Isaac and Ishmael Buried Their Father Together

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The Old Man Who Would Not Get Down From the Camel

Abraham rode out into the wilderness at his age to look at his son's face, and when he got there the son was out hunting. He had sworn to Sarah that he would not get down at Ishmael's tent, so he stayed up on the camel in the noon heat and asked the woman in the doorway for bread and water.

She said there was none. There were children around her knees and she was cursing at them while she said it, and she had things to say about her husband too, none of them good, to a stranger she had never seen before. Abraham did not tell her whose father he was.

He left her a message instead. When Ishmael comes back, tell him an old man from the land of the Philistines was here, and tell him the tent pin he has set in the ground is the wrong one, and he should pull it out and put in another.

Ishmael came home and heard the message and understood every word of it, because there was only one man alive who would send him a sentence built like that. He divorced her.

The Second Wife and the Bread

Years later Abraham made the ride again. Ishmael was out hunting again, and again a woman came to the tent door, but this one took hold of the camel's bridle and told the old man to come in out of the sun. She brought bread. She brought water. He came down and ate and blessed the house before he left.

The message he left this time was that the tent pin was good and Ishmael should leave it where it stood. Ishmael got home, heard it, and praised God in his own tent. Then he loaded his wife and his children and everything he owned and moved the household back to the land of the Philistines to live near his father, and only then did Abraham tell him what the first message had been about.

The Well Where Hagar Was Living

Isaac was the one who went and got Hagar.

After Sarah died he rode out to Beer-lahai-roi, the well of the Living One who sees me, which had been Hagar's well since the day she ran from the camp, and he brought her back to his father. She was called Keturah by then. Abraham took her again and she bore him six more sons in his last years, so the family that had been cut apart in that tent with the bread and the water put itself back together late and in the wrong order, with nothing explained to anybody.

Ishmael was alive for all of it. His mother was sleeping in his father's camp again because his younger brother had gone out to the well and fetched her.

Thirty-Eight Years and the Same Hands

Abraham died at a hundred and seventy-five, and they carried him down to Machpelah, the cave in the field he had bought from the sons of Heth, where Sarah had been lying for thirty-eight years. Rabbi Tanchuma counted that gap, and he counted it to say something about the people walking behind the bier: the same hands that had done the work for Sarah were the hands that got to do it for Abraham. Nobody had let the cave go untended in the interval.

Shem and Ever walked in front of the body. They knew the inside of that cave, so they went ahead into the dark and found the chamber that had been left open beside Sarah, and that was where he went.

Who Went In First

At the mouth of the cave the two sons stood together with their father between them, and the older one had the right of it. Ishmael was the firstborn by more than thirteen years. Every custom in that country put his name and his foot ahead of Isaac's, and no one at that burial would have said a word if he had taken the place.

He looked at his brother. He had spent a lifetime with a claim in his hands that had been stripped off him once already, and here it was back, and this time nobody was reaching for it. He stepped aside and let Isaac go in first.

That is all of it. No speech, no embrace, no explanation, and nobody asked him afterward what he had meant by it. What survived was the order of two names in the verse: Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him. The younger in front. The sages read that inversion as the confession Ishmael never made in words, and they called it teshuvah, the same word used for a whole nation turning around.

Decades later two brothers stood at the same cave mouth over Isaac's body, and Esau walked in ahead of Jacob, and the verse set their names down in the ordinary order with nothing about them worth noticing.