Sarah: Women of Genesis: 1 (Women of Genesis (Forge)) (43 page)

There is a middle ground between hostile skeptics who refuse to accept any evidence that suggests the biblical account is real and the fervent apologists who have never found a “proof” they didn’t love. The virtue of this middle ground is not that it somehow averages the errors of both extremes, but rather that it fits the evidence far better and is less likely to lead to foolish self-blindedness. The middle ground is this: The biblical accounts are all authentic in that those who wrote them, those who copied them, and those who included them in later compilations all believed them to be true and sacred.

This isn’t a very hard concept to swallow. After all, Homer’s account of the Trojan War and its aftermath, while obviously embellished, nevertheless faithfully records the culture of the era when the tale was first told—which may be very near to the epoch in which the events the tale was based on first happened. And when those details were checked, they were found to be echoed in the archaeological record. It’s easy to forget now that the same sort of critic who today claims that the biblical stories were all made up by scribes after 1000 b.c. and usually far later have their roots in the same scholarly tradition that insisted that all of Homer was a work of fiction barely older than the first plays of Aeschylus.

As a Mormon, I take the Bible very seriously, as a vehicle for giving us, with varying degrees of accuracy, true stories of God’s dealings with human beings. But I believe in the Bible so seriously that I think it really is what it claims to be—a record, written by men, of stories that seemed important and truthful to them at the time of writing, using the standards of truth available to them at the time. This means that the idea of inerrancy of biblical scripture is silly on its face. It was written by human beings, limited by our finite understanding and subject to all the errors of transmission that inevitably corrupt all manuscripts. Our task, in reading the scriptures, is not to read it blindly as if God were dictating it to his secretary, but to read it faithfully, trying to understand what truths are being shown to us by means of, or in spite of, the words used to tell the tale.

In short, my purpose is pious—I believe there really was a woman named Sarai who married a man named Abram and that they very probably did all the things, or almost all the things, attributed to them. I believe that Abraham was a prophet and received the word of God, and that Sarah was also obedient to the same God.

But when we have two very similar events happening to Sarah and Abraham at different times—passing Sarah off as Abraham’s sister in order to keep a king they’re visiting from killing Abraham to get at his wife—I have no problem remaining completely ambivalent. Hugh Nibley has shown quite convincingly that the same thing might well have happened twice—three times, if you count the identical events happening to Isaac and Rebecca, and with one of the same kings, no less! At the same time, I think it’s at least as likely that the story was orally transmitted and got attributed to two different patriarchs and two different kings, but it really happened only once. I won’t be upset whichever one turns out to be true, on that happy day when we get independent evidence beyond the scripture itself. But for the purpose of this story, including two nearly identical incidents would have been bad fiction, and so I went with Plan B and had the event happen only once, in Egypt. Some would say I chose wrong, because having Abimelech as the king is much more plausible than the idea that a Pharaoh would care two hoots about a desert wanderer; but I say that having Sarah at age 90 or older, as she is in the Abimelech account, strains credulity far more. And I think Hugh Nibley is right in pointing us to a picture of Abraham as a very important man in the culture of the Middle East at that time. He would quite possibly have a very important wife as well.

Sarah
means “princess.” Her original name, Sarai, is deemed to be merely a variant of the same name—but that makes the name change meaningless. What if
Sarai
is merely a false cognate from another language? Perhaps even an unrelated one—perhaps even Sumerian. My guess is as good as anyone’s. But to make Sarah a real princess of a historical royal house is not much of a stretch, given her name and the high prestige that Abraham obviously has in the culture depicted in the Genesis account.

There are a few other points where some readers might quibble with my choices. I didn’t like the idea of Abram having his earliest adventures in “Ur of the Chaldees.” The name is obviously spurious, having been inserted much later for the obvious reason that at the time of Abraham and for many centuries afterward, the people who gave Chaldea its name did not even live in the area or, if they did, were apparently unnoticed by any of the people who did live there. Furthermore, Ur “of the Chaldees”—in this book called Ur-of-Sumeria, the original Ur—was ruled in that period by conquering Amorite kings who had invaded Mesopotamia during the period of devastating drought and had toppled and supplanted the old kingly lines in many or most of the great cities of the area.

