Rebekah wrote, “I understand that you didn’t want me to hate you.”

“No, no,” said Bethuel. “Oh, well, of course I didn’t want you to hate me, but I would have borne that as the consequence of my choice, if that’s what it took. No, I had to lie to you so you wouldn’t grow up hating God.”

That hadn’t occurred to Rebekah.

“Your mother, driven away from her home because she wouldn’t worship God. No, worse, because she wouldn’t worship only God. Would you hate your father? No, because your father was merely obeying the Lord. It’s God you would be angry at.”

“Eventually I would have understood,” she wrote.

“And eventually I would have told you,” he said. “But what was the day? When would I know it was time to tell you? That’s when I turned coward. I could have told you when you were old enough to start leading the women of the camp. Surely there was no reason to keep the secret any longer then. But it was easier to let things go on as they were. I didn’t want to see the hurt and anger that . . . that I saw today.”

Father sighed. “But all along, I was punished. Surely you understand that, Rebekah. Because I missed her. She was the joy of my life, and I had sent her away. As you grew, though, you were so much like her. You had her face, her voice. And the way you could outtalk anybody!”

Mother laughed. “Oh, that’s not just from me.”

Father did not hear her, of course. “Rebekah, I loved you for yourself, but I also loved you for the echo of your mother in everything you did. And then that wagon fell on me in the stream, and I lost my hearing, and then I understood that God was not going to let me go unpunished for taking your mother from you.”

“It wasn’t God,” said Rebekah, “it was an accident.”

“It was my own words,” said Bethuel. “When your mother was leaving, I acted very stern and calm—now that was a lie!—and I said to her, like this terrible curse, ‘Your voice shall never again be heard in my house.’ It was meant to be a curse on her, for having deceived me about Asherah. But instead, when my hearing was taken away from me just before your voice changed and became womanly—became like your mother—well, I realized that I had cursed myself. Your mother’s voice was going to be heard in this camp, whether she returned or not, because you were going to sound just like her, the way you looked like her. So I had to go deaf, don’t you see? So my curse would be fulfilled.”

“Do you think God keeps a tally of such things?” asked Rebekah. “I think he has better things to do.”