How Abraham Eulogized Sarah With Proverbs 31

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He Came to Mourn Her and Could Not Begin

Abraham sat down beside the body of his wife, and the words he said over her were not his own.

Sarah had died at a hundred and twenty-seven. He had been married to her longer than most men are alive. He began to weep, and what came out of him was the opening of an old poem about a capable wife. A woman of valor, who can find? Her price is far above rubies.

He had found her. That was his answer to the question, and it was the only line in the poem that cost him nothing to say.

The Line About Trust

The heart of her husband safely trusts in her.

He had put that trust to work once, on the road down into Egypt, by asking her to tell people she was his sister so that it would go well with him. She said it. Pharaoh's men took her into the palace on the strength of it. She said nothing in there that would have endangered him, and she came out again.

She is like the merchant ships. A merchant ship takes the worst water there is and comes back loaded. She had made that crossing twice, once through Pharaoh's house and once through the court of Abimelech at Gerar, and both times she came back to him with the household intact.

She was the most beautiful woman anyone had ever measured against. The old comparison runs the other way, and puts every other beautiful woman next to Sarah the way an ape stands next to a human being.

The Morning He Rose Early

She rises also while it is yet night.

That line points at one particular morning. He had got up before the light, saddled the donkey himself, split the wood, taken fire and a knife and his son, and walked north to a mountain without telling her where he was going. What Sarah did in that house while it was still dark is hers. Nobody wrote it down.

She girds her loins with strength. Three strangers had come to the tent once at the hot part of the day, and he called in to her to hurry, three measures of the best flour, quickly, and she baked for men she had never been introduced to. Afterward she stood behind the tent flap and heard one of them say she would have a son, and she laughed, and when they asked her about the laugh she said she had not laughed. They told her the child's name anyway. It had already been written down, before he was conceived.

She looks well to the ways of her household. From that day on she watched the road for the one who had said, I will surely return to you.

She stretches out her hand to the poor. That was food handed to people going past on the road, and clothes given to people who had none.

The Field She Had Already Chosen

She considered a field and bought it.

Sarah had thought about the cave at Machpelah while she was still alive. She had wanted that ground. Now she was going into it, and her husband was out in the gate of the town bargaining for it, because the whole country had been promised to him and he did not own enough of it to bury his wife in.

Her husband is known in the gates. That was him among the sons of Heth, saying he was a stranger and a sojourner with them. They called him a prince of God and told him to take the best tomb they had. He kept on until the field was properly bought, weighed out in the best current coin, written up and witnessed, so that no one could ever say it had been a gift.

Strength and dignity are her clothing. The cloud that used to stand over her tent was gone off the roof. She is not afraid of the snow for her household, and she had never been afraid of Gehinnom (the realm of judgment after death) either, because every person under that roof wore two garments, the Sabbath and the covenant cut into the flesh.

Give her of the fruit of her hand. A hundred and twenty-seven years.

Isaac stood at the bier asking his mother where she had gone. The mourning ran seven days and the whole country came to it, and the man with the most reason to be comforted spent the week comforting other people. "Do not take her going too much to heart," he told them. "One thing comes to all alike, to the pious and to the wicked. Now give me a burying place among you, not as a gift. For money."

Old Age Came Down on Him in a Day

He walked out of that cave an old man. He had not been one going in. It leaped on him the moment she was in the ground, and from then on he sat among the elders of the land and was called old, and his hair was white as clean wool.

He had been rich for a long time, cattle and silver and gold, and he had set aside a tenth of all of it and given it away. There was nothing left that could be handed to him. A king with one friend he cannot repay ends up taking the crown off his own head and putting it on the other man, and that is what the white hair was. The crown, given the week he buried his wife.

And after she was in the ground, God blessed him. Not before. The blessing was held back until Sarah was dead so that no generation coming afterward could stand up and say that Abraham had only ever been blessed on her account.