Ur-of-the-North, however, founded quite probably as a colony by the original Ur, was not very far from Haran, where Abram’s father and brothers came to live. Furthermore, the cities in that area were, in exactly this period, susceptible to much Egyptian influence. Abram could more easily have become acquainted with—and butted heads with—priests of the Pharaonic religion who were doing what Christian missionaries did in Africa and the Pacific, spreading the “true” culture and opening the door to control by imperial merchants and soldiers coming behind them. The road from Ur-of-Sumeria to Egypt is strewn with historical and archaeological obstacles; the road from Ur-of-the-North to Egypt is smooth sailing. Again, if I turn out to be wrong, so what? I have done my best with the information that we have.

Now we come to the problem of Sarah as Abram’s “sister.” An astonishing number of apologist scholars have come to believe that Genesis actually says that Sarai was the daughter of Abram’s older brother Haran, who was also the father of Lot, who was Abram’s business partner. The King James version introduces Sarai in this way: “Terah begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran begat Lot. And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees. And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai; and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah, and the father of Iscah” (Genesis 11:27–29).

(Here is Ur of the Chaldees, of course, and Terah and his sons could easily have been refugees from the Amorite invasion—except that Ur was a Sumerian city that did not speak a Semitic language, while Abram and his family presumably spoke an early form of Hebrew, which was probably similar to the language of the Amorites and definitely similar to the languages most commonly spoken in the region of Haran and Ur-of-the-North. That proves nothing, but disproves nothing about my suppositions, either, once you throw out “of the Chaldees” as an anachronism.)

Let’s see what this passage actually says about the people named. We know that Nahor’s wife was Milcah, and Milcah was the daughter of Haran, and that Haran was (redundantly) the father of Milcah and the father of Iscah. But we also know that Lot’s father, Haran, was the brother of Abram and the son of Terah. So apparently Abram’s brother Nahor married the daughter of his brother Haran. So, since a man could marry his niece, say the apologists, why couldn’t Sarai also have been a daughter of Haran, and therefore, since Abram regarded Lot as his brother, couldn’t he also have regarded Sarai as his sister, besides being his wife and his niece, and thus when he told both Pharaoh and Abimelech that Sarai was his sister,
he wasn’t lying.

And there you have the whole reason why the apologists go on this silly guessing expedition—they are desperate to show that Abram didn’t lie when he called Sarai his sister. Which absolutely baffles me. Why
shouldn’t
he lie if the Lord told him to, or even the Lord didn’t tell him to, if it was necessary to save his life? There is such a thing as a pious lie—the opposite of bearing false witness against your neighbor, it is the lie told to save the righteous from destruction by the wicked.

But setting aside the question of whether all lies are sins (they aren’t, necessarily, but let’s not argue), the fact remains that there is nothing in the text, at least as translated in the King James Version, that even implies that Abram married his niece. For one thing, the text specifically identifies Milcah, Nahor’s wife, as the daughter of Haran, and never says a thing about Sarai’s parentage. And for another thing, it seems plain to me that this passage is speaking of two different Harans. There is Haran, the son of Terah and father of Lot—the Haran, in other words, who died. And then the scripture mentions that Nahor married Milcah, the daughter of a
different
Haran, who is identified as “Haran the father of Milcah and the father of Iscah.” I mean, if the writer or oral storyteller wanted us to know that the same Haran who was the father of Lot was also the father of Milcah, why would he tag him without referring to Lot at all, and instead bring up “Iscah,” whoever that is? No, the intent seems obvious to me—the storyteller wants us to know that Haran the father of Milcah is a different Haran from the other one already named.

