the same root as the word you used today to refer to God—Kadosh—Holy, Set Apart. But in my youth the culture
