For that matter, you didn’t have to be simpleminded for the distinction to seem meaningless. Once you knelt before an image of stone, the stone began to be your god, and not the God the stone supposedly represented. It was that simple and always had been. That was why Abraham did not claim Terah’s images along with the birthright. He knew the images were false by their very nature, and could never be anything else. The keeper of the birthright knew that every stone of the earth showed the power of God, but none could contain his image.

Father has been wrong, just as his father was wrong, and Terah before him.

How do I know these things? How can I be so sure? If my father is wrong, then who taught me the true religion that I feel here in my heart? Not my mother, surely—none of her words, no sound of her voice remains in my memory. Not my nurse—Deborah understands nothing. How did I learn these things with such certainty that I know I’m right even if both Father and Pillel stand against me?

From Abraham.

From a man she had never met. All she had of him were stories, what he did, a few things he said. The way he faced death at the hands of a priest of Pharaoh in Ur-of-the-North, and God sent an earthquake to knock down the idols of the temple and save his life. The way he refused any reward when he saved the kings of the cities of the plain, lest anyone think that these kings had made him rich, for the only wealth he had was what had been given him by God. The way he trusted in the promise of God that he would have children as numberless as the sands of the sea, as the stars of heaven, even though his wife was as barren as a dried-out stick. The way he refused to take the gods his father had carved to represent the God of heaven and his Servant, by whose word all his creations were made.

She had learned her religion from the stories of Abraham and Sarah, and then assumed that her father understood things the same way. And he did! He had to! He was not a fool, he had to have learned the same things from these stories that Rebekah had. Pillel was wrong. Father would agree at once when he was reminded that no marriage could be entered into without protecting her right to worship the God of Abraham, and him alone.

“You don’t look happy,” said Deborah.

“I’m worried a little, that’s all.”

“If he doesn’t make you happy, I don’t want you to marry him, no matter how rich he is,” said Deborah.

“And I won’t, either,” said Rebekah. “If he doesn’t make me happy.”