He stood in silence, and she wondered: Is he looking at me? Are his eyes so good that in this faint light, he can see something to look at?
“They told me your eyes were very tender, and you couldn’t walk about alone,” said Jacob.
“You know who I am?”
“I’ve met everyone in the camp but you, Cousin Leah,” said Jacob. “I was beginning to think you were my brother Laban’s dearest treasure, that he dared not let out where covetous eyes might see.”
She couldn’t stop herself from chuckling a bit, though she hoped the bitterness in her heart could not be heard in her voice.
“Too tender-eyed to walk in the day, but like a hunting cat, you prowl the darkness and find your way by scent and sound and the feel of the wind in your face.”
She loved him in that moment. She had not meant to. She was here to speak to the priest, not the prince, and certainly not the man. And yet it was the man’s voice that stirred her. The voice of the poet who had found words to make her affliction seem like a mystery.
“Oh sir,” she whispered.
“Jacob,” he said. “I’m your cousin, not your master.”
“I came to speak to you of the holy books.”
He did not answer. Had she crossed some invisible line? Should she not have spoken of them? If only she could see his face!
In the continuing silence she flailed about for words to cover whatever misstep she had taken. “Shouldn’t I have mentioned them? Is it forbidden to ask?”
“No, no,” he said. “I was only waiting for you to tell me what you wanted.”
“Can we … the camp is coming awake, and my question is … private.”
“But it wouldn’t be right for me to take you into my tent in the darkness,” he said.
“That’s not—of course I—”
He took her by the arm. “Here,” he said. “Let’s sit under the awning. People will see that we’re in conversation and no one will disturb us. But it will still be in the open.”
He was so careful, to care for her honor. Or was this a veiled rebuke to her for having been so careless of her own reputation?
“What did you want to know about the holy books?”
“I don’t know enough even to know what to ask,” she said. “My question is a hard one.” And now that she loved him, loved his voice, the poetry of his words, she could hardly bear to bare her heart the way that she had planned. And yet if she could not speak to God’s servant, how could she ever hear God’s word to her? “Sir. Cousin Jacob. It’s just that I … I don’t know whether the holy books contain what I hope for, but I …”
“You have a question, and you want God’s answer.”
“It’s not a matter of law, you see. My father teaches us the law, though I’m sure he doesn’t know as much about it as you and your father and his father did.”
“Your father is a wise and worthy man, and his camp is known as a place where the law is kept and justice and mercy are both well served.”
“Yes, you see? It’s not to know what’s right or wrong. It’s to know why something is the way it is. Why God has ordered the world a certain way, when …”
“When it seems so unfair to you.”
She almost gasped at his wisdom. “Sir, do you already know my heart?”
“No,” he said, chuckling. “Do you think I didn’t have the same questions? Do you think you’re the only one?”
“But how could you have questions like mine?” she asked.
He laughed again, more of a hiss than a laugh, really. “A boy who loved the holy books, with a father who loved them also, and the boy wanted nothing more than to sit at his father’s feet and read the books aloud and hear how his father explained the word of God. Only the father loved his brother better, the brother who had the birthright but despised it, who lived only to ride out to hunt, to lead a band of men in pursuit of raiders and slaughter them all. The violent man, the hairy, bloody-handed man who thought that it was for old men to sit in a tent door and read and write. He was the one his father loved.”
Leah could not believe how easily he spoke of it; and yet now she saw that it must be that way, that the stories of Esau were true, only she had never stopped to imagine what it must be like to be Esau’s younger brother. “Yet you have the birthright now,” she whispered.
“I do,” he said. “I tried to get it by bargaining, and Esau gave it to me with laughter, with contempt, because he knew that he could reach out and take it back from me whenever he wanted. I tried to get it my mother’s way, by trickery. I could fool my father, but how could I imagine I might fool God? In the end, my father gave it to me as he should, not because I reached for it, nor even because I deserved it, but because he is a man of God, and God led him at the last moment to do his will. Like Abraham finding the ram in the thicket, and sparing his beloved son.”
“So you know,” said Leah. “What it means to be …”
“What it means to be alive when God seems to have no purpose for you,” said Jacob.
“You knew before I even spoke,” she said, tears on her cheeks, but not really weeping, was she? Her voice was still under her control. And in this dim light, perhaps he didn’t even see her tears.
“No,” he said. “Or yes, I did, but not by the gift of God. I heard your father speak of you, and Rachel, and others. Your father and sister love you, but they also speak of you like someone apart from the life of the camp. Like a painted clay cup among the carven bowls, fragile, not to be used. And even before I met you, I wondered what it was like for you, and whether you understood God’s purpose for you.”
“I don’t,” she said. “And I think sometimes that he has no purpose. That I’m here only to be a burden on my father. Until he can find a man willing to marry a wife who can barely see. Not that I’m blind. I found my way here, didn’t I?”
“You didn’t have to come to my tent to find your way to God,” said Jacob. “Why didn’t you ask him?”
