Torah you will read that Abraham and Sarah had one child only, a son born to them very late in life, who they named Isaac. Well it’s true that they only had one son. And it’s true that Abraham did have another son with Hagar, which isn’t a name at all. It means ‘The Stranger.’ Her real name was Isis, which was changed later on by fussy old men who didn’t want their text to include the name that she shared with Egypt’s main goddess. Funny isn’t it, sad, ironic, and maddening, that these two great matriarchs and later rivals both lost their real names.
As I said, Abraham and Sarah came from different backgrounds, and they were living in a time when the matri-focal element was shifting, rapidly. Patriarchy was the hot new thing and Abraham was influenced by it. He wanted sons, when in fact he and Sarah had three daughters in Ur before Isaac was born, Atirat, Yonah, and Kalilah. They have been left out of the story, not just because they all moved back to Ur to marry men who lived there, but because they were women and women didn’t count for much with the later editors of what became our most sacred texts. It’s true that Sarah was rather old when Isaac was born, but not as old as the story makes her out to be. A year after they settled in Canaan she gave birth to her fourth daughter, Davah, and three years after that she had her last child. We know a few things about Isaac, but nothing any longer about Davah. Although she was a powerful healer, she never married or had children, so the later editors and redactors of the Torah didn’t think that she was worth mentioning. But I do, and I’ll have more to say about her in a little while. Remind me if I forget.
According to everything I was told, Abraham was a very very handsome man and Sarah was quite a looker herself. So, while theirs was a love-match, it was different than how we think of marriage now. Well, some of you would understand it. You talk about polyamory and open marriages, and that’s what theirs was. Abraham had other lovers besides his wife, and Sarah had other lovers besides her husband. There are garbled stories in Genesis, two similar ones about her involvement with Pharaoh and Abimelech the king of Gerar, and a version of that one is also told of Isaac and Rebecca. But here’s the truth, Sarah had an Egyptian lover, name Ahmose. He wasn’t a pharaoh but a provincial ambassador stationed in Jebus, which later became Jerusalem. And later she did have a relationship with Abimelech, the king of Gerar. The storytellers got that right. But they didn’t know what to make of the story in their increasingly patriarchal society, so they bent the story, instead of discarding it, which several of them wanted to do, and then they attributed the very same story to Isaac and Rebecca, for very different reasons that relate to Isaac, which I’ll get into in a little while.
The redactors of the Torah did not know what to make of the family tale that Abraham and Sarah had the same father but different mothers. This is not true, but they did have a kind of marriage that made them the equivalent of siblings in the eyes of the law, and the later redactors took that literally. When beatniks and then hippies were popular, and experimenting with all different kinds of relationships, with free love and group sex, I couldn’t help but think of our ancestors as a kind of proto-hippie couple, devoted to each other, equally strong in their own different ways, but not constrained by their relationship in the ways that so many people are today when they get married.
Abraham was a great charmer. That’s how the family was able to settle in so easily in Canaan. He used his charm with all his family’s business connections. Sarah was also a shrewd businesswoman. My mother told me that she chose her lovers because they were good contacts for the family business, which she was also involved in. Her third lover, at least of the ones I’ve heard about, was Efron the Hittite, another non-local, a real estate investor who was a good friend of Abraham’s as well, and who sold them the cave and the land around it that became the family tomb. This tomb is not, I repeat NOT, the tomb in Hebron that two branches of Abraham’s descendants are still fighting about. The location of the real tomb has long been forgotten, and I will not tell you where to go looking for it. We’ve gotten in too much trouble already fighting about the wrong places.
By the way, Abraham’s nephew Lot, the one who came with them from Ur, did settle in the area near the Dead Sea, but he had nothing to do with Sodom, or sodomites, angelic or human. He did not sleep with his daughters, nor did his wife turn into a pillar of salt. We will see stories like this again and again, where real people like Nurit, Lot’s wife, are slandered by later writers in order to make a point. We’ll see this in the story about Shechem and Dinah and in the account of the Golden Calf, where fact is bent for political purposes. Lot’s descendants had all remained in Canaan and were hostile to the Israelites when they returned with Joshua from Egypt, and that story of sodomy and incest was those old homophobic writers’ revenge.
Now let’s talk about Abraham’s lovers. I’ll start with Hagar, who I already mentioned, and I’ll call her that rather than Isis as that’s the name you know her by. She was, I’ve been told, a very lovely woman. To begin with, she was Sarah’s best friend, not her maid as the text tells you, but she did come from Egypt. A young widow whose husband had been stationed in Canaan, she remained there after his death and she and Sarah bonded over being foreigners. As I said, the ancient world had different forms of legal couplings, as do we. There’s marriage, common-law marriage, domestic partnership, and civil unions, all of them different. We had different forms too, including marriage, sister-marriage, and concubinage. The later writers couldn’t understand that, and in your (supposedly) monogamous world (I say supposedly because you all know the truth of human nature) it may be hard to understand these different kinds of relationships.
In a world where increasingly men could have many wives but women could no longer have many husbands, and where the man’s lineage became sacred and the women’s ignored, Hagar was in a dubious position. She and Abraham were never married. They did have a son, Ishmael, who was for a time his father’s male heir. But the writers minimized her role and they diminished him too, for in their day and age Ishmael’s descendants and Isaac’s descendants had long been hostile to each other.
The story about Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar contains a good deal of truth. Abraham wanted a son, and after four daughters in a row it was Sarah who proposed that her husband and her best friend hook up. Hagar had always wanted children, but her husband had died soon after their marriage, and as women say today, “After that I just never met the right guy.” Well, from all I’ve heard, Abraham was the right guy for a lot of women, and he had a number of other children besides those mentioned in the surviving text. And while this kind of an arrangement may seem odd to you, I remember several decades ago watching a film called something like The Long Freeze, in which a group of old college friends come together for the funeral of one of their old circle. One of them is a single woman who wants to have a child, and another woman decides to lend her her own husband for the night.
Thing weren’t so different with Sarah and Hagar. But the story didn’t have a happy ending, in the text and in real life too, because thoughts and feelings aren’t always the same and a good idea in the head may be really bad news in the heart, the gut, or in the genitals. So it was with those two women who from the best of friends turned into bitter rivals. Hagar left their encampment several times, came back, but finally went off to a village where some of her family had settled, which was called Lahai-roi, from which she did not ever return. (Remember the name of this place, Lahai-roi. It will become important later in the story.)
By the way, Isaac’s real name wasn’t Isaac. That was his nickname. His real name was that of his grandfather, Terah, and in naming their son after his well-traveled father, who’d made numerous trips to Canaan, Abraham was legitimizing the family’s new location and asserting its authority. But since there already was a Terah in the story, and since no one ever called Isaac that anyway, the writers of the Torah left his true birth name out of their tale.
Here’s the missing part of the story. When little baby Terah the Second came into the world and the midwife held him up to wipe him off, he had such a funny look on his face that both Sarah and the midwife started laughing, and so right from the start his nickname became Yitzhak, which is Isaac in English, and means “He who laughs” in Hebrew. His name had nothing to do with angels or with his mother laughing at God, as the story now stands, which is a lovely story indeed.
Now Ishmael, Abraham’s son with Hagar, was no more the ancestor of all the Arabs than Isaac was the ancestor of all the Hebrews, Israelites, or Jews,