Tag Archives: Hevron

Chayei Sarah – the lives of Sarah the matriarch

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“V’hayu chayei Sara meah shanah vesrim shana v’sheva shanim, shenei hayei Sarah. Vatamot Sarah b’kiryat arbah hi Hevron b’eretz Canaan, v’yavo Avraham lispod l’sarah v’livkotah. Vayakom Avraham me’al pnei meito”

And the life of Sarah was a hundred years and twenty years and seven years; these were the years of the life of Sarah.  And Sarah died in Kiriat-arba–the same is Hebron–in the land of Canaan; and Abraham came to eulogise Sarah, and to weep for her. And Abraham rose up from before his dead, and spoke unto the children of Het”

Sarah, the first Jewish matriarch, is last seen in bible having given birth to Isaac through a divine intervention when both she is in her nineties and Abraham is a hundred. We see Isaac named – unusually – by his father, and circumcised at the age of 8 days old, as required by God. We hear Sarah say: ‘God has made me a laughing stock; every one that hears will laugh on account of me.’  And then: ‘Who would have said to Abraham, that Sarah should be able to feed a child? For I have borne him a son in his old age.’ And then on the day Isaac celebrates his weaning feast, Sarah, seeing Ishmael (the son born to Abraham through her own intervention in offering her Egyptian maid Hagar to him, in order to provide a child for Abraham so that God’s promise is fulfilled), recognised the threat Ishmael poses to his younger half brother, and tells Abraham’ Cast out this bondwoman and her son; for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac.’   Abraham is upset but does not speak to Sarah – instead he goes to God who tells him “Let it not be grievous in your sight because of the lad, and because of your bondwoman; in all that Sarah says to you listen to her voice; for through Isaac shall your descendants be called.”

After that, we never hear the voice of Sarah again. Instead we have the two terrible stories of Abraham sending off his older son Ishmael into the wilderness to what he must believe is likely death, and then taking his second son Isaac up a mountain, to what he must again believe is likely death. And then we have a genealogical list which takes us to Rebecca the daughter of Betuel the nephew of Abraham through his brother Nahor.  The next thing we hear is that Sarah is dead, that she has been living not at Beer Sheva with her husband but in Hevron, and that Abraham comes to eulogise her and to weep for her, before getting on with the practicalities of arranging a funeral.

            What happens to Sarah in between her arranging for the removal of Ishmael, the person she saw as a threat to the wellbeing of Isaac her son, and the death as reported in bible?  Where is the voice of the woman who has been a powerful presence up till now, a formidable partner for Abraham, a true incarnation of what the bible calls the ‘ezer k’negdo’ – a help who is equal and powerfully separate from her husband?  Was Sarah’s death somehow related to what nearly happened to Isaac? And was that related to the choice she forced on to Abraham to remove a much beloved son from his household?  Had she already removed herself from the household when Abraham went to offer Isaac on a mountain top?

We do know that Sarah is not herself party to what turns out to be the most important decision of her life. Abraham does not discuss with her the test he sees God as having set him. There is indeed a huge irony working in that once Abraham is told “in all that Sarah says to you, listen to her voice”, we never hear her voice again.  But what does her silence tell us? And what can we learn from the powerful absence we feel?

Sarah’s death is told us in the context of her life – indeed the Hebrew tells us clearly that her life was full and complex – the literal translation of the first verse would be “and the lives of Sarah were a hundred years, and twenty years and seven years, these are the years of the lives of Sarah.” And Jewish tradition takes from this the learning that a full life is made up of a number of separate strands, all of equal value though not all of equal length. So one might read this description as being that most of her adult life was as a barren woman, wife to a man who had been promised descendants. She then had a shorter period as a mother, and another short period living separately from her child.  Each of these lives helped to define her, each was a fully experienced era, and the fact they were of unequal length is irrelevant in terms of the value of each life she lived.

