Rebekah, page 35
“I have no idea what you heard,” said Rebekah, “because if you had heard what I did, you wouldn’t be sending Midian away.”
“Are you really proud of Jacob, setting a trap for his brother like that?”
“It was a test that Esau could easily have passed. All he had to do was say he’d rather go hungry a few minutes longer than to sign away the birthright.”
“Esau is young and foolish, and I’m not surprised at his attitude. It takes time to understand the value of the holy writings.”
“Did it take you so much time? He’s a grown man. When do you think he’s going to understand? And it wasn’t just the selling of the birthright. It was his threats against Jacob.”
“I have a few threats against Jacob myself,” said Isaac.
“Well, Esau was certainly right when he said ‘Father doesn’t care what I do, I’m the firstborn.’”
“I care about everything my children do. Including lying.”
“Jacob didn’t lie.”
“He didn’t tell Esau he had his parents hidden in the kitchen shed, listening.”
“He didn’t tell him that we weren’t there, and Esau wasn’t speaking quietly anyway. We might have heard him simply by chance.”
“But it wasn’t by chance. Jacob laid a trap.”
“A trap which Esau could not have fallen into if he had had even the tiniest shred of respect for the birthright.”
“So you defend your precious Jacob even now.”
“He did nothing that needs defending. But Esau’s attitude—if you give the birthright to someone who thinks and talks like that, how long do you think it will last? If he’d sell it for pottage, he’d sell it for gold, or even more readily for the favor of a king.”
“He didn’t sell it at all. He signed a meaningless piece of parchment in order to get his brother to give him some food when he was hungry. Esau doesn’t own the birthright, so it isn’t his to sell.”
“Who does own it?” asked Rebekah.
“I do,” said Isaac.
“How odd,” said Rebekah. “I always thought it belonged to God.”
“Oh, I see. Now you’re digging pits for me to fall into. Of course it belongs to God, but I’m the steward of it here.”
“What kind of steward are you, even to think of passing it along to the man Esau has become?”
“He hasn’t become anything. He isn’t finished growing up yet. He has plenty of time to mature before it matters. I’m not dying yet.”
“How do you know?” said Rebekah. “Death can come to anyone at any time.”
“It’s simple,” said Isaac. “God won’t take me until Esau is ready to receive the birthright.”
“No, it’s not simple,” said Rebekah. “Maybe you’re being tested the way your father was tested.”
“What do you mean?”
“When he was commanded to sacrifice you. Maybe the Lord is expecting you to sacrifice Esau’s privileges as firstborn for the sake of preserving the holy writings in good hands.”
“Good hands? You mean the hands of that lying snake of a boy?”
“He’s a man—the man who stays here day after day and manages your household like a steward. The man who sits at your feet and studies the scriptures. Haven’t you been listening to him? Jacob’s questions are important and deep, and he’s a righteous, prayerful man.”
“It’s all part of his ambition. Pleasing me in hopes of getting what belongs to someone else.”
“He’s not ambitious,” said Rebekah. “He cares about the birthright and doesn’t want it in the hands of a worldly man who despises it. Why don’t you test him? Give the birthright to Midian, and see what Jacob does.”
“Midian! The birthright is more than just copying the scriptures.”
“I know. It’s adding to them,” said Rebekah. “Writing down the acts of God that you witness during your life. Now, what do you think Esau will write? What do you think the book of Esau will contain? Accounts of the virgins he’s deflowered in Gerar and Mamre?”
“Get away from me,” said Isaac, his voice low and the words bitten off.
They were at the door of his tent, and Isaac’s hand was on the post that held the flap, so she could step away. “So you hate me now for telling you the truth.”
“I don’t need you to tell me the truth,” said Isaac. “I need a wife who loves both her sons and doesn’t play favorites.”
Rebekah wanted to scream back at him in rage. It was so unfair of him to accuse her of the very thing he had done for the boys’ entire lives. No one had ever made her so angry. But she controlled herself and spoke in measured tones. “I did my best with both boys. Esau chose to reject every good teaching, and Jacob embraced them. You’ve been blind to Esau’s faults all along, and to Jacob’s virtues. The worse Esau behaved the better you liked him. No, let me state it plainly. The more he behaved like Ishmael, the better you liked him. And the more like you Jacob became, the more you despised him. But the man who is like you is the man who should have the birthright. And you fail in your duty to God when you refuse to see that.”
“So you’ve judged me unworthy of the birthright,” said Isaac. “Very well, be a judge. But what I need is a wife. Go away. I’m done with you.”
She understood at once that she had gone too far—but she had never thought he would respond like this. “Isaac, I beg you, don’t send me away from my children, I’ll speak no more about this, but don’t do to me what was done to my mother!”
“What are you talking about?”
She sank to the ground. “Please, Isaac, I beg you on my knees. I was trying to help you see, but I’ll keep my silence, only don’t send me away.”
