“If a man does not love God more than he loves his own sons, then he does not truly love his sons, either,” said Isaac. “I know that.”

“So why do you reproach me?”

“Because I’m human,” said Isaac. “I know I consented, but my heart has its own memory. As I lay there, I couldn’t help but think, Now I’ll be dead and he can have Ishmael back.”

“Is that why you won’t let your sons be born in Kirjath-arba?” said Abraham. “Because I didn’t choose you over God?”

Rebekah had had enough, and now she could speak her mind in a way that did not sound like an attack on Abraham alone. “Shame on all of us,” she said. “Listen to what you’ve been saying.”

“Now your wife judges her husband and her father-in-law,” said Abraham, not without amusement.

“Our babies aren’t born in order to fulfill our lives,” said Rebekah, “or to quell old fears or heal old injuries. They’ll have their own lives, and their own relationship with God, and they’ll make their own choices and create their own future. Their lives will not be about Abraham, or Isaac, or Rebekah. Their lives will be about themselves and their God. No one else stands between them. So whatever old pain you’re trying to heal, work it out between each other, but let’s keep our sons out of it.”

She rested a hand on Isaac’s head, hoping he would understands that she was sorry that she seemed to judge him. And he reached up and touched her fingers and took them gently between his own, as if to say, I love you anyway.

“I’m going to go rest now,” she said to Isaac. And to Abraham: “Your journey has worn me out.”

She waddled away toward her tent, with Deborah holding her arm.

“You were very bad to talk that way to your father-in-law,” said Deborah into her ear as they walked. “You should be more respectful.” She sounded more worried than reproachful.

Rebekah knew that she had behaved badly. That all she had really done was prove to Abraham that even if she had received a vision, she really wasn’t the sort of woman who could raise the birthright son. And yet . . . what else could she have done? He did not take polite, respectful answers as if they mattered. “He’s not the man I thought he was,” Rebekah said quietly. “He’s not the Abraham of the stories.”

“Oh, he is,” said Deborah, very seriously. “I asked long ago, when we first came here, and everybody said yes, he is the very same Abraham.”

Rebekah lay down on the bed from which she had arisen only a few minutes before. “I shouldn’t meet with people I disagree with when I’m tired,” she said. “I simply utter whatever comes to mind. I was awful.”