Sarah was clearly a formidable woman. Any view that women in the bible were somehow simply adjuncts to their menfolk cannot be sustained in the face of any of our matriarchs, but it is Sarah who sets the pattern.  She is named as an equal figure in the story of the travelling from Ur of the Chaldees with her husband – and from this text Sarah emerges in the Talmud and Midrash as an equal partner with her husband in God’s work, and a prophetess in her own right. She is described as someone who worked alongside Abraham to build up his wealth and “acquire souls” in Haran, where they stopped off before going to Canaan (Gen 12:5). She is the woman who intervened in order to bring what she thought was God’s promise to fulfilment – When she cannot have children, Sarah takes the initiative and gives her maid-servant, Hagar, to Abraham so that he can have children through Hagar on Sarah’s behalf. She is the woman who is taken – apparantly willingly – into the households of both Pharaoh and Abimelech in order to protect her husband, and then quickly released again untouched, and with compensatory wealth. Sarah acts independently on a number of occasions, taking the initiative to decide the future of her family, even against her husband’s wishes.

The modern scholar Tikvah Frymer-Kensky argues that although the Bible portrays a patriarchal social structure, it has a gender-neutral ideology.  The women in the Bible may be socially subordinate but not essentially inferior; they have strong, independent personalities, and they often act to guide the course of events.  So when Sarah gives Hagar to Abraham she is keeping ancient Near Eastern tradition. We have evidence of three ancient Near Eastern marriage contracts stating that if the wife remains barren after a specified number of years, she gives her husband her slave to have children on her behalf.  On her behalf note, not simply for him.

Another scholar Carol Meyers applied insights from sociology, anthropology, and archaeology to reconstruct the ordinary women’s place within Israelite society in various periods of biblical history. She argues that when agricultural work and childbearing, two spheres in which women played an active role, were central to biblical society, social and religious life in ancient Israel was relatively egalitarian. Only when the political state and the monarchy emerged, and religious life was institutionalized in the Temple cult and priestly bureaucracy (beginning in the tenth century B.C.E.), were women increasingly excluded from the public arena and lost access to communal authority.  Sarah then is from a period when women were able to be active in society and in determining how the family should operate, and we can see forcefully how she does this in a number of stories about her.

But however powerful she was in the prime of her life, in old age and with the added vulnerability of parenthood, Sarah found herself less able to voice her ideas.  With the birth of Isaac she gained a new role and meaning for herself, but she also became more aware of her own mortality and vulnerability.  So when God tests Abraham, seeming to require him to take the so beloved child of Abraham and Sarah and offer him on a mountain top. Is Sarah’s absence because she knows that this is happening and cannot stop it? Oris it a result of her shame at the treatment of Ishmael and desire to move away. Or is it something different – to do maybe with having now become a parent she no longer has the relationship with Abraham she once did. From being a tight unit they are now a family of three and having to adjust to the demands of another person in the relationship.

We cannot know what causes Sarah’s voice to fall quiet in the text. Whether it is protection of her that she does not have to be party to this most horrible test of faith or punishment for what happened to Ishmael. But what we can know is that in this final life of the lives of Sarah, she has struck out alone and left her husband behind. She is, once more a woman of strength, no appendage to her husband but living alone and with some status in Hebron.

When the last of Sarah’ lives are over and Abraham hears of her death, he comes to Hebron in order to fulfil the requirements of family and religion. And it is interesting what he does and the order in which he does them. He first come ‘lispod’ then liv’kotah and finally to buy a burial place and perform the funerary rites.

The first thing he does is “lispod” to give a Hesped – in effect a eulogy. He tells the stories of Sarah, who she was, what she did, how she lived her life in its many parts.

Only then does he mourn her through his weeping – livkotah. And then he gets up from before her dead body and takes on the practicalities of the living – to make a funeral for her, to perform the rites of burying the dead and then to go back into life. I can’t help wondering as I read this chapter whether the very first verse is indeed the hesped – that Abraham actually said “these are the lives of Sarah, who lived a hundred years and twenty years and seven years – three different and distinct lives all of which should be honoured, and which may have been of different lengths but are most certainly of equal and complete value.”

