Suddenly Leah’s voice broke the silence. “Would she marry him at the beginning or the end of his seven years?”
Father looked at her in surprise, but since it was a sensible question, he did not rebuke her. Instead he looked at Jacob. “Of course the end of the seven years. She’s far too young right now.”
“I can wait seven years,” said Jacob. “Every hour of service will be a happy one, knowing that I’m an hour closer to earning the right to be her husband.”
Rachel felt the words as if they rushed like a blush into her face. In all their conversations, he had never spoken like that to her. Words of love—this was nothing like the bantering and bragging of the boys and men of the camp as they spoke to—or, worse, about—girls.
“I will also wait the seven years,” said Rachel. “And at the end of that time, when you are free again, I will freely marry you.”
She felt Leah’s hand stroke her back. Comfort from her sister? But why should she need comfort? She had just promised her future to this man, but he was a good man, a prince that God had brought to her, first in dreams, and then in body. How could she not rejoice, to know she had set her feet upon God’s path for her?
Yet if she did not need her sister’s comfort, why was she crying, and why did her legs tremble as if they were cold? Why was her heart mourning the loss of her girlhood and the ending of her carefree days among the lambs and sheep, out in the sunlight and the rain? Why did she feel that her whole life now had closed behind her, and the future was strange and frightening? She should be feeling nothing but pure joy.
“Leah,” said Father, “your sister trembles with joy, as you will tremble someday when you accept betrothal to a good man.”
Rachel felt Leah’s hand withdraw from her. Why did she have to take offense? Father was only reassuring her that Rachel would not shame her by marrying first. Why shouldn’t he? Why did she always take it as an insult?
“Father,” said Leah, “shouldn’t Rachel remain to hear her future husband swear his bond to you? At present she isn’t sworn to any man, because Jacob remains unsworn to you.”
Jacob laughed pleasantly. “And this from a girl who has never heard priests arguing the fine points of scripture.”
“You’re right, Leah,” said Father. “Jacob, kneel before me, my brother, and become my son.”
Rachel knew, of course, that what Jacob was becoming was not a son at all, but a slave. For a fixed term of years, yes, and with the promise of becoming a son-in-law when the time was done. But not a son. Yet those were the words. So many untrue things were part of such bargains, yet it seemed as if everyone agreed that if some parts of a covenant were lies, that was all right, but if other parts were lies, a man could be killed for it. Why not just tell the truth to everyone all the time? Why all the posing? Why did Leah have to be brought in to this presentation, when everyone knew it was for Rachel that Jacob was going to make his bargain? There was a pretense of trying to assuage Leah’s feelings, but it only hurt her more; yet Leah pretended not to be hurt, at least in front of company, and Father pretended to believe that a husband just as good as Jacob would be found for her, even though everyone knew that there was no husband just as good to be had in all the world.
Jacob knelt and put his right hand on the inside of Father’s thigh. Each swore an oath to the other. Jacob swore to be Laban’s true and obedient servant for seven years, to labor for him and fight for him in battle, on the promise of Rachel’s hand in marriage at the end of those years.
And Laban answered, “Rachel my daughter will be your wife when your seven years of service are complete, and during your service I will be your good master, providing for your wants and governing you wisely.”
But my oath was given first, thought Rachel. Without my oath, there would be nothing between these men. As surely as if I stood between them, it was for love of me that this prince has humbled himself before my father.
It filled her with a rush of some heady emotion that she could not name. She was not trembling now. She felt light-footed, as if she could dance from the room, or float like a tuft of lambswool in a breeze.
“Can we go now, Father?” asked Leah.
Father looked at Rachel. “Come here, little one,” he said.
Rachel went to him.
“Give me your hand,” said Father.
She gave it to him.
“I dreaded the day I would promise you to your husband,” he said. “I’m glad that seven years will pass before I give this hand to him. And I’m glad that when I do, I will be giving you to such a man as this. What man has ever married better?” Then he turned to Jacob. “Except perhaps your father Isaac, when he took my sister Rebekah for his wife.”
“I am content to have a marriage that is the equal of my father’s,” said Jacob. “What contest can there be between youth and age? Each age has its beauties and wisdoms, and its own kind of love. May God bless us to be old together, as well as to be together in our youth.”
“Amen!” cried Father.
“Amen,” whispered Rachel.
Then Leah took her by the arm and led her kindly from the tent.
Outside, some of the women were gathered, openly weeping and smiling, eager to hug Rachel and pat her and tell her how lucky and blessed she was and what a fine man she was getting. Even Reuel had tears in his eyes, Rachel saw.
Leah stood back apart from them all, not looking.
A hand gripped Rachel’s arm tightly. Startled—because the older women had been so affectionate—she turned to find Zilpah holding her. “So it’s done?” asked the girl.
Rachel nodded, wondering why Zilpah looked so fiercely happy about it. What was this to her? Why should she care?
“Let me be your servant when you marry him,” said Zilpah.
Rachel shook her head. “That’s not mine to promise,” she said. “You don’t belong to me.”
“Your father will give you whomever you ask for,” said Zilpah.
