After all, these problems were solved easily enough. Keturah’s constant efforts to provoke a quarrel and get Abraham to side with her against Rebekah ended soon after the birth of Keturah’s second son, when Rebekah had not yet conceived any child at all. That was victory enough, and when after only five years she was nursing Medan and Midian while Zimran and Jokshan played at her feet, she could finally afford to be magnanimous to her poor barren stepdaughter-in-law. What threat could a childless Rebekah possibly be to Keturah? Instead of finding reasons to prevent Rebekah from visiting Abraham’s camp, Keturah issued an endless stream of invitations, to Isaac’s and Rebekah’s amusement. They might even have been irritated at how Keturah loved to play the matriarch and display her children, but it was so much more pleasant now that the one-sided war between her and Rebekah was over that neither of them could complain.

As for Miriel, Rebekah and Isaac together approached a worthy man among the farmers of Lahai-roi and offered him his freedom, and Miriel’s too, if he would marry her and raise her child as his own. Eliezer had a few caustic words to say about how, with rewards like that, they’d soon find all the girls in the camp pregnant, but Rebekah pointed out that none of the girls envied Miriel or wanted to emulate her. And Rebekah’s other handmaids served much more happily now that Miriel was not among them, constantly complaining and goading them to be resentful of everything along with her.

In a way, the person most affected by the whole incident with Miriel was Deborah. When the girl came back pregnant, this of course stirred Deborah’s memories of the young man who had seduced her in her youth, and her first reaction was to announce cheerfully to Rebekah, “Now Miriel can be nurse to your baby!”

“Deborah,” Rebekah said, “even if I had a baby, which I don’t, Miriel would be my last choice to nurse her.”

This disturbed Deborah to the point of tears, and it took hours of tender questioning before Rebekah could finally help Deborah figure out why this had made her so sad. Finally the words came, as much a surprise to Deborah as to Rebekah: “You hate Miriel because she’s just like me!”

Rebekah was so surprised that she laughed, which sent Deborah into a new fit of crying until Rebekah could explain to her that Miriel was nothing at all like Deborah. “Miriel’s careless and complaining and lazy and irresponsible, while you’re the opposite—careful and patient and hard-working and dependable all the time.”

“But she was bad and had a baby when she wasn’t married, and so was I.”

“You were both young at the time, but you were an innocent child who was deceived by a man, while Miriel was definitely not innocent and asked for what she got.”