Chayei Sarah

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I cannot read the story of Sarah, her life and death and subsequent burial arrangements, without sadness. I want to ask about her – who was this woman? She had been moved from her homeland without the experience of hearing God’s command to support her. She had been infertile in a time when fertility meant status and her husband was expecting myriad descendants.  Twice she had had to pretend that her husband was not her husband in order for him to survive (and consequently be taken into the harem of Abimelech king of G’rar, and also into that of the Pharaoh). She had taken matters into her own hands by offering her maidservant Hagar to her husband in order for him to bear a son, and was humiliated and embittered by the experience, causing her eventually to send Ishmael away from the family.  The longed for child she finally bore in old age, Isaac, was traumatised by his experiences with his father on a mountain top, and was not present either at her death or her funeral arrangements.  Poor Sarah. Living apart from her husband in Kiryat Arba Hebron while he was in Beer Sheva, a woman one might say who loved too much for her own good.

But it is her last days and her burial arrangements that have extended into our own times, and some of the bitterness and humiliation and tragedy still stalk us. Why was she living in Kiryat Arba, the City of the Four, rather than with her husband and son?  Who were the Four to which the name refers? And why is she to be buried in this cave in Hebron belonging to Ephron the Hittite? A cave whose name, Machpelah, means ‘doubled’?

It is almost as if the idea of plurality is embedded in this text – Kiryat Arba meaning “the city of the four”, Machpelah meaning ‘doubled’ or ‘a couple’, Hevron meaning ”joined/or the place of friendship/relationship”.

The loneliness of the woman living away from her family, somehow estranged from the events that had happened within it, is mirrored with the words to do with ‘two’ or ‘couple’ or even ‘twice coupled’. It is as if we are looking at parallel universes, at the individual and the communal, at being alone and isolated – and at having friends and connections.

Sarah dies alone, without her husband or son, in a place called ‘friendship’. It is a painful and horrible irony. Her husband buries her alone, in a cave called ‘couple’, and goes on to remarry a woman called Keturah (fragrant), though his two sons come and bury him with his first wife in Machpelah when his time comes. As if, after death, everything comes right and husband and wife are reunited. But we know, of course, that we should be putting things right before death comes to us, that behaving well in life is a far greater act than making atonement after the event.

Hevron today is a tragic place; a catastrophe doubled and doubled again, a place not of friendship but of tears and fearfulness. One can almost hear the cries of our mother Sarah who lies at the centre of a town filled with anxiety, where everyone feels alone and isolated, afraid of each other, afraid of what they themselves might do. There is no plurality there at all, just different communities each wishing the others didn’t exist.

I spent a day there a few years ago and was horrified at what I saw, tearful and shaken at how this town I had remembered in the 1980’s as bustling and thriving had become empty and watchful. The tension in the air was palpable, the tension in the people horribly clear. Shuhada Street, a main thoroughfare which led down to what had been the central market area is, in army parlance, ‘sterilised’, meaning it is closed to Palestinians – even those whose front doors open onto it.

The isolation of Sarah, and the tragic events in her life that led up to it, can be felt today in Hevron. All the missed connections, the lack of understanding of human feelings and needs that seem to underpin her life can be felt in modern Hevron.

The support that Sarah gave to Abraham was given at enormous personal expense to – and distortion of -herself, and ultimately they were driven apart by her giving more than she could, and him taking without apparently appreciating what it was that he received. While he mourned her death he did not celebrate her life, he did not seem to know her, or to understand what motivated her or to appreciate her. He was focussed on his religious belief – leave the land they knew to go to another place, offer his son to God on a mountain – to the exclusion of his wife.

“What if” is not usually a productive game to play, but given that it was to be the son of Abraham AND Sarah who was to inherit the promise and the covenant, what if Abraham had worked together with Sarah to share the burden? What if he had understood the price she paid for him to become the wealthy and powerful patriarch he did? What if he had supported her too, so that she did not suffer at the hands of Hagar and retaliate against Ishmael?

And what if Hevron could finally become a place of friendship rather than antagonism, where both parties could share the space and the place, where both could worship at the ancestral graves, where both could live lives of fulfilment and peace, thinking about the needs and feelings of the other and appreciating their difference?

Sarah’s final days and her burial could be a lesson to us in so many ways, the plurality of the names of Machpelah and Kiryat Arba, the relationship and sense of connection implicit in the name Hevron. And the stark reminder that all of us are mortal, that sometimes it is too late to make up again, that then we can only mourn.