Customs Officers Forced Open Sarah's Chest

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What Abraham Said at the Border

Abraham stopped the caravan within a day of Egypt and told his wife she was beautiful.

They had been married for decades. He said it like a man who had just worked something out. "Look, I know that you are a beautiful woman." The road takes a face apart. Weeks of dust and bad water and sun, and most people arrive at a border looking like nothing worth a second glance. Sarah had come through all of it and had not faded, and that was the trouble. They had crossed Aram Naharaim and Aram of Nahor without meeting a woman who could stand next to her. Among their own people that had been a quiet pleasure. In front of Egypt it was a death sentence with his name on it.

So he had a chest brought down off a pack animal, put her inside it, and locked it.

The Officers Wanted to See Inside

The customs house at the frontier ran on suspicion, and the men there had seen every trick a merchant can pack.

"Duty."

"I will pay it."

"You are carrying garments."

"Then I will pay the rate on garments."

"Silks."

"I will pay the rate on silks."

"Pearls."

"I will pay the rate on pearls."

He never argued a single number down. That was his mistake. Nobody pays a pearl merchant's duty on a crate he will not open, and the officers stopped quoting rates and put their hands on the lid. It came up.

The light of her went out of that box and across the whole land of Egypt.

There was a likeness of Eve that had been handed down through the heads of the generations, and it was the measure everyone used. When Scripture wants to say that Abishag the Shunammite was lovely, it says the girl was very beautiful, meaning she came up close to that likeness. Sarah went past it. She was more beautiful than the likeness of Eve.

A Hundred Dinars, Then Two Hundred

Pharaoh's officers reached the customs house and did not behave like men who had seen a wonder. They started bidding.

"A hundred dinars and I go in to her."

"Two hundred."

The number climbed while they walked her toward the palace, and the praise they carried to Pharaoh climbed with it, each man talking her price up because he had already put money on her. She went into the king's house that evening as the most expensive thing in Egypt, and Abraham stood at the edge of the market with an open chest and the receipts for silk and pearls.

The Night the Angel Waited for Her Word

Sarah spent that night on the floor with her face against the stone.

"Master of the universe. Abraham walked out of his country on a promise. I walked out on nothing but trust. Abraham is standing outside the boat. I am inside it."

"Everything I am doing," God told her, "I am doing for you."

An angel stood in that room all night with a whip in his hand and took his orders from her. When she said strike, he struck. When she said leave him, he left off. And she said it over and over, the one sentence that should have ended the night at the door, that she was a married woman, and Pharaoh kept coming back.

So the whip kept moving. Bar Kappara said the disease that came over Pharaoh was raatan. Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel met an old man covered in sores in Sepphoris who told him there are twenty-four kinds of skin plague and only one of them makes a man useless in bed, and that was the one the king got. The beams of the house were struck along with him. Servants ran through corridors where the wood itself was breaking out, and every one of them was saying the same thing to every other one: it is because of Sarai, the wife of Abram.

A palm tree kills the man who climbs it carelessly. He gets to the crown, he loses his grip, and the ground does the rest.

The Road Out

Pharaoh gave the order himself and put men on the road to walk them out. Abraham left Egypt heavy with cattle and silver and gold, and he went back north by the same stages he had come down, stopping where he had stopped before to settle what he still owed.

He had been told at the start what the trip was for. Go down and conquer the road ahead of your children. Every step of it came back later, in order, with different names on it. A famine drove the father down. A famine drove the sons down. The father's wife was taken and the sons' children were thrown in the river. The father came out loaded with silver and gold, and so did they.

The chest went back on the pack animal empty. Sarah rode north with the light still in her and said very little.