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Back Rebekah Save as PDF
Chapters (16)
  1. Preface
  2. Chapter 1
  3. Chapter 2
  4. Chapter 3
  5. Chapter 4
  6. Chapter 5
  7. Chapter 6
  8. Chapter 7
  9. Chapter 8
  10. Chapter 9
  11. Chapter 10
  12. Chapter 11
  13. Chapter 12
  14. Chapter 13
  15. Chapter 14
  16. Chapter 15

Then she returned to her own tent, eager to sleep and get this awful day behind her. And yet, awful as it had been, angry as she still was about having been cheated out of years that could never be restored, she realized she was also eager to wake up in the morning and begin her new life, not as a wife, but as a daughter to this woman that God had finally restored to her, even though Mother did not believe in him. For if God’s hand wasn’t in it, how could all these things have come together as they did?

Part III

Chosen

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Never in Rebekah’s lifetime had the camp of Bethuel been happier than in the days and months after Mother’s return. Everyone seemed to sing when they weren’t talking, and the talk was filled with laughter; yet everyone worked as hard as ever, and with the year’s good rains there was plenty of pasturage and so they prospered.

Was it this way, everyone so constantly cheerful, before Mother was exiled? Rebekah suspected not—back then, there would have been tension, with Mother sneaking around to worship Asherah and Father laying down the law. No doubt some of the servants back then had disliked her for disobeying Father, while others probably resented Father for trying to keep Mother from worshiping the god she loved best.

Now, though, the euphoria reminded Rebekah of the time she found a lost doll. It was a foolish, poor thing, a toy made for her by Deborah with little care for workmanship, and played with by Rebekah when she was a toddler with no sense of just how much torture the cloth and seams of the doll could withstand. In time she had wearied of it, set it aside, and forgotten it.

Then, when she was about ten years old, she happened to be rummaging through a pile of guest-rugs in search of one suitable for a noteworthy visitor, and what should she find between two rugs near the bottom of the stack? Her old doll, mashed flat by the weight of the rugs, still threadbare and seam-tattered.

Rebekah had no use for dolls by then, being much too busy with the real life of the camp, and she had stopped caring about this one long ago, or it would never have been lost. Yet in the moment of finding it, it became a treasure. She pulled it out and ran to show Deborah and then Father, rejoicing. She put the doll in a place of honor in her tent, where it remained even today, the emblem of her childhood.

Mother’s return was something like that, Rebekah believed. She had become the lost treasure, found again. And, like the doll, her mere presence was cause for everyone to celebrate. It was not Mother herself, but the finding of her, the restoration of what was lost.