Nobody married his niece. Not Nahor, and not Abram. Marrying siblings and other near relations was not unheard of in some places, and was very common in Egypt’s ruling class, but it is certainly not the rule in the culture of Abraham and his descendants. They could marry cousins, but no one closer. So if the text does not require us to believe in consanguinous marriage of this degree, our predisposition should not be to accuse Abram of incest in order to excuse him from a life-saving lie.

That’s why, in this book, Sarai is born a princess but named in a non-Semitic language, and she is not Abram’s niece and she is not Lot’s sister. I believe the text permits and even encourages my decisions.

Of course, I’m not above flat-out manipulation for fictional purposes. There isn’t the slightest reason, in the text, to suppose that Abram’s wife and Lot’s wife were related in any way. I made them sisters because it was useful and interesting to me in telling the tale to give them a connection that allowed us to see Lot’s wife through her own eyes and also through the eyes of a sister who didn’t like her much, but still cared about her.

Speaking of Lot’s wife—Qira, in this novel—it’s worth noting that the “pillar of salt” story is one that I take as a later interpolation. Why? Because there really are a whole bunch of salty deposits not all that far from Sodom’s probable location to the southeast of the Dead Sea. Some of them rather resemble very small people. It’s so easy to imagine a group of people passing through there, getting spooked by the weird humanoid forms of some of the salt pillars, and then around the fire that night, one of the travelers saying, “You know, one of those pillars really
is
a person. Lot’s wife. Yep, she was forbidden to look back when God destroyed the city, and when she did it anyway, she was turned into a pillar of salt.” In short, it seems likely to be a “just-so” story, like the tale of Elisha and the bears, and Joseph and the Egyptian practice of storing grain in fat years to provide for the lean years. But I might be wrong. Because I also have a personal preference for the idea of an omnipotent but parsimonious God. If he warns the righteous to get out of Sodom because it’s going to be hit by a meteor shower, he lets the meteors have their effect on the disobedient, and doesn’t fuss with a whole separate miracle just to get one woman for daring to look back—especially since the punished-for-looking-back story is such a common one in world folklore. That doesn’t prove anything. It’s just my preference. If I’m wrong, it’s not like I erased the Bible. The story is still there, intact, as written. All I’ve written here is a novel, one view of how things might have happened, and what kind of people they might have happened to.

Which is not to say that I take my own work lightly. On the contrary, I take it very seriously, and I wrestled with these issues so long and researched the surrounding information so seriously that I ended up turning in the manuscript one very inconvenient year late. And after all that work, I know I’ve undoubtedly still made mistakes and missed out on important information that would have made the novel better had I gotten it right. But I can only tell the story that seems right and true to me at the time I wrote it, using the information that I had available. One of my goals was to give the story a plausible setting, but that was only to support my main purpose: To tell the story of Sarah in such a way as to make her come to life as a real person in the mind of my readers. The research was all undertaken in support of that purpose. And I’d like to think that, by bringing my understanding of the surrounding culture to bear on this story, I will have been able to help readers understand how Sarah might have come to make the choices she made in her life, and why Abraham loved her, and why Isaac honored her so much that when his wife Rebecca came to live with him, it was said that she dwelt in Sarah’s tent—years after Sarah died.

This woman was remarkable, desirable to kings, seemingly harsh and yet also chosen by God. I think the harshness she showed toward Hagar was not only justified, it was probably overdue—just on the evidence already visible in the Genesis account, in which Hagar is already shown to be in conflict with Sarah almost as soon as Hagar conceives a child with Abraham. So in a sense I suppose I’m an apologist, too. But instead of being an apologist for God or Abraham, who need no defense from me, I’m an apologist for Sarah, a tough, smart, strong, bright woman in an era when women did not show up much in historical records. It’s one of the things that’s so remarkable about the book of Genesis. There aren’t many other writings from that period that give women so much stage time as the chapters about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Of course, the whole of Israelite scripture has this remarkable trait—Eve, Deborah, Jael, Naomi, Ruth, Esther, Bathsheba, Abigail, Tamar, and even Shiphrah and Puah—the Hebrew scriptures are, by the standards of the day, practically bursting with women,
named
women, who are often the heroes of the story.