“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.”
rabbisylviarothschild 