The task in this novel was to show how good people can sometimes do bad things to those they love most. The story of Rebekah could easily be taken as a case study in how not to run a family. But if there’s anything I’ve learned in my fifty years of life, it’s that people doing the best they can often get it wrong, and all you can do afterward is try to ameliorate the damage and avoid the same mistakes in the future. Good people aren’t good because they never cause harm to others. They’re good because they treat others the best way they know how, with the understanding that they have. Too often in our public life we condemn people for well-meant errors, and then insist that everyone should forgive people whose errors were intentional and who attempted, not to make amends, but to avoid consequences. Good and bad have been stood on their head by people who should have known better. How do we live in such a world? Isaac was headed for a disastrously wrong decision; Rebekah chose an equally wrong method of stopping him. The question of which wrong was worse is not even interesting to me. They both meant well; they both acted badly; but in the end, the result was a good one because good people made the best of it despite all the mistakes.

Much of what goes on in this novel is speculation. I know that some people have a specific set of theological “meanings” assigned to Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, and there is no room in their picture of these men for Isaac to have had anything other than perfect agreement with all that his father did. While that is not impossible, I find it highly unlikely. Prophets are human beings, too, and the feelings of human beings are not always responsive to our intellectual understanding. Isaac might well have agreed that his father made the right choice. But to me it seems inevitable that Isaac would come away from that scene on a mountain in Moriah with a great deal of pain at the knowledge that when his father was commanded to kill him, the old man did not love his son so much that he could not do it.