“All right,” he said. “Half the apologies we have to make in life are precisely for telling the truth, but right now, anyway, don’t waste time apologizing to me. I’m the one who has to apologize to you.”

She agreed completely, of course, but out of courtesy started to protest that he didn’t need to. Again he stopped her. “It’s late, and I’m a tired old man with a new bride, so let me get straight to the point. I owe you an explanation. More important than a mere apology. You need to know why your father would do the things I did.”

Rebekah nodded, set down the stick, and turned to face him more directly. She would listen, answering with her face instead of written words.

“I loved your mother more than anything or anyone in the world, until you and Laban were born,” said Father. “And then a strange thing happened. It brought me closer to her than ever, but there could be no doubt of it—I loved my children more than my wife, more than anything. And I feared for you, all the things that could go wrong. All the dangers in the world. Wild animals. Marauders. Disease. Famine. Storms. Things I could protect you from, and things I could do nothing about. You could fall in a stream and drown. You could climb a rock and fall. Whatever I did, wherever I went, there it was in the back of my mind, this constant worry about you. I never felt that about your mother. She was a strong, wise woman, even if she was city-born, and she had taken to life in the camp quite naturally. So I didn’t worry about her. I knew she’d be all right.”

Father took a deep breath. “But your mother never understood God. She worshiped with me, as a good wife should. But she couldn’t see why it was any of my business that she worshiped other gods as well. Especially Asherah. It drove me mad sometimes. I wanted so much for her to understand that the God of heaven is real—so real that you don’t have to pretend to see him or make an image to look at.”

Rebekah refrained from looking at the little gods that sat on a low table in the corner.

But he must have seen her stop herself from glancing that way. “Let’s not have that argument again, not right now,” he said. “Let’s just say that even as I took every precaution I could against all the other dangers in the world, the one thing I feared most—that you would grow up without respect for the true and living God—the greatest danger to you came, not from some outside threat, but from your own mother.”