Notes 27. Search for a bride (24:1-67)

SYNOPSIS: An aging Abraham is worried that Isaac shouldn't marry a local Canaanite girl. He sends his trusted servant Eliezer on a mission to Padan-Aram, in the "old country", where his relative Laban lives, to find a bride for Isaac and bring her back to Canaan. Eliezer is concerned the girl may not wish to come back with him. Abraham gives him full istructions: if she won't come, so be it, but on no account is Isaac to go back to Padan-Aram, since God has promised that his offspring will inherit the land of Canaan. Off Eliezer goes with some camels. When he reaches a well at Padan-Aram he prays to God to give him a sign, and God obliges by having the first girl he asks for some water to drink offer to water his camels too. When Eliezer learns that she is none other than Rebecca, Laban's sister, he knows his prayer has been heard. He tells his story to Rebecca, who runs home to tell Laban, who comes running out to invite Eliezer into his home. At dinner Eliezer retells the whole story yet again for the benefit of his hosts who haven't heard it yet, and he concludes with a request for him to be allowed to take Rebecca back to Canaan with him to marry his master Isaac. Laban says Rebecca must be asked if she wishes to go, and she does. Laban blesses Rebecca and they leave. They arrive back, Isaac and Rebecca meet and the match is consumed.

• Text of the passage

By way of introduction to this chapter-long episode, I will quote CB (p. 247):

The bringing of Rebekah to Isaac may be a picturesque way of describing the incorporation of Aramaic clans in Israel; but the narrative is much more than this, it is a graphic story of the fortunes of individuals. The various features reproduce well-known experiences of the nomads of the desert; the seeking of a wife from some distant but kindred tribe; the trust reposed in a favourite slave; the meeting of travellers, as in the case of Jacob and Moses, with the women at the well; and the negotiations that led up to a betrothal. In a few graphic touches these familiar scenes of ancient days are lived over again before our eyes. Throughout there is manifest a simple faith in the continual presence and activity of a benevolent Divine Providence.

As Speiser (p. 183) points out, "the chapter as a whole, the longest in the book by far, is a self-contained unit and an unsurpassed literary masterpiece of its kind." Yet it is well integrated into the larger narrative framework, from which it draws its broader significance. It is a kind of story that is still popular to this day, almostly childishly naive in the form of the telling, which invites the listener to anticipate or even recite with the story teller the recurrent passages which repeat information the audience has already heard, as it narrates first what the protagonist is going to do, then what he does, and finally replicates his telling in the first person to another character of what he has done.

Told in the manner it is, this may, on the surface, look like a rather inconsequential story, but we can also read it as an allegory of quite profound importance: see the notes.

24:2 ‛avdo z'qan beto
There is a tradition that identifies Abraham's unnamed head servant in this story with the eli‛ézer who is referred to in 15:2, but that is uncertain and in any case the sentence in ch. 15 where the name appears is itself quite obscure. Therefore the name cannot be assumed by any means.

sim na yad'kha táxat y'rekhi
The strange-sounding instruction to the servant to place his hand under Abraham's thigh is supposed by commentators to have been a gesture which solemnized an oath, as is fairly obvious from the narration. They also suggest that "thigh" may really mean "genitals" here. This ritual act also appears in 47:29, but nowhere else in the Tanakh.

24:3 bYHWH elohe hasshamáyim welohe ha'áretz
This formula seems to echo the use (three times) of the collocation hasshamáyim w'ha'áretz in the first Creation passage (1:1, 2:1, 2:4). It is partially repeated in v. 7, where however it is abbreviated to YHWH elohe hasshamáyim. Note too that in the present verse the formula is used by Abraham, and in v. 7 by his faithful servant.

mibb'not hakk'na‛ani asher anokhi yoshev b'qirbo
I have already commented elsewhere on the term Canaanite. In the present context it may simply mean the local inhabitants all around Abraham whom he clearly considers to be ethnically distinct, and with whom he has no desire to have his family intermarry. The only thing remotely resembling an explicit reason for this wish to remain apart that I can see in the foregoing narrative is the b'rit, the covenant made specifically between God and Abraham and his descendants. Of course, the preference for one's children to marry one's "own kind" is a widespread cultural phenomenon that can be observed in many places and at many times in history, and so in a sense there is nothing all that remarkable really about the existence of and emphasis on such an attitude in Genesis. It is also a necessary motivation in the narrative framework of the present story and a notion which also finds a place in other parts of its plot line, although it must also be said that, from the start, it fails to be adhered to consistently; indeed, Abraham's own first child is the son of Hagar the Egyptian (whatever the "attenuating circumstances"), and Joseph will also marry the Egyptian woman Asenat.

24:4 el artzi w'el moladti
This is clearly a hendiadys meaning 'the land of my birth', and it was also seen in ch. 12, which it seems to echo, perhaps a literary gesture harking back, near the end of Abraham's long life, to the day when his story began (12:1 lekh l'kha me'artz'kha umimmoladt'kha umibbet avíkha).

w'laqaxta issha livni
Again the use of l-q-x in association with marriage.

24:7 mal'akho
We have already encountered the enigmatic figure of the messenger/angel (mal'akh, angelos) several times now, see ch. 16, 19, 21, 22. No mal'akh makes any personal appearance at any point in the present story, but one is referred to by Abraham here, and his words are recollected by the servant in v. 40.

