Then she put it together. Abraham’s remarks about how soft Isaac was because Sarah was too protective of him. And now Isaac talking about how different two children of the same father could be. It was about Ishmael. Isaac was making a jab at himself. And Abraham was letting it stand.

But why? Ishmael was a great lord of the desert, everyone knew it—he was feared by anyone who might be his enemy and shunned by his rivals, who dared not face him. He went where he wanted, from well to well, and took what he needed. He was also known as a generous man, but when you can take anything you want, simply leaving people with what they already had can seem like generosity. He was ostensibly a worshiper of the God of Abraham—at least it was said that he bowed down to no other god. But he was certainly not what anyone could call a holy man, not in any of the stories Rebekah had heard.

If Abraham thought her husband was weak, surely it did not imply that he thought Ishmael was strong!

Whatever was going on here was too deep for her. If it wasn’t a war, it was some kind of struggle between father and son. Yet when they laughed together—she had never seen Father and Laban seem so close, so at one with each other.

One thing was certain. She did not dare bring up what Keturah had said, about women being forbidden to see the holy writings. If he was already talking about needing to oversee the rearing of a grandson that hadn’t even been conceived yet, the last thing she needed to do was to give him grounds for thinking of her as even less trustworthy than he already did.

So she asked for the one thing she had wished for in her and Isaac’s hurried wedding. “Grandfather,” she said, “will you bless our marriage?”

Isaac moved next to her, and she looked up to see him gazing at her. Had she said something wrong?

“My wife is wiser than I am,” said Isaac. He turned to Abraham. “Will you, Father?”

Tears came to Abraham’s eyes. “The old man still has a few blessings in him,” he said. “Come here, children. Kneel before me. Hold hands, yes, like that.” And there on the spot he gave them a blessing such as she had never heard Father give in all the marriages he had blessed. Abraham promised them great blessings in life and after they died as well, and he placed them under the covenant that he himself had made with God, that as long as they obeyed the Lord they would be blessed with progeny as numerous as the sands of the sea or the stars in the sky.