“But that will be seven years from now. You’ll be married by then, with three fat babies.”
“No I won’t,” said Zilpah.
Rachel couldn’t help looking at the way the older girl was dressed, the way her body’s curves cried out for men to notice her, her bright eyes and full lips and smooth and slithering hair as showy as the brightest fruit on a gray-green tree.
“Yes you will,” said Rachel. “Or the boys in this camp will all run mad and marry sheep.”
Zilpah laughed and winked, as if somehow in the past few minutes they had become great friends. Then she backed away and disappeared around the outside of the tent.
One of the old women leaned close. “Stay away from that one. Low born and low bred, there’s a stain in her very breath, you can be sure.”
That seemed unfair to Rachel. Zilpah couldn’t help being born fatherless. The things Rachel didn’t like about Zilpah were those she chose herself—how she dressed, how she carried herself, and that grasping hand that had gripped Rachel’s arm as tightly as someone falling from a cliff might hold to the one sapling that might save him.
Rachel smiled politely to the older women. “Thank you, it is a happy day. Thank you. Seven years is a long time, I’m still just a girl, but yes I’m glad.”
Finally Reuel intervened. “Let the girl be. Her life has been decided tonight. Let her have some time by herself, or with her sister.”
Please not with my sister. Let me not have to worry about what Leah’s feeling.
And when she looked around, Rachel realized that her prayer had been granted before it was even thought of—Leah was not there. Leah had gone off by herself.
Reuel walked silently beside her to her tent and held the flap open for her. “Sleep in peace, little one,” said Reuel. “If your father were not so rich and important, you wouldn’t have had to think of things like this until you were old enough to want them.”
“But I do want them,” said Rachel.
Reuel smiled and shrugged. “Only becau
se you don’t yet understand what they are.”
Annoyed, Rachel turned her back on him and went inside. What did he think she didn’t understand? She knew all about marriage, all about men and women. She knew that men didn’t butt heads together the way rams did, and the winner got the ewes. But then, wasn’t the bargain between Father and Jacob just the human equivalent? I have the girl, you want her, let’s see who has the bigger, stronger set of horns, and the thicker head.
She undressed herself, laying out the dress for a servant to fold and put away, and then knelt to pray. If he’s going to be a good husband to me, Lord, then please keep him safe, let no accident take him from me, no sudden disease, no assassin from an enemy, no terrible fall from a high place while he’s tending sheep. And if he’s going to be a hard man, a cruel husband—for some men are cruel, who seem to others to be good—then let me die before the seven years are up, so I don’t have to be disappointed in him.
She thought she was done with her prayer, but then thought of something else that needed saying.
“Dear God,” she whispered, “give my sister Leah a husband as good as mine, so she can be happy as I am happy.”
PART VI
HOLY
BOOKS
CHAPTER 11
At first Jacob took little time with their study. It was Reuel who taught Leah and Bilhah the shapes and sounds of the letters. It made little sense to Leah. “So when I see this shape, I say ‘ba.’”
“No,” Reuel explained patiently. “You say ‘buh.’”
“So how do I write ‘ba’?”
“With this letter,” said Reuel. “But it could be ‘ba’ or ‘buh’ or ‘beh’ or ‘bi.’”
“Then how do I know anything? A letter to say just ‘b’ makes no sense. You can’t even say ‘b’ without some sound after it.”
“Look, we don’t have to have all the sounds on the papyrus. Just the hard sounds, and let the singing sounds be whatever they are.”
Leah simply hated the thought that words could be broken into pieces like that, and only some of the pieces be written down. It made reading so hard, to have to guess what went between, and where words stopped and started.
But finally the conceptual battle was won, and Leah could kneel down and scratch the letters in the dirt, and read the letters Bilhah scratched, and they could make words and sentences out of them, and read them readily enough. Of course, Bilhah could read them standing up, while Leah had to bow down and put her face close to the earth to see what was written. But when Jacob came and saw them working at their reading, he said, “It’s good to bow down when you prepare to read the words of God.” So from then on, Leah did not mind her humble posture.
Of course, Bilhah also began to kneel when she wrote and read, even though she didn’t have to. Which might not have been what Jacob intended, but Leah rather liked the effect, the both of them kneeling together; and if Leah bowed lower, then that only made her closer to God, and that’s what all this was for, wasn’t it? To find God’s will for her?
When they could read and write with some ease, Jacob began to spend more time with them—but still he did not bring out a single holy book. Instead he gave them brushes and taught them to write with ink on stones. “Papyrus is expensive and has to be brought from Egypt,” said Jacob. “But ink I make myself, and stones are free. So now you will learn to write on stones and read from rocks. The Lord made them all, didn’t he?”
Leah laughed, for she could hear in his voice that he was smiling when he said it. A jest—because it didn’t matter what they wrote on. Holy books were holy because the words spoke of God and the men and women who served him. If they were scratched in dirt, it made the dirt holy; if the words were swept away, then it would just be dirt again.