24:8 raq et b'ni lo tashev shámma
Here an explicit hierarchy of priorities is established in what turn out to be Abraham's last reported words: don't let my son marry a Canaanite woman, but above all, do not return him to the land from which I came. It is not that the descendants of Abraham cannot ever leave Canaan, because that is precisely what they will do at the conclusion of the book! But they move forward towards their destiny, never back to the old life away from which Abraham has already progressed, showing the way forward. In a nutshell, then, Abraham says: try to stay "pure", but most important of all, go forwards, not backwards. Manifested in a multitude of different ways, this is the same dilemma facing all ethnic groups everywhere, always, and the present scene seems to be offering a solution to just that question. The integrity of ethnic identity is valuable and to be protected where possible, but the one thing that it does not override is the call to move forward towards one's calling or destiny, also known as "a better world." We must make every effort to make the two compatible! Today, these desiderata are spoken of, respectively, as culture and progress, and this resolution of the apparent contradiction, translated into terms we now understand, remains as pertinent as ever! Continue being who you are, cultivate your specific identity, yes, but never try to turn back to the primitive ways that your ancestors left behind for good reasons. Does this not, at the mid-point of our book and the turning point of the imminent death of the founding patriarch, encapsulate the essential Abrahamic message?

24:10 el aram naharáyim el ‛ir naxor
Perhaps we may translate the geographical term aram approximately as "Syria"; the added epithet naharáyim is a dual and means 'two rivers', so this might mean the part of Aram/Syria that is in the region of the two big rivers of the area (the Tigris and the Euphrates). As pointed out in CB, that is not really the same thing as saying Mesopotamia which refers to the entire greater region dominated by these rivers (as opposed to just the Syrian or "Aram" part). As for the city of Nahor, this is traditionally assumed to mean Haran (xaran), Nahor being the name of Abraham's late brother, but Nahor is also the name of a place in the district of Haran. Acc. to Speiser (p. 183), the trip "must have taken at least a month."

24:27 xasdo wa'amito
The collocation xésed we'emet is a cliché, a conventionalized hendiadys for which CB suggests the gloss 'faithful lovingkindness', Speiser 'steadfast kindness', JPS 'steadfast faithfulness' (which last seems slightly deficient: where is xésed?). The important thing is not to go with mechanistic traditional renderings such as KJV 'his mercy and his truth'. In Genesis alone there are two more occurrences of the idiom (in v. 49 of this ch. and in 47:29), in both of which it forms part of a longer formula for expressing a request, in a construction that amounts to something like 'if you would be so kind.'

24:40 YHWH asher hithalákhti l'fanaw
Abraham described himself to his servant, according to this, as having walked before God (MB p. 34). 

24:48 axi adoni
Here as elsewhere ax does not always mean a literal brother but may signify 'kinsman.' Cf. 13:8, 14:14 etc.

24:49 w'efna ‛al yamin o ‛al s'mol
Lit. 'I will turn to the right or the left.' Clearly idiomatic and not necessarily to be translated literally. Perhaps something like: 'I will go my way.'

24:56 al t'axaru oti
'Do not delay me.' I would echo the comment in CB:

It was certainly startling that Rebekah's family should be asked to let her leave them at once, that very morning, for a distant land with a man whom none of them had ever seen till the previous evening, to marry a cousin whom they had never seen.

On the other hand, (1) it's a story, and (2) there are some clues that Abraham may have been nearing death and the servant was anxious to get back in time with Isaac's bride. (True, there are also contradictory hints elsewhere, such as the notice in ch. 25 that Abraham remarried (or took a concubine) and had more children! The solution obviously will refer to conflicting sources and/or relative chronology.)

24:57 w'nish'ala et píha
Lit. 'let us ask her mouth', which again obviously should not be replicated literally.

24:58 elekh
This reply (lit. 'I will go') is pragmatically the BH equivalent of 'yes' rather than 'I will go.'

24:59 meniqtah
The death notice of Rebecca's nurse is given in 35:8, where she is named as Deborah (d'vora).

24:60
Rebecca's blessing is, one might say, a reduction to its most essential elements of the standard scheme of such blessings in Genesis: have lots of descendants (hayi l'alfe r'vava) and may they vanquish all their enemies (w'yirash zar‛ekh et shá‛ar son'aw).

24:62
Something funny seems to be going on with the narrative here. Didn't the servant return to Abraham with Rebecca first, before going off to look for Isaac? (And how did he know where to look for him?) It has been suggested that perhaps Abraham had already passed away. Why then does the account omit this? Maybe because the account of that has been delayed until the next chapter?

b'er laxay ro'i
See 16:14.

24:63 lasúax
Meaning very uncertain, which is a nuisance because the meaning of this part of the story is not at all clear.

24:65 mi ha'ish hallaze haholekh bassade liqratenu
Rather then read too much into this question in terms of what it tells about whether or not they knew that they would find Isaac there, I prefer to think that this is perhaps just a dramatic dialogue, a piece of fine conventional story-telling that does not need to be over-interpreted. "Who is that man coming towards us?" "He is your future husband." Great lines, and remember that even in Golde's time love was part of a new world.

wattiqqax hattza‛if wattitkas
I quote EH:

Israelite women normally were not veiled. In the ancient Near East, the veiling of the bride was part of the marriage ceremony, but wives generally went about unveiled. By veiling herself now, as a sign of modesty, Rebekah signals Isaac that she is his bride.