Rebekah: Women of Genesis Read Free Page A

can figure it out.”
     
    “If we make fun of their gods, people in the towns will shut us out,” Laban reminded her. It was one of the rules learned by those who moved from place to place, following green grass and searching for ample water.
     
    Rebekah knew the rule. “I was making fun of the priests.” She looked again at Laban’s drawings in the dirt. “Let’s show Father as much as we’ve figured out about writing.”
     
    “I don’t want to show him until we have it right.”
     
    “Maybe he can help us get  it right.  Maybe he knows how Uncle Abraham does it.”
     
    “And in the meantime, how will I draw a picture of us not knowing how to draw pictures of things we can’t draw pictures of?”
     
    “If you draw something and he doesn’t understand, then at least he’ll understand that we don’t know how to make him understand, and that’s what we’re trying to make him understand.”
     
    Laban grinned. “Now you’re sounding like a priest.”
     
    Rebekah laughed. “The Lord is not made of stone, he is in the stone. The Lord is not confined by the stone, he is expressed by the stone. Since the Lord was in the stonecutter who shaped the image, the idol is both man’s gift to the Lord and the Lord’s gift to man.”
     
    Laban whistled. “You listen to that stuff?”
     
    “I listen to everything,” said Rebekah. Her own words made her think of Father, who could never listen to anything again.
     
    “I listen to everything, too,” said Laban. “But you remember it.”
     
    “That has to be the worst thing for Father,” said Rebekah. “That he remembers being able to hear. Being at the center of everything.”
     
    “What, you think it would have been better if he had always been deaf? Who would have married him, then? Who would be our father?”
     
    “Father would,” said Rebekah. “Because Mother would have loved him anyway.”
     
    “But Mother’s father would never have given her to a deaf man in marriage.”
     
    “She would have married him anyway!”
     
    “Now you’re just being silly,” said Laban. “Would you marry a . . . a blind  man? A cripple? A simpleton?”
     
    “I would if I loved him,” said Rebekah.
     
    “That’s why fathers decide these things, and don’t leave them up to silly girls who would go off and marry blind, deaf, staggering fools.”
     
    Laban said this so loftily that she had to poke him. “But Laban, someday Father will have to find a wife for you. ”
     
    “I’m not a . . . I don’t . . . I refuse to let you goad me.”
     
    Rebekah laughed at his dignity. “Let’s go show Father as much writing as we’ve got.”
     
    “I don’t want him to see how bad we are at it.”
     
    “The only way to get better is to do it wrong till we get it right. Like you with sheep shearing.”
     
    Laban blushed. “You really do remember everything.”
     
    “I remember eating lots of mutton,” said Rebekah. “I remember you wearing an ugly tunic woven out of bloody wool.”
     
    “You were only a baby.”
     
    “Come on,” she said, pulling him toward the brightest-colored tent that marked the center of their father’s household.
     
    They did not clap their hands outside the tent, or call out for permission to enter—what good would it have done? That was one of the things Rebekah knew Father hated worst—the fact that people now had no choice but to walk in on him at whatever hour they thought their need was more important than his privacy. Or his dignity. He had tried keeping a servant at his door, but either his visitors ignored the servant or the servant kept out people Father needed to see, and besides, it was not as if the household could afford to keep a man away from his real work just to sit at the master’s door all day. So Laban parted the tent flap and peered inside.
     
    Father was going over tally sticks with Pillel. Because Rebekah knew that Pillel had just been to the hills south of the river, she knew