Rebekah: Women of Genesis

  © 2001 Orson Scott Card.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Card, Orson Scott.

  Rebekah / Orson Scott Card.

  p. cm. — (Women of Genesis)

  ISBN-10 1-57008-995-7 (hardbound : alk. paper)

  ISBN-13 978-1-57008-995-4 (hardbound : alk. paper)

  1. Rebekah (Biblical matriarch)—Fiction. 2. Bible. O.T. Genesis—History

  of Biblical events—Fiction. 3. Women in the Bible—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.A655 R427 2001

  813’.54—dc21 2001005523

  Printed in the United States of America

  Publishers Printing, Salt Lake City, Utah

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  * * *

  To Zina

  alight with all the graces you are the joy of this old man’s life

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Deaf Man's Daughter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Unveiled

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chosen

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  The Seed of Abraham

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Blessings

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Preface

  I used all the sources that previously helped me in writing Sarah, the companion volume to this book, and in addition, Norman L. Heap’s Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: Servants and Prophets of God (Family History Publications, Greensboro NC, 1986, 1999). While Dr. Heap places more reliance on non-biblical sources than I do, he performed the valuable service of bringing together all the scattered verses about each figure in the stories of the patriarchs. In particular, his book called my attention to Deborah, the nurse of Rebekah, who had figured in none of my preliminary outlines because I had carelessly overlooked her. And figuring out why Rebekah, alone of all these women, was so close to her nurse throughout her life led me to the whole elaborate invention of the first half of this book.

  The task in this novel was to show how good people can sometimes do bad things to those they love most. The story of Rebekah could easily be taken as a case study in how not to run a family. But if there’s anything I’ve learned in my fifty years of life, it’s that people doing the best they can often get it wrong, and all you can do afterward is try to ameliorate the damage and avoid the same mistakes in the future. Good people aren’t good because they never cause harm to others. They’re good because they treat others the best way they know how, with the understanding that they have. Too often in our public life we condemn people for well-meant errors, and then insist that everyone should forgive people whose errors were intentional and who attempted, not to make amends, but to avoid consequences. Good and bad have been stood on their head by people who should have known better. How do we live in such a world? Isaac was headed for a disastrously wrong decision; Rebekah chose an equally wrong method of stopping him. The question of which wrong was worse is not even interesting to me. They both meant well; they both acted badly; but in the end, the result was a good one because good people made the best of it despite all the mistakes.

  Much of what goes on in this novel is speculation. I know that some people have a specific set of theological “meanings” assigned to Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, and there is no room in their picture of these men for Isaac to have had anything other than perfect agreement with all that his father did. While that is not impossible, I find it highly unlikely. Prophets are human beings, too, and the feelings of human beings are not always responsive to our intellectual understanding. Isaac might well have agreed that his father made the right choice. But to me it seems inevitable that Isaac would come away from that scene on a mountain in Moriah with a great deal of pain at the knowledge that when his father was commanded to kill him, the old man did not love his son so much that he could not do it.

  Believers in biblical inerrancy will be annoyed by some of my choices. For instance, I don’t take literally all three accounts in Genesis of a husband passing off his wife as his sister in order to avoid getting killed by a king. It happens once with Sarah, Abraham, and Pharaoh; once with Sarah, Abraham, and Abimelech of Gerar; and a third time with Rebekah, Isaac, and Abimelech of Gerar. My conclusion that the two Abimelech versions of the story are really variant accounts of the same story is reinforced by the fact that both end with a newly-dug well being named “Beersheba.” I chose to leave the digging and naming of Beersheba with Isaac, and the incident of deceiving a dangerous king with Abraham, Sarah, and Pharaoh. I’d rather think that the Bible has included three variants of the same story than to think that these people were so dumb that they would dig the same well and give it the same name twice. Not to mention what a slow learner Abimelech apparently was—even if, as some have speculated, the Abimelech who flirted with Rebekah was the son of the Abimelech who had the hots for Sarah.

  In preparing this novel I am indebted, as always, to a small corps of friends and family who read the chapters as they spew forth from the LaserJet. Kristine, my wife, is always there to read and keep me from the most egregious errors. She was joined on this novel by my daughter Emily, who reads like the perceptive actor that she is, with a keen eye for what characters would and would not do, and by our friends Erin and Phillip Absher, who were with us for much of the summer when I wrote the book. Erin, in particular, alerted me to an imbalance in my portrayal of one of the characters; unfortunately, she did so when I was right up against a deadline and had no time to make the substantial corrections that would be required. But once aware of the problem, I could never have allowed the book to be published as it was. So the deadline was pushed back one more day as I made the changes. It’s a better book for her having had the courage to tell me such unwelcome news. Another whose prereading and comments were much appreciated is Kathryn H. Kidd, who was far too generous with her time during a month when she had precious little of it to spare. And Kay McVey’s encouragement and enthusiasm for the book reassured me that maybe, despite all the difficulties, this story was going to work.

