At first Rebekah thought, How can he know? Does he hear through his feet? And then she realized: She is saying the only thing she can say. She is thanking him for not slaying her son for his disloyalty and ingratitude, for slandering his daughter and speaking of her as if she were any man’s woman, a harlot. She is begging for mercy.

Father spoke to Laban. “Have Pillel give her three days’ provisions, and let her take her clothing, and her son’s clothing, and coppers for a room.”

Laban was outraged. “Coppers!” he wrote. “If he touched Rebekah, would he get silver?”

Father slapped his son lightly across the face. “I will not have you face me down. I forgive you because you spoke in anger, on your sister’s behalf. But if you had told me at the beginning, we would not have come to this day, and your sister would not have seen or heard any of this. So do not condemn me for showing mercy to Khaneah and her son, when you depend on my mercy as well.” He reached down and took the woman by the hand and lifted her up. “If she returns to harlotry that is her choice, but let God never reproach me that she did it because I sent her away penniless.”

Weeping, she clung to his hand and kissed it until he drew away from her. As soon as his back was to her, several of the servant women threw stones that landed at her feet. The message was clear. It was time for her to go.

Laban spoke to her. “Wait there, by that cedar tree, until I come to you with the coppers my father is giving to you because he loves God, and not because you deserve anything but stones from us.”

Still weeping, she nodded, and shambled over to her son. Roughly she dragged him along behind her, heading for the cedar.

Rebekah saw no more, because Father took her by the hand and, gently but irresistibly, led her to his tent. Rebekah wanted to wait until she could calm Deborah down, for her nurse was still agitated, on the edge of crying. “Laban, explain it to Deborah,” she called. She could see Laban forcing himself to calm down so he could soothe the poor woman, and then Father had her inside the tent.

He spoke to her haltingly, filled with shame. “That a daughter of mine should have suffered such things. Heard such things, and in my own house, and from the son of a whore.”

Rebekah wrote in the patch of dirt they always kept open inside his tent: “She was not a whore in your household.”

Father embraced her. “You are a child of mercy. But how will I ever erase his words from your memory? You remember everything, and so this ugliness will be inside you forever, poor child, poor child.”