“What makes you think I haven’t? A thousand times. As many times as I’ve had days in my life.”
“So you think he hasn’t answered you.”
“I think he has,” said Leah. And she summoned enough courage to finish her thought. “I think he sent you to answer my question.”
“But how can I know the answer?” said Jacob. “I’ve never seen you before this morning.”
“You have the holy books,” said Leah. “All of God’s words are there, aren’t they? Even his words to me, aren’t they?”
“What do you think the holy books are?” asked Jacob.
“Father said—the way I understood it … aren’t all of God’s plans for humankind written there? Father says God knows the end from the beginning, and every soul who ever lived or will ever live. I thought … they say that Abraham knew the path of every star. And since everyone knows that the stars guide the lives of men and women in this world, then somewhere in the book he must have charted the course of my star.”
To her embarrassment, Jacob laughed. Softly, but any laughter cut her to the heart.
“No, no,” he said soothingly. “How could you know? Who teaches such things to girls? Or to boys, for that matter. Have patience with me. No one has ever come to me like this, asking for counsel. It’s good that you want to know, and it’s true that there are answers to be found in the holy books. I’ve found them there, but not the way you think.”
“How then?” she said.
“To start with,” said Jacob, “that idea about the stars telling the lives of every person—it’s just not true. That’s what they teach in Babylon and Sumer. What the false priests of Elkenah teach. They made it all up to gain power over people, by pretending to have the secrets of all knowledge. But the stars aren’t tied to people that way.”
“But then what are the stars for?” asked Leah.
“That’s what Abraham taught us. The stars are really suns, like our sun, only far away. We don’t see them in the daytime because our own star, the s
un, shines so brightly. But they’re there all the time, day and night, shining down on worlds of their own, like ours. God made them all, and he knows their times and seasons. All that we’re given to know is our own world, and our own sun, and our own times and seasons. But to God it’s all known.”
“Abraham knew it, though?”
“He knew it but he didn’t write it all. Every star? It wasn’t important for us to know every star, so there was no reason to write it. There isn’t papyrus enough in all the world to write all the creations of God, and if we could write it there isn’t room enough to hold all the scrolls on the whole surface of the earth. No, what Abraham wrote was the same thing Noah wrote, and Enoch, and Adam when he first kept the book of remembrance as the Lord commanded at the very dawn of time.”
“And what is that?”
“The covenants of God with men, and the doings of men in the eyes of God. His judgments and his mercy, his laws and his love, and how his children serve him sometimes, and fail him often, and rebel against him in every generation. His sorrow for us, and his punishment, and his generosity and atonement.”
“But that’s what I want to hear,” she said.
“No,” said Jacob. “What’s written here is what God has done for others, and what you want is to learn what he has in mind for you.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I want. To know why God bothered to make me, to be a burden on everyone.”
“Your eyes are lovely,” said Jacob. “Dark and beautiful wells, deep with the promise of wisdom. But they don’t serve you well, those eyes—lovely to look at, but hard to see out of, and it puts a high fence around your life, so you’re a lamb that can never leave the fold and go out onto the grassy hills.”
He knows my heart and yet he describes it in words that are not bitter but beautiful. Does he really see me this way?
“But the holy books don’t have any passages addressed to Leah, daughter of Laban,” he said. “There are words of God to prophets, and words of God to the people of each prophet’s own time. And there are words of the prophets to the people, and stories of the prophets’ lives, and stories of the lives of people who weren’t prophets, some of them even the enemies of God.”
“Then there would be no answers for me.”
“Ah, but there you’d be wrong,” said Jacob. “Here is how God speaks to us through the holy books. First, when I read the stories, I think, is this like my life? Can I learn from this how to live my life closer to God? Second, when I read the covenants and laws, I think, am I keeping these covenants? Am I breaking these laws?”
“But that’s your own thinking, not the voice of God.”
“It’s me thinking about the voice of God. He has already spoken. I have to use my ears to hear him. But then, when my own reading and thinking have taken me nowhere, and I still don’t understand, then I pray and I read again, and this time Wisdom comes into my heart while I read, and now words and phrases come to life on the page, and things that I read before without understanding now say something new and clear, and my eyes are opened.”
“Your eyes are open,” said Leah. “But what about me? I don’t have the holy books, and even if I did, how could I read them?”
“When I was born, I didn’t know how to read. I learned.”
“But you had eyes that could see.”
“And you have servants that can learn and read aloud,” said Jacob.
“You have these books as your birthright,” said Leah. “Would you give them to a servant to read to me?”
“I would let you and your servant come into my tent during the day, and read. When I’m here, I will explain what I can, if you have questions. This birthright is not given to me to hoard, but to share.”
Leah could hardly breathe.
“Who is your handmaiden? Bilhah? The mosaic-maker’s daughter?”
Had he learned the story of every man and woman and child in Laban’s camp?
“I think she can learn to read to you,” said Jacob. “I think she already knows a kind of writing, so it will be easier to learn another.”
