Soon they were all mounted and the camels were on their feet, so that Rebekah looked down on Father’s camp from a point higher than the tops of many of the tents. It looked so different from here. The tents were all so small, and filled such a small space. The green-and-gold hills around the camp were so much larger. And Rebekah knew from all her previous trips from one pasture to another that these hills were not even particularly large ones, and that they went on row after row, from here to the great river Euphrates, or if you went the other way, through great mountains and then down to the sea. And even that was only a small portion of the world. Yet this camp had been her world, really, despite visits elsewhere. It had held all the people that she loved. And she would always love them, even though she did not know whether she would ever see them again. Because she would carry them with her in her memory. She would see everything with eyes they had taught to understand what they saw, and she would hear everything with ears that had learned language from their voices.

How could she ever love a husband as much as she loved her father, her brother, her newfound mother? How could she ever understand a new household the way she knew every soul in this camp? How could she ever feel that she truly belonged somewhere, the way she belonged here?

Today, there was no shortage of weeping servants, and what Rebekah had wished for last night, she had in plenty: They grieved to lose her. They had not resented her leadership. They loved her, and were sorry to see her go.

Then all the good-byes had been said, and though the sun was already warm and they were only a few hours from noon, Eliezer began to tug the lead camel, starting the procession moving forward. Rebekah understood: Hot as this day’s travel would be, it was necessary to go as far as they could the first day, to put distance between them and their past.

As her own camel lurched forward—the second in the caravan, and the first with a rider—she heard Laban call out to her. She turned as best she could, in her awkward perch on the camel’s hump, and saw him running toward her.

“Rebekah!” he cried out. “You are my sister, but now you’ll be the mother of thousands of millions! Let your seed possess the gates of all those who hate them!”

Laban’s blessing rang in her ears as they moved away into the hills. The mother of nations—is that what she would be? But that was the promise of Sarah, wasn’t it?

Mine now. Because I am marrying the heir of the covenant between God and Abraham.