There came a point in every session, though, when Leah’s head would hurt and her eyes would be too tired to work any more. That was when she would lie back and cover her eyes and Bilhah would continue her practice alone. Sometimes Leah would say words and Bilhah would write them down; later, when Reuel or Jacob came by, they would read what Bilhah had written and Leah would tell them whether that was what she said. Bilhah became very skilled at it—more so than Leah, but that was to be expected. She had more practice at it, and she could see better to start with.
Gradually, Bilhah’s handwriting became quick and graceful and small—so small that if Leah held it close enough to her eyes to read it, she cast a shadow on the stone and then could not read anything at all. “Don’t worry, Leah,” Bilhah said. “You’ll be able to read the holy books. The stones are grey, but papyrus is white.”
“You could also write larger,” said Leah pointedly.
“But this is the size that Jacob told me I had to be able to read and write. If you write too large, you can use up whole scrolls on just a tiny portion of a book. So the writing is small, to fit whole books on as few scrolls as possible.”
“I was there,” said Leah testily. “I heard.”
“But your eyes were closed,” said Bilhah. “You were resting. You didn’t see the size of the writing he showed me.”
Leah sighed. She didn’t understand why Bilhah always had to taunt her with her blindness. What Bilhah could do easily, and for hours at a time, Leah could do only for a little while, and it remained a struggle. Yet Bilhah could not resist using her superior vision to clinch a point in an argument. I’ve seen, you haven’t.
Well, with my ears I “see” more than most people do with their eyes. I hear in your voice how you brighten whenever Jacob is near, how your voice sings with a music that is never there for Reuel, or for me. That’s my sister’s husband you’re falling in love with, foolish girl. You may be free, but you’re not free to do that.
At last came the day when Jacob and Reuel both agreed that Leah and Bilhah were as ready as they were going to be. It was time to bring out the holy books, or at least one of them, and begin to hear the words of God.
They would need bright sunlight to read by—or at least Leah would—so Jacob had several men help him stretch a fence of cloth to make a dooryard around the entrance to his tent. This would keep the eyes of curiosity away from the scrolls.
Leah and Bilhah sat on rugs facing the tent flap. Jacob emerged with a low table, which he laid where it would be close to both girls and to him, once he sat down. Then he returned to the tent and came back a few moments later with a cloth-wrapped bundle. This he set on the table, and when he had sat behind it, he unwrapped a scroll which was tied with a thong of soft leather. He untied it, and pried up the leading edge of the papyrus, and at last the words of God unrolled on the table before them.
Jacob turned the scroll so the writing faced the girls.
The trouble was, Leah could see nothing on the scrolls at all.
“Lean down close to it,” said Bilhah softly. “The writing is there.”
But even though she put her face so close her nose brushed against the papyrus, the writing was never more than a set of grey smudges to her. She could tell that in the midst of the vertical bands of grey there were letters, but when she put her face close enough to read, her head cast a shadow on the papyrus.
She felt tears coming to her eyes and sat up quickly, to keep them from falling on the book and smearing the ink. “I can’t read it,” she said.
“We always knew that was possible,” said Jacob. “That’s why we made sure Bilhah learned beside you.”
“But I hoped,” said Leah.
“We all hoped.”
“I prayed,” she murmured.
“God’s answer seems to be that you can hear his word, but in the voice of Bilhah.”
“Then I’m glad I have this friend to help me,” said Leah.
“Thank you for letting me be that friend,” said Bilhah.
Jacob slid the papyrus slightly on the table, so now it faced Bilhah completely.
“I don’t know this word,” said Bilhah.
“It’s a name,” said Jacob. “Enoch.”
“
I don’t know who that is,” said Bilhah.
“He was the grandfather of Noah,” said Leah. “He was taken up by God, he and the whole city of Zion, because they were so holy.” She turned to Jacob. “Is this where that story is written?”
“One of the places. But not till the very end. This is the book of the revelations of Enoch. An account of his warnings to the wicked, and then of his promises to the righteous, and then his great hymn of praise to God, who walked among the people of Zion like any man, and they gathered at his feet to be taught wisdom.”
The way we gather at your feet, thought Leah.
“Go ahead,” said Jacob. “Read it! But don’t expect it to be easy. It uses many strange words that my father had to teach me. I’ll teach them to you, as well. Except that there are a few whose meaning is entirely lost. It’s as if God has chosen to make us forget some of his secrets, that once our holy ancestor Enoch knew.”
“If Enoch could know it, why can’t we?” said Leah.
“These things are controlled by God, not men, and so the reasons can only be discovered by asking him, not me.”
Leah smiled. “So to have the holy books does not necessarily mean you understand them.”
“If I understood them perfectly,” said Jacob, “I wouldn’t need holy books, I’d be a holy man.”
“I thought you were a holy man,” said Bilhah.
Leah silently sighed at the worship in the girl’s voice.
“I’m a man who loves holiness and strives for it,” said Jacob. “But that doesn’t make me holy. Not like Enoch. God spoke to him face to face. Like a man to his brother. Enoch walked with God, the way Adam and Eve did in the garden.”
A question occurred to Leah and she blurted it out. “Did his wife, too?”
Rachel and Leah (Women of Genesis) Page 13