Rebecca Ran Down From Her Tower the Day Jacob Came Home
Twenty years after she sent him to Haran, Rebecca was still in the tower. A runner shouted that Jacob was on the road.
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The stairs of the tower were still in shade when the runner shouted. "Behold, Jacob thy son hath come!" Rebecca did not wait for the message to finish. She was already on the steps, one hand on the wall, the other gathering her skirt so she would not fall.
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Twenty years of watching the eastern road had trained her body to move before her mind agreed. Her spirit revived the way a chest revives when a long grief finally lets go of the ribs.
The Night the Dew Stores Opened
The leaving had begun on a night she named for him. Storehouses of dew unlocked. Celestial beings sang Hallel (הלל), the psalms of praise. She told Jacob this was the night Egypt would one day answer with the same song, and he had to take the blessing before Esau reached the tent.
The ruach hakodesh (רוח הקודש), the holy spirit, had already settled the matter. Isaac was old and blind and ready to put the charged words on the wrong son. Rebecca was not playing favorites. She was stopping a mistake that would travel forward through generations.
"This night is special," she said. "Go now and prepare savory meat for thy father, that he may bless thee before his death. Do as I bid thee. You are my son whose children, every one, will be good and God-fearing."
She dressed him in Esau's clothes and sent him into the tent of a blind man. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi later said she was not only shielding Jacob. She was keeping Esau from painting a false picture of himself and walking out with a blessing that would have been an abomination to God.
Flee Before You Kill Him
Esau's rage came on schedule. Rebecca caught Jacob by the sleeve before he could turn it into a fight. "Obey my voice. Arise and flee to Laban, my brother, to Haran, and tarry with him a few days until thy brother's anger turneth away."
Jacob lifted his chin. "I am not afraid. If he wishes to kill me, I will kill him."
She had no patience for that arithmetic. "Let me not be bereft of both my sons on one day." Winning was not the question. What mattered was what a man becomes who has killed his brother, and what a family becomes that has watched it happen.
He was sixty-three by the count of Jubilees, nine weeks of years, and he told her he had never touched a woman of Canaan. He remembered Abraham's command. She blessed him anyway, as a mother blesses when she is not sure she will still be there to give another one. Take a wife from her father's house. The Most High God would bless him. His children would be a righteous generation and a holy seed.
She told him it would be a few days. She lived long enough to know that few days was a translation of twenty years.
Twenty Years in a Tower
The Torah does not name her at the reunion. She is not in the scene where Jacob meets Esau on the road. She is not named when he comes to Isaac. The scroll buries her in a footnote, the death of Deborah her nurse, recorded in Genesis 35:8 without the death of the woman Deborah served.
Rebecca refused that silence with her body. She took the high tower of the household and kept the horizon. A wealthy nomadic family puts its elder woman where she can see. She used the height the way a sentry uses a wall.
Dust on the eastern road became a person in her mind a hundred times before it was him. She ate. She slept. She woke with her palm already on the stair-rail. The grief had taken up residence in her chest and paid no rent. Then the runner came, and the grief stood up and left.
She Did Not Wait at the Gate
She came out of the tower to the front of it. Jacob was there. She kissed him. She embraced him. The verbs are the fullest reunion the old book knows how to name. No speech first. Mouth, arms, the dust of Haran still on his clothes.
He was not alone. Two boys stood with him, Ephraim and Manasseh. Rebecca looked from face to face.
"Are these thy sons, my son?"
She already knew. She asked so the blessing would have a door. She embraced them. She kissed them. "In you shall the seed of Abraham become illustrious, and ye will prove a blessing on the earth."
The spirit that had revived in her chest now had somewhere to go. It went into the boys.
A Blessing on Abraham's Seed
Jacob went in to Isaac, who lay in his chamber, the two sons with him. The old man who had once been fooled in the dark now received the son who had carried the blessing through twenty years of Laban's wages. Rebecca did not follow them in. She had done her running.
Behind her the tower stood empty of watching. The road no longer needed a woman at the window. She had sent him away to keep him from becoming a brother-killer. She had dressed him so the blessing would not go to the son who would have spent it as charm. She had waited until waiting itself became a kind of prayer. Then she ran, and the prayer turned into a kiss.
The stairs kept her footprints until the next wind. Jacob's mouth still held the salt of her greeting when he crossed the threshold to his father.
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