The Servant Who Entered Paradise Alive

Before Eliezer left for Haran, Abraham made him understand the stakes. The wife chosen for Isaac had already been chosen. She existed. She had been born. Her name was Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel, who was himself born on the very day Abraham had lifted the knife at Moriah. The timing was not coincidence. The tradition preserved in the Legends of the Jews insists that divine providence does not improvise. When a patriarch needs something, the preparation has already been underway for years.

Eliezer looked like Abraham. This detail matters because Laban, Rebekah's brother, saw him approaching and thought he was looking at the patriarch himself. It caused complications later, but at the moment of arrival it opened the door. Laban said: come in, you blessed of the Lord, I have cleansed my house of idols. Whether he had actually cleansed the house of idols is a separate question; the family's relationship with idolatry would become a recurring problem for the next several generations.

Eliezer came with ten camels loaded with gifts. He was accompanied, the text says, by two angels: one appointed to guard him, one appointed for Rebekah. The journey from Canaan to Haran, which would normally take weeks, was accomplished in hours. The earth folded itself to receive him. This is what the tradition calls kefitzat haderech, the leaping of the road, a miracle granted to those whose mission is genuinely urgent and whose mission is genuinely God's.

He stopped at the well outside the city and prayed. He asked God for a sign: the girl destined for Isaac would be the one who offered him water when he asked, and who also watered his camels without being asked. He added to himself that he hoped it would not be a bondwoman who came first, because what would he do then? But God granted his request, the tradition notes, somewhat indulgently. When Eliezer asked, the other girls told him they had no water to spare. Then Rebekah came, walking to the well against her usual custom, for she was the daughter of a king, Bethuel being king of Haran, and such women did not normally draw water at the public well.

She offered him water immediately and rebuked the other girls for their discourtesy to a stranger. As she drew, Eliezer watched something remarkable: the water rose to her from the bottom of the well, so she barely had to exert herself. He gave her a nose ring weighing half a shekel, which the rabbis read as a foreshadowing: her descendants would one day bring the half-shekel offering to the sanctuary every year. He gave her two bracelets of ten shekels' weight in gold, which pointed to the two tablets of stone and the Ten Commandments written upon them.

The negotiations inside the house were almost fatal. Bethuel and Laban set poisoned food before Eliezer. He refused to eat before telling his errand, which saved his life. While he spoke, the poisoned dish was moved by some arrangement of the table and came to stand in front of Bethuel himself, who ate of it and died. Eliezer presented the document Abraham had prepared, deeding all his possessions to Isaac, to show the family who they were dealing with. He also let them know that Abraham was not wholly dependent on their answer: he might seek a wife for Isaac from the daughters of Ishmael or Lot. The family understood the negotiation.

The fuller midrashic account of Eliezer's mission describes him as Abraham's spiritual equal in one critical respect: like his master, he had full power over the evil inclination. Like Abraham, he was learned in the law. He was of the accursed lineage of Canaan, which is why Abraham had told him plainly: my son is of the blessed race, and curse and blessing cannot be united, so you may not offer your own daughter as Isaac's wife. But because he served Abraham loyally, this curse was transformed into a blessing. At the end of the story, the text says God found him worthy of entering Paradise alive, one of the very few in all of history to whom that distinction fell.

The return journey also took three hours. He had left at noon. He arrived in Canaan at the time of the afternoon prayer, and found Isaac coming from the way of Beer-lahai-roi, where he had gone to reunite his father with Hagar. Rebekah saw Isaac from a distance and asked Eliezer: who is that man walking toward us in the field? She saw his extraordinary beauty. She also saw, the text says, an angel accompanying him. She fell from her camel in startlement. She covered her face.

Isaac brought Rebekah into his mother's tent. The cloud that had rested over the tent during Sarah's life and vanished at her death appeared again. The Sabbath light that Sarah had kindled, which had burned through the week miraculously, returned. The blessing that had rested over Sarah's dough came back. The gates of the tent opened wide to the poor as they had been in Sarah's time. Isaac had mourned his mother for three years and found no consolation. Rebekah consoled him. She was, the tradition says, the counterpart of Sarah in person and in spirit, and for that reason the continuation of the line did not skip a generation but passed whole from one woman to the other, intact and without interruption.