Why Rebekah Was Buried at Night With Only Esau to Mourn

The kicking began before they were born. Rebekah pressed her hands to her own belly and felt it again, two small bodies driving against each other in the dark water inside her, fist against fist, heel against rib. It did not feel like life turning over. It felt like a fight. She bent forward over the loom and could not breathe for a moment, and the words came out of her low and frightened. If this is so, why do I exist? (Genesis 25:22). She went out from the tents to ask, because no woman should have to carry a war.

Two Fists Inside One Body

What she carried were two who could not share a single skin. One of them, the elder, lay with his small hand already stretched out across the womb toward his brother, the fingers open, reaching, as if even there he meant to close them around a throat (Psalm 58:4). They did not curl together for warmth. Each one ran at the other in that closed dark, the elder running to kill, the younger running to kill, neither yielding ground that did not exist. Whatever the one held sacred, the other held cheap. Whatever the one forbade, the other took as permitted. Rebekah did not know all of this. She only knew the bruising, and that the answer she received outside the tents was that two peoples were already at war beneath her own heart, and that the older would serve the younger.

The Younger Sent Into the Night

Years made the prophecy flesh. Esau grew red and broad and hungry, a man of the open field, and the birthright slid out of his hands for the price of a bowl of stew. Jacob grew quiet and watchful and kept to the tents. When their father Isaac went blind and called for his elder son to bless him, Rebekah moved fast. She wrapped Jacob's smooth arms in goatskin, she cooked the meal, she pushed her younger son into the dim tent to take the blessing meant for the other. And when Esau came back from the hunt and found the blessing gone, his cry filled the tent, and the murder he had carried since the womb woke up in him fully grown. Rebekah heard it. She sent Jacob running by night toward a far country, to save the boy from his brother's hands. She told herself it would be a few days. She did not see him again.

A House Emptied of Men

The years that followed hollowed out her household one mourner at a time. Abraham had long been laid in the cave at Machpelah. Isaac sat blind and still and could not lead anyone anywhere. Jacob stayed away in the far country, building a life among strangers, kept from home by the very danger his mother had sewn into goatskin. So when Rebekah herself lay down for the last time, the woman who had outmaneuvered an entire household to steer the covenant, there was almost no one left standing to carry her out.

There was Esau. The elder. The passed-over one. The man whose blessing she had taken with her own clever hands and given to his brother. He was near, and he was strong, and by every custom he was the son who should walk at the head of his mother's bier through the streets in full daylight, where the people could see.

The Curse They Would Not Risk

That was the thing the family could not allow. Not Esau's grief, which may have been real enough. What they feared was the crowd. They could picture it too clearly, the procession moving through the town, Esau at the front of it, and some voice rising out of the watching faces, sharp and unforgivable at a graveside. Accursed be the breasts that gave thee suck. A curse aimed at the living son would land on the dead mother. It would follow her into the cave. They could not let her memory take that wound on the last day anyone would speak of her aloud.

So they did not wait for morning. They lifted her in the dark. No procession through the streets, no crowd, no named tree of weeping such as had marked even the grave of her old nurse Deborah. They carried Rebekah out under cover of night, quietly, by torch and not by sun, and laid her in the cave at Machpelah where the others slept. The woman who had seen further than anyone in that house went into the ground unwitnessed, hidden from the very people her foresight had served, because the one son free to mourn her was the son she had spent her life working around.

Comfort Sent to the Far Country

Word of it had to travel. Jacob, still in the far country, still kept from home by the old fear, received no message in time to come and bury his mother. The night that hid her from the crowd hid her from him too. Into that absence came a comfort he had not asked for. The God of his fathers stood near him in his grief and did not leave him alone with it, far from the cave, far from the brother whose outstretched fist had been the first thing he ever touched. The war that began in the womb had cost Rebekah her own funeral. It had not, in the end, swallowed the son she ran into the night to save.