“I was telling you to get away from my tent, I wasn’t divorcing you! I’m not like your father. My marriage doesn’t end just because my wife hates me.”
“I don’t hate you!”
“Oh, is it love that tells me I’m unworthy to be my father’s son?”
“I never said that!”
“I’ve failed in my duty to God, I heard you say it. I’m not deaf, just blind.”
“I said you’re about to fail. Or that’s what I meant, anyway. I’m trying to give you good and honest counsel!”
“You’ve given it. I disagree with you. The decision is mine. I’ll hear no more about it.”
“Yes, I agree,” said Rebekah. “I’ve said what I’ve said. I don’t unsay any of it. You heard me. I don’t need to say it again.”
“Good. Now leave me in peace.”
“I can leave. But you’ll have no peace if you throw the birthright into a pit.”
Still shaking, she walked back to her tent, went inside, and threw herself onto her sleeping rugs and wept until she could weep no more.
Deborah came to her after a while and, saying nothing, lay down beside her and held her until she fell asleep.
This was a quarrel that did not dissipate with time. It remained between Rebekah and Isaac for days, weeks, months afterward. Ironically, Jacob and Esau were soon back to normal—which included sniping at each other, but they also had many times when they laughed together over one thing or another. In fact, Rebekah suspected that Esau knew that his parents had heard about the business of selling the birthright for pottage, though neither Isaac nor Rebekah had spoken to either of them about it. Why else would Esau suddenly take a new interest in the scriptures? He came several times to their copying sessions, and though he didn’t actually write anything—she still suspected that he wasn’t quite sure how to make all the letters, though it might be he was simply ashamed of his unpracticed hand—he took part in the discussion and vied with Jacob to ask the most searching or challenging questions.
However, Jacob caught on at once to what was happening, and just as Rebekah would have expected, he immediately backed away and asked questions only when he wasn’t sure what an obscure passage meant, and he wanted to make sure he was putting the letters together to form the right words. Jacob had no interest in competing with Esau for the birthright. If only Isaac could see that. Not that she’d point it out to him, or discuss it with him in any way. He had put a ban on that topic, and she intended to keep it. Still, she could guess what he’d say in response: Jacob held his silence when Esau was there because he was a coward who could only be bold when his manly brother wasn’t there. Or perhaps he would say: Jacob is ambitious enough to know how to make a good impression, but Isaac wasn’t fooled.
Who can fool a man who insists on fooling himself?
Something had to be done. Rebekah prayed morning and night and many times in between, begging the Lord to intervene somehow, to make Isaac see what had to be done—or, better yet, to help Esau to repent of his rebellious nature, his love of worldliness.
But the only answer she got came the day Esau came to his father to inform him that he was going to marry and needed a bride gift. No, two bride gifts—for he had fallen in love, he said, with two Hittite girls, Judith the daughter of Beeri, and Bashemath the daughter of Elon.
Rebekah chanced upon the conversation when it was already well under way, arriving in time to hear Esau half-mockingly say, “Well, Father, you always warned me not to marry a Canaanite girl. So I’m marrying two Hittite women!”
Two women at the same time. What was he thinking? And both of them full wives, able to bear children who could inherit.
Didn’t the boy—no, the man, he couldn’t be called a boy anymore—didn’t the man see that taking wives and having sons was something that couldn’t easily be undone? How could Isaac give the birthright to a man whose sons had been raised by idolatrous women?
Rebekah didn’t say anything, however—for she suspected that if she criticized Esau in any way, it would provoke Isaac into taking Esau’s side, and the last thing she needed was for Isaac to start finding justifications or excuses for this.
“I’ll give you no bride gift for Hittite women,” said Isaac.
“As you wish, Father. It will be said that Isaac is too poor to provide for his son’s wives, but what’s that to me?”
“You’re the one who’s too poor, Esau. What do you plan to do, hunt for their meat? You have no flocks and herds.”
“Am I your firstborn or not? Are the flocks and herds here someday to be mine, or not? Have I no claim upon them now to support my wives? Or will you shame me in front of everyone, leaving me as poor as if I had no father?”
Rebekah wished Isaac could see the smirk on Esau’s face as he said these things. From the tone of his voice, Isaac might think Esau was making reasonable arguments. But Rebekah could see that he was mocking his father even as he demanded the right to bring these wives into the camp and set up his own household here.
“No idols,” said Isaac.
“What are you talking about?” said Esau.
“I’ll have no idols in my camp.”
“Neither of them is particularly religious, Father.”
“I didn’t suppose they were,” said Isaac. “But I tell you now, so you won’t be surprised later. In my camp, idolatry is forbidden.”
“I’ll tell you what, Father. Do for me what your father did for you. Set me up in my own household, with my own servants and my own flocks and herds. Lahai-roi was good enough for you, wasn’t it?”
“There isn’t water enough there.”
