Eliezer Offered His Own Daughter to Isaac and Abraham Said No

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The Question He Only Asked Once

Sarah was in the ground at Hebron and Abraham was old, and the thing that would not wait any longer was a wife for Isaac.

Not from the daughters of Canaan. Abraham had watched what the local marriages did to a house, and whoever came would have to come over entirely, all the way over, so he reasoned that he might as well take her from his own stock, which had the first claim on him regardless. There was a proverb for it that he liked. Even if the wheat of your own place is darnel, use it for seed.

He called in Eliezer, who ran everything he owned.

Eliezer heard the whole plan out and did the arithmetic that any man in his position would do. Damascus was far. The family up north might refuse. And he had a daughter of his own, in this house, already inside the household, already raised in it.

"Peradventure no woman will be willing to follow me unto this land," he said. And then, having built the ramp, he walked up it. "May I then marry my own daughter to Isaac?"

"No."

Abraham did not soften it afterward. "Thou art of the accursed race, and my son is of the blessed race, and curse and blessing cannot be united." Eliezer's line ran back to Canaan, and the curse spoken over Canaan was still sitting on it, and that was the end of the matter in one sentence.

Then came the conditions. Under no circumstances was Isaac himself to be taken north. "For if thou broughtest him thither again, it were as though thou tookest him to hell." As for the difficulty Eliezer had raised, the God who sets the heavens moving would set this right too, and would send His angel out ahead on the road.

Abraham had him put his hand under his thigh, on the sign of the covenant, and swear.

A Road With No Light in It

He left with ten camels and everything good his master owned loaded on them, and he went out of the country he knew and into country he did not.

He had no map worth the name. A man in that position is a man walking in the dark, and this one was walking in the dark on behalf of a household that had just told him his own blood was not good enough for it.

The road was lit anyway. Shooting stars went over him. Lightning stood up on the horizon and stayed there long enough to show him the ground. Whatever else he could complain of on that ride, he could not say he had been sent out unwatched.

He Prayed for the Man Who Had Refused Him

He made the well outside the city at evening, the hour the women come out with jars, and he knelt the camels down and started to pray.

"Lord, God of my master Abraham, please arrange it for me today, and perform kindness with my master Abraham."

Nothing in it for himself. Not his own name, not his own house, not the daughter sitting back in Hebron. The whole prayer points at the man who had said no to him, and heaven took it, because the one who fears the Lord was Abraham and the one heaven was listening to was Abraham's servant.

Rebecca came down the steps with the jar on her shoulder before he had finished speaking. She filled it, and gave him a drink, and then said the sentence that ended the errand.

She would draw for the camels too, until they had done.

Ten camels off a desert road is not a kindness, it is labor. She went down and up the well steps until the trough was full and then until it was full again, and the man stood there and watched her and said nothing at all, holding still, waiting to see whether it would hold.

Straw for the Camels, Water for the Feet

Laban came out fast once he saw the gold on his sister's hands.

In the courtyard Eliezer went along the line and unfastened the animals. There were no muzzles to take off. Nothing belonging to Abraham had put its head into another man's field the whole way north, so there had been nothing to muzzle in the first place, and what came off was only the saddles. Straw and feed went down in front of them. Water came out for his feet and for the feet of the men who had ridden with him.

Then they set food in front of him, in a house that kept gods of its own in it, the same small figures Rachel would carry out years later hidden under a camel saddle.

He would not eat.

"I will not eat until I have told mine errand."

And he told it. The whole thing, from the oath to the well, at a length that would have embarrassed a shorter man, the herds and the silver and the son born late and the prayer and the girl on the steps, and then he told the whole thing a second time to Bethuel and the household, and the food sat there going cold in front of him the entire while.

He Handed Her Over in a Field at Evening

They gave her up. She got on the camel and rode south with a man she had met at a well.

Isaac was out in the field toward evening when the camels came in. Rebecca got down and covered her face, and Eliezer walked over and told Isaac everything he had done, and that was the last important sentence of his life.

He went back to running the household. Somewhere in that household was his daughter, who had not married Isaac and never would, and who had been the reason he asked once and the reason he never asked again.