  Passages of this book were written in such farflung places as Laie, Hawaii; the home of my beloved cousins Mark and Margaret Park in Los Angeles; in a rented beach house in Corolla, North Carolina; and on a grassy shore near Cape Canaveral, where I wrote a chapter and a half while waiting for our friend Dan Berry to take off on a mission in the space shuttle.

  Cory Maxwell is the perspicacious publisher who first caught the vision of these books and made it possible for the project to go forward. Sheri Dew inherited the project when Deseret Book bought out Bookcraft; she became my mother confessor during some bleak days, and gave me a bucket to bail with more than once. My editors, Emily Watts and Richard Peterson, showed unbelievable patience when this book was shamefully late, and if it comes out on time, it’s only because of the extraordinary lengths they and others at Deseret Book went to to compensate for my tardiness. Kathie Terry, Andrew Willis, and Tom Haraldsen did an excellent job of promoting this series outside the normal territory of the publishing company. And Tom Doherty astonished me by picking up the paperback rights to books that are definitely not science fiction or fantasy. You’re too good to me, Tom! But don’t stop.

&
nbsp; During a very hard year in our lives, my family has stood by me—or, rather, we’ve all stood by each other. My wife, Kristine, and my children, Geoffrey, Emily, and Zina, have borne me up through all sorrows and given purpose to my work. Zina, especially, has dealt with more death than a child her age should see, and yet remains the light of my old age. And the two children who are not with us now were nevertheless very much in my heart as I wrote. I have written elsewhere of my love and gratitude for those who were good to Charlie Ben during his life and who reached out to us since his passing, as well as those who helped comfort us after the brief life of our youngest child, Erin Louisa. Given the story I have told in this book, it seems appropriate for me to use these pages to thank God for letting me have the joy of all these children in my life. No one brings you more woe, more worry, or more rejoicing than your children. Blessed is he who has a quiver full.

  Part I

  Deaf Man's Daughter

  Chapter 1

  Rebekah’s mother died a few days after she was born, but she never thought of this as something that happened in her childhood. Since she had never known her mother, she had never felt the loss, or at least had not felt it as a change in her life. It was simply the way things were. Other children had mothers to take care of them and scold them and dress them and whack them and tell them stories; Rebekah had her nurse, her cousin Deborah, fifteen years older than her.

  Deborah never yelled at Rebekah or spanked her, but that was because of Deborah’s native cheerfulness, not because Rebekah never needed scolding. By the time Rebekah was five, she came to understand that Deborah was simple. She did not understand many of the things that happened around her, could not grasp many of Rebekah’s questions and explanations. Rebekah did not love her any the less; indeed, she appreciated all the more how hard Deborah worked to learn all the tasks she did for her. For answers and understanding, she would talk to her father, or to her older brother Laban. For comfort and kindness she could always count on Deborah.

  Rebekah no longer played pranks or hid or teased Deborah, because she could not bear seeing her nurse’s confusion when a prank was discovered. Rebekah soon made her brother Laban stop teasing Deborah. “It’s not fair to fool her,” said Rebekah, which made little impression on Laban. What convinced him was when Rebekah said, “It’s what a coward does, to mock someone who can’t fight back.” As usual, when she finally found the right words to say, Rebekah was able to prevail over her older brother.

  The real change in her life, the one that transformed Rebekah’s childhood, was when her father, Bethuel, went deaf. He had not been a young man when she was born, but he was strong enough to carry her everywhere on his shoulders when she was little, letting her listen in on conversations with the men and women of his household, shepherds and farmers and craftsmen, cooks and spinners and weavers. Riding on his shoulders as she did, his voice became far more than words to her. It was a vibration through her whole body; she felt sometimes as though she could hear his voice in her knees and elbows, and when he shouted she felt as if it were her own voice, coming from her own chest, deep, manly tones pouring out of her own throat. Sometimes she resented the fact that in order to say her own words, she had only her small high voice, which sounded silly and inconsequential even to her.

  But when she spoke, Father heard her, and since he was the most important man in the whole world, however weak her voice might be, it was strong enough. Even after she grew too big to ride his shoulders, she was at his side as much as possible, listening to everything, understanding or trying to understand every aspect of the life of the camp, the work and workings of the household. He, in turn, called her his conscience. The little voice always at his side, never intruding, but asking him wise questions whenever they were alone together.

