At the end of it, Abraham put a hand on her shoulder and said, “I love most in all the world the kind of people who put themselves in the Lord’s hands with perfect trust. Eliezer told me that you were that kind of person. As long as you bend to the Lord’s will, I can put up with a little defiance of mine. Not a lot, but a little.” He smiled. “My son deserves to be happy. I think, with you, he will be.”

Rebekah found herself weeping. This was the Abraham she had longed to meet, not the old man gibing at his grown son, but the voice that pierced her to the heart with the words of God. She could feel the power of what he was saying; it was the way she felt when God had filled her with the knowledge of what she was to do. Peace and perfect trust, that’s what it was, knowing that God held her in his gaze for this moment, and knew her, and loved her, and wanted her to be happy.

That night there was feasting, and all the next day Rebekah was introduced to Abraham’s servants, and to friends and visitors who had come from nearby to meet the wife of Abraham’s heir. There was singing and dancing. The food was magnificent, the stories enthralling. They could not have shown her more honor.

But none of it could still the fire that burned in her from having Abraham rest his hand upon hers and Isaac’s and blessing their marriage to last forever, like his own marriage with Sarah, even beyond the gateway of the grave.

She did not even mind so much the disappointment of not having seen the holy writings.

After all, someday they would be Isaac’s, and he would make his own rules about who could and could not see them.

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

At the time, her life seemed full of worries and little disasters—a quarrel with Keturah that led to a spiteful silence that lasted nearly a month before Abraham finally intervened; Miriel running off with a boy from a nearby village, only to come back two months later, tearful and pregnant; Isaac’s refusal to ask his father to let Rebekah look at the holy writings, or even to explain to her why he wouldn’t. Years later, however, looking back at these first years of her marriage, Rebekah would think of them as an idyllic time and yearn for the simplicity of her life then.