“Oh, Mother, how can you even think that?”

“There are many husbands who beat their wives for less reason than that,” said Mother. “No, Pillel was right. He should have had the boy killed without consulting your father first. Bethuel is too merciful for his family’s good. This boy is clearly obsessed with you. He’ll cause you harm someday.”

“Or he loves me,” said Rebekah.

“You say that as if you think it’s not the same thing,” said Mother, amused.

“Love and obsession? Tenderness and harm?”

“The man who hurt me worst in my life,” said Mother, “was the one who loved me most.”

And, when she thought about it, Rebekah realized that she could say the same thing.

What was love, then? Something to be feared and shunned, because it caused so much pain?

That was a question that was useless to ask, she realized. Love was love. You didn’t choose when it would enter your heart, any more than you chose what kind of people your own parents would be. You just loved whom you loved. And then hurt whom you hurt, and forgave whom you forgave, and lived your life day to day as best you could.

After Belbai, though, other suitors began to show up. Apparently whatever bad impression it gave when Ezbaal’s suit was rejected had faded, and even unveiled, Rebekah was still considered a good match. And Rebekah was getting older. Sooner or later, Father would say yes to one of these men, and Rebekah would agree, because if you waited too long, they stopped coming.

Late one afternoon, in the quiet hour when supper was being prepared and she had a lull in her work, Rebekah rose from the bed where she had thought to nap, went to her tent door, and prayed. She made no demands; she was not impatient. Just offered the suggestion that if God had kept her from Ezbaal in order to find a better husband for her, it would be good if he sent that husband soon.

Of course, as soon as she was through with the prayer, she realized that it wasn’t that different from her mother’s prayer to Asherah. Now it would be easy to persuade herself that any husband she ended up with must have been the answer to this prayer. After all, she prayed and . . . he came. How soon was “soon”? For that matter, how much divine intervention did there have to be for a man to seem “sent”?

There sat Mother at the door of her tent, taking advantage of the last bright light of the afternoon to work on sewing nice tight stitches in the linen of Father’s new undergarment. Feeling smug, no doubt, because she had achieved exactly what she wanted. Her story about Asherah choosing her wasn’t designed to convert Rebekah to Asherah—it was designed to make her doubt that the God of Abraham answered prayers any better.