“Have you checked lately? There were good rains this past year.”
“The best you can say is that there were rains at all. It wasn’t disastrous. Lahai-roi will still be dry.”
“Well, Father, I happen to have checked already. There’s water in the well there.”
“There’s always water in the well. The question is how much water there’ll be after you’ve drawn from it enough to satisfy a few hundred sheep. The well at Lahai-roi doesn’t recover quickly in dry years.”
“I can’t believe you’d try to use a well as an excuse to keep me from setting up my own household.”
“It won’t be your household. It will be my flocks, my servants, and you will be my steward. I still forbid idolatry.”
“I forbid it too. I’ve already told them. No idols. I’m not completely ignorant, Father. I know we worship a God who doesn’t appreciate rivals.”
“He has no rivals,” said Isaac. “The other gods don’t exist. Only God is real.”
“That’s what I meant, Father. Don’t try to catch me in some trap because I used the wrong words.”
Rebekah could see, in Isaac’s silence, how infuriated it made him to be accused of trapping Esau when he intended no such thing. Well, let him chew on that for a while, thought Rebekah. It’s only just, since that’s the very thing he did to me in our last argument.
Despite Isaac’s opposition, Esau went ahead with both weddings. Isaac did not go, but Rebekah and Jacob did. Isaac claimed that the journey was too dangerous for a blind man, but Rebekah knew better. And she was secretly pleased at how furious Isaac was over the marriages, not because she wished him to be unhappy, but because maybe now he would awaken to what kind of man Esau was.
The girls were beautiful, as Rebekah expected; what she did not expect was that they gave no sign of being the kind of wild woman that Esau had a reputation for consorting with when he visited a town. Judith was nearly twenty, but it wasn’t for lack of beauty and grace that she had not taken a husband before now. From what other guests at the wedding said, she gathered that Esau had been courting her for three years, and it took this long for her father to give consent for her to marry a man who didn’t worship the gods of Heth! The other girl, Bashemath, was small of stature and quite a bit younger—was she even fifteen yet? Still, she too was quiet and respectful, and her father and mother seemed to dote on Esau as if he were a fine jewel someone had given to them.
And he was, wasn’t he? Sometimes it was hard for Rebekah to remember, in all her worrying about Esau, that he was still a fine-looking man who had learned the gracious manners of a desert prince. For all that he could be snide and overbearing with his younger brother and his parents, he was still a man of intelligence and considerable knowledge. He had the look of a warrior about him. He was generous with his friends—and with his family, too. And he did love them. Ever since he first started hunting, it wasn’t enough for him to bring home the game—he cooked the meat and proudly served it to the household, and prepared the skins and gave them as gifts. Rebekah herself had received his first rabbit skin. It had been raggedly removed and unevenly tanned, but she had treasured it then.
After the wedding, she went home to Beersheba and searched until she found it, that first rabbit skin. It was badly worn—the girls had used it pretty roughly in their games when they were little, and since it hadn’t been all that well prepared, it wouldn’t have held up well in any case. But it was good to have it, all the same. Her proof that there had been a time when Esau loved her.
Or did he love her still? Was the man with the smirk who enjoyed showing his independence from his parents still the boy who had wanted to please her?
Why did he stop wanting to please her? She didn’t like to think of it, but it was possible that he simply gave up when it seemed she could not be pleased by anything he did. Maybe it seemed to him as he was growing up that anything he did well, Mother didn’t much care about, and anything she cared about, he did badly and had to be corrected.
Having thought of it, the idea preyed upon her. Did I cause this? If I had been less critical of him, would he have kept that generous, giving spirit in his relationship with me?
After several days in which Rebekah had lived with—and prayed about—an overwhelming sense of guilt about this, Esau came home with his brides for a visit. She saw how disdainful he was with his father—enough so that Judith, at least, looked a bit shocked—and Rebekah realized that while she might have been too critical of him, his father and Abraham had certainly not been, and Isaac now got even worse treatment than she did. Of course, that might be simply because he was blind so Esau could get away with more right in front of him. For all she knew, he mocked her viciously behind her back. But the important thing was that the parent who indulged him and approved of him all the time got treated as badly as, or worse than, the overly stern parent. It wasn’t the way they treated him. It was Esau. It was his own choice.
The girls were nice enough, though it made Rebekah feel old to have her son married to such children—even Judith seemed like a child to her. And she was glad that his wives were kind, and treated her and Isaac’s daughters well. Young Deborah, especially, hovered around Bashemath like a bee around a flower, wanting to take possession of her, which was not surprising, since Deborah was only a couple of years younger than the bride.
Which meant that soon they would need to arrange a marriage for her. It made Rebekah tired and sad, to think of her daughters getting married and leaving her. All this work to raise children, and just when they become interesting, everything changes. The girls get married and leave and you never see them again, and the boys—well, Esau, at least, had become a stranger in many ways.
