Keturah Was Hagar Whom Abraham Once Sent Into the Desert

Click for full size

The Bill of Divorce Sarah Demanded

Sarah did not ask that the handmaid be sent away quietly. She told Abraham to sit and write a get, a bill of divorce, the kind a man drafts to cut a wife loose for good. Then she named the second thing, and it was heavier than the first. Hagar and her boy Ishmael were to be severed from her and from her son Isaac, not only under this sun but in the world to come. No shared inheritance in life. No shared portion after death. The exile was to run past the edge of the grave.

Abraham heard the whole demand, and something in him gave way. Of every hard thing that had come to him, and hard things had come, this one landed worst. The sage Ben Tema kept the measure of it. The matter was, in the words of the verse, "very grievous in Abraham's sight on account of his son." Not the property, not the quarrel between the two women. His son. Ishmael was his firstborn, the child he had carried on his own shoulders, and now he was to write him out of the world with his own hand.

The Night the Holy One Came to His Tent

He did not sleep, and in the dark of that night HaKadosh Baruch Hu, the Holy One, came to him. Rabbi Judah preserved what was said. God did not argue the estate. He spoke about the marriage.

"Abraham, dost thou not know that Sarah was appointed to thee for a wife from her mother's womb?" the voice said. "She is thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant." One woman was the wife of the covenant, chosen before she drew her first breath. The other was the handmaid, and the difference was not cruelty, it was station. Then came the ruling that broke the argument. "All that Sarah has spoken she has uttered truthfully. Let it not be grievous in thine eyes." The verse sets it down the same way. "And God said unto Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight."

Abraham had no appeal left to make.

The Handmaid Walks Into the Wilderness

In the morning he did what he had been told. He wrote the deed. He took bread and a skin of water and set them on Hagar's shoulder, and he sent her out with the boy toward the open country. She went the way a divorced woman goes, carrying a child and a document that said she would not come back. Behind her the tent held Sarah and Isaac and the whole weight of the promise. The wilderness swallowed the mother and her son and did not give a reason.

That should have been the end of her. A handmaid is sent off with a document in her hand, the covenant narrows to one son, and the sand takes the rest.

The Tent After Sarah Was Buried

Then Sarah died. Abraham bought a field and a cave and laid her in the ground, and he came back to a tent that had won every argument and now stood empty of the woman who had made them. He was old. The great trials were behind him. The knife on the mountain, the long wait for one son, all of it done.

And the old man reached back across the years for the woman he had driven into the sand. He took another wife. Her name, the sages say, was Keturah, and when they say it they lean close, because they know who she was. Keturah was Hagar. The handmaid he had cut loose with his own bill of divorce had come back to stand under the same roof, and this time he married her outright.

The Woman Whose Deeds Smelled of Incense

The name carried the verdict. Keturah runs close to ketoret, the incense burned in worship, and the sages read her deeds into it. Whatever she had been in Sarah's tent, whatever contempt or grief had passed between the two women, her acts in the years apart had turned as pleasing as the smoke that rises off the altar. The desert had not broken her. It had refined her, and Abraham married the refined woman.

She bore him six sons. The verse counts them plainly. "And she bare him Zimran," and after Zimran the others, a whole second household rising in the tent of a man near the end of his life. The woman who had walked out with a water skin and a boy came back and filled the tent with children.

Six Sons and a Second Bill of Divorce

The reunion carried the old shape inside it. The sons were Abraham's, and still they were not Isaac's brothers in the inheritance. When he grew old he gave the sons of his concubines gifts, and he sent them away from Isaac his son toward the east, and the sages say he did it, once more, "by a deed of divorcement." The same instrument that had opened the whole story closed it. A get had sent the mother into the wilderness. A get now sent her sons toward the sunrise, loaded with presents and pointed away from the covenant.

So Abraham stood in his last years and watched the camels go east, the incense-woman beside him, her six boys carrying his blessing and his gifts and the old name of Ishmael out past the horizon, while Isaac stayed behind with the promise. The exile he had signed came back as a marriage. The marriage went out again as an exile. And the woman he had sent to die in the sand died instead as his wife, her deeds smelling of incense, in the house that had once written her out.