  And then, trying to keep a cart from sliding down a muddy bank into the cold water of a brook in spring flood, Father slipped himself and fell into the water, the cart tumbling after him. The men swore later that it was a gift of God that Bethuel was not killed, for the cart was held up by the spokes of its own broken wheel just enough that he was able to keep his mouth above water and breathe while the men hurriedly unloaded the cart enough that they could lift it off him. He seemed at first to be no worse the wear for the hour he spent in the cold water, but that night he awoke shivering and fevered, and for two weeks he came back and forth between fever and chills as if the icy water still had a place in him.

  When he rose at last from his pallet, the world had gone silent for him. He shouted everything he said, and heard no one’s answer, and when Rebekah ran to him and covered her ears and cried, “Father, why are you angry with me?” he bent down to her and shouted for her to speak up, speak up, he couldn’t hear her. Louder and louder she spoke until she was red-faced with screaming and Father gathered her into his arms and wept. “Of all the sounds that I shall never hear again,” he murmured into her hair, “the voice of my sweet girl is the one I will miss most of all.”

  Father remained master of his household, but there was no more ranging out in the hills to oversee the herds. There was too much danger to a man who could not hear a shouted warning, or the roar of a lion, or the cries of marauders. Instead, Father had no choice but to trust his servants to oversee his flocks and herds. It embarrassed him to have to ask people to repeat everything, to talk slowly, to pronounce their words carefully so he could try to read their lips. He did not have to tell Rebekah that she could not stay with him all the time that he was in camp, as she had used to. She could see that he did not want her there, partly because he was ashamed to show his weakness in front of her, and partly because, when she spoke to him, she saw how much it hurt him that he could not hear her anymore.

  “Why don’t you go with your father?” Deborah asked her. “He likes you beside him. He used to carry you when you were little. You’re too big now.”

  Rebekah had to explain it to her several times. “Father is deaf now. That means he can’t hear. So I can’t talk to him anymore. He doesn’t hear me.”

  And after a little while, Deborah understood and remembered. Indeed, she took to informing Rebekah. “You mustn’t go to your father today. He’s deaf, you know. He can’t hear you when you talk to him.” Rebekah didn’t have the heart to rebuke Deborah for the frequent reminders. Instead, she would ask Deborah to sing her a song as she plaited Rebekah’s hair or spun thread beside her or walked through the camp, looking at the work of the women and children and old men. Everyone looked up when Deborah came singing, and gave her a smile. And they smiled at Rebekah, too, and answered her questions, until she understood everything she saw going on, all the work of Father’s household.

  Rebekah was ten years old when Father lost his hearing, and her brother Laban was twelve. It was just as hard on him as it was on her, for as she had been Father’s constant companion in the camp, Laban had been his shadow on almost every trip to visit distant flocks and herds where they grazed.

  To Laban it was like a prison, always to be in camp because his father rarely traveled. And Rebekah was no happier. Once she would have rejoiced to have Father always near the home tents, but he was short-tempered now, and bellowed often for no good reason.

  Everyone was ill at ease. But the work of the household went on, day after day, week after week. People get used to anything, if it just goes on. Rebekah didn’t like the way things were, but she expected this new order to go on unchanged.

  Until, a year after her father’s deafness began, she happened to come up behind several of the servant women boiling rags, and overheard them talking about Father.

  “He’s an old lion, with all that roaring.”

  “A lion with no teeth.”

  And they started to laugh until one of them noticed Rebekah and shushed the others.

  Rebekah told this to Laban, and at first he was all for telling Father. But Rebekah clutched at Laban and held him back. “How will you even tell him? And if you make him understand, then what? Should he beat the woma
n for saying it? Or the others for laughing? Will that make them love him better?”

  Laban looked at her. “We can’t let them laugh at Father behind his back. Soon they’ll laugh in his face, and then they’ll do what they want. Already the servants don’t even try to tell Father half the things that happen. Pillel makes decisions all by himself that he used to never make, and Father knows it but what can he do?”

  “We can pray to God for him to hear again,” said Rebekah.

  “And what if God answers us the way he answered Abram and Sarai when they prayed for a son? Can Father wait ten years? Twenty? Thirty?”

  They knew well the tales of their father’s uncle Abraham, the great lord of the desert, the prophet that Pharaoh could not kill, and how his wife Sarah bore him a baby in her old age.

  “But what else can we do?” said Rebekah. “Only God can let Father hear again.”

  “We can be his ears,” said Laban. “We have time to explain things to him. Let the men tell us, and we’ll tell Father.”