Now it seemed silly to her, that quarrel with Bilhah. The girl had meant well. It’s not as if she said anything untrue. Bilhah was young and tainted by the city; of course she could only think of a woman’s life as leading to marriage. But it wasn’t marriage Leah would get from Jacob. It was the path that would lead her to Wisdom. Marriage to a man whose affection was nothing but pity would not make her happy, but Wisdom would.
Bilhah would bring Wisdom to Leah, not out of her extravagant imaginings of the stranger from the southern desert who falls in love with the half-blind girl, ignoring her beautiful sister, but from Bilhah’s learning to read aloud the words of God and the prophets out of Jacob’s holy books.
Bringing the birthright of Abraham into her life.
PART V
BARGAINS
CHAPTER 9
Bilhah crested a hill and stopped, for there on the plain below her she could see, for the first time, the great city of Byblos. For a moment she forgot to breathe, and then took in great gasps of air, to keep herself from sobbing in relief. In her year in a herdsman’s camp, had she forgotten how much she loved the city? No, she had never known how much she loved it, because until her father died the city had surrounded her like water around a fish. And when she left, she had been grieving for her father, and hardly thought of the city itself.
She had even imagined that she hated those crowded streets—after all, it was precisely that crowding that had crushed the life out of her father.
But now, seeing the walls of the buildings, white or brown or grey, yet all bright in the bright sun of early afternoon, and the roofs of thatch or tile, she was filled with a sudden longing for all that she had lost when she left the city behind. To live in a place where she didn’t know everyone and exactly what their business was, where life was never the same two days in a row, where sheep and goats did not outnumber people, where you might catch bits of a hundred different songs and conversations during a five minute walk … how had she stayed away so long? Leah had done her such a favor by ordering her to go.
Just because she could see the city, though, did not mean she was close to it. She had a long way to go on this winding road, and she would not get there before dark unless she quickened her pace. She was hungry and thirsty, having brought only one small water sack and nothing but her breakfast bread and cheese, which had not even lasted her till noon. She knew that she was probably hungry precisely because she knew there was nothing she could do about it. And it might get worse before it got better, for no one in the city would be expecting her. But certainly one of her father’s friends would take her in, if only for a night or two, and then she would go to the men who followed her father’s art and offer herself as an assistant, a skilled sorter of tile shards. She could earn a living for herself and not be dependent upon the whims of a spoiled, angry, self-pitying child.
“Are you already a harlot, or merely planning to become one?”
The voice startled her, for she had not heard anyone approach; and then, when she realized what the man had said, she responded with all the venom she could put into her voice, “What kind of man looks at a girl my age and thinks such a vile thought?”
The man—who was not tall, and not old, and scruffy-bearded—merely laughed. “Hundreds of men on this road would look at a girl like you, walking alone, and wonder what her master charges for her services. The men who are more fatherly than lustful will shake their heads and wonder what vile turn of life left you without protection. While the truly evil men—who are, fortunately, rare in this world, will say to themselves, this girl has been walking alone for miles, and carries no burden. Perhaps she has no master, or has run away, and no one will miss her. So I can take her by force, and use her up, and leave her so that no other will ever have her except for the wild scavenging animals of these mountains, and for those few minutes I’ll have the power of a savage god over her, and no one wi
ll hear her scream.”
He said this so pleasantly that the sense of his words almost failed to register with her. “Are you trying to frighten me, sir?”
“Why would I want to do that?” he said. “Any girl who wanders this road alone must fear nothing at all. The only surprise is that you got this far without meeting one kind of man or another.”
“I have met many men and women on this road today,” she said, “but none spoke to me except to offer me peace.” She turned away and continued walking down the road. The city fell out of sight below the next hill.
He walked behind her. “A girl who is determined on harlotry must choose her master carefully. For she will have a master, one way or another—if she lives at all.”
Now she was frightened, for it was obvious that he had something in mind for her.
“A kind master can make sure you are offered only to the gentlest of clients, the kind who pretend they want their young girls to feel pleasure rather than pain. A kind master will teach a girl patiently and well how to ply her trade, and dress her richly in fine clothing instead of a scrap of a rag. A kind master will keep her well fed, with plenty of drink to help her forget what she has become.”
The road widened, and she darted to the left, then ran back up the road, passing him. He did not reach out to try to stop her, but he did turn to follow.
“How far have you already walked? Will you make it back home before dark? If not, some mountain cat might find you. Some beast of prey whose heart knows nothing of beauty, but only hunger. One way or another, girl, you’re bound to be devoured today, unless someone takes you under protection.” She was back at the crest of the hill, but without even breaking into a run, he had nearly kept up with her, so she could not catch more than a glance at the city that now seemed infinitely out of reach.
“I’m a strong man,” he said. “I offer my protection. My companionship. The shelter of my fine tent, not far from here, where I offer a bed to travelers, and all the comforts of home, only without the nagging.”
Rachel and Leah (Women of Genesis) Page 10