Rebekah and the Camels at the Well

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Full script

It is evening, and a long line of camels is kneeling in the dust beside a well, and every one of them is thinking exactly the same thing.

Ten camels. Ten very tired, very thirsty camels, who have walked a very long way, carrying a very great deal of luggage, for a man who has not yet said where they are going.

The man himself is standing a little apart. He is not looking at the camels. He is looking at the town gate, where the women of the town are coming out, one and two at a time, with jars on their shoulders. And he is saying, quietly, to nobody who is visible, a prayer. It is a very specific prayer. It is, in fact, rather a bold one.

And a young woman comes down the path with her jar on her shoulder, and she looks at him, and she looks at the camels, and she says something that nobody has asked her to say.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is from the book of Genesis, chapter twenty-four, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and we will tell it straight, as it is written. A few of the small conversations, and a good deal of the weather and the camels' opinions, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will tell you at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

First, where we are in the story.

If you have been with us for the night of the three visitors at Mamre, you will remember Abraham: a man who left his home because God asked him to, and who lived the rest of his life in tents, as a stranger in the land that had been promised to his family. He was very rich in sheep and goats, and very short of one thing, which was a settled place to call his own. For decades he had been promised a son, and then a family as many as the stars, and for a long time there was no son at all.

Then there was a son. His name was Isaac. And the book tells us, in chapter twenty-two, a story we will not tell tonight, because it is a hard one and needs its own evening, in which Abraham was asked for the most that a father could be asked, and in which God, in the end, gave Isaac back.

After that, the book tells us, quite briefly, that Sarah died. She was a hundred and twenty-seven years old. Abraham wept for her. And then, because he was a stranger in the land and owned not one foot of it, he went to the local people, the sons of Heth, at the gate of their town, and he bargained, very politely and at some length, for a field and a cave where he could bury his wife. It is chapter twenty-three, and it is a surprisingly funny chapter, full of two sides refusing to be paid and then naming a very large price. He buys the cave at Machpelah. It is the first piece of the promised land that he ever owns, and he buys it to bury someone he loved.

That is where tonight's story begins. Abraham is very old now. Sarah is gone. Isaac is grown, about forty, we are told later, and still unmarried. And the old man, who has spent his whole life trusting a promise about a family, now has to think about how a family is actually made.

The book says that Abraham was old, well advanced in years, and that the Lord had blessed him in all things. And it says that he called the oldest servant of his house, the one who had charge of all that he had.

Now, the book does not tell us this servant's name. I would like you to notice that. All the way through this long chapter, the most active person in the story, the one who does most of the walking and most of the talking and most of the praying, is never named. Some readers, long ago, guessed that he might be the man Abraham once called Eliezer of Damascus, his steward, back when Abraham feared he would have no heir. It is a nice guess. The text does not say it, so neither will we. We shall just call him the servant, which is, I think, how he would have wished it.

And Abraham says to him: "Put your hand under my thigh, and I will make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and of the earth, that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell, but will go to my country and to my kindred, and take a wife for my son Isaac."

That gesture, the hand under the thigh, is a very old way of taking an oath. We do not do it now, and I would advise against trying it at the dinner table. It means: this is a solemn thing, and it concerns the family line.

The reason Abraham gives is not snobbery. It is not that other peoples are worse. It is that Abraham's whole life rests on a particular promise, made to a particular family, and he wants his son's wife to come from the people who share that faith in the one God, not from a place where the household gods are everywhere. He wants Isaac to marry into the family's faith as well as the family's blood.

And the servant, who is a sensible man, asks the sensible question. "Perhaps the woman will not be willing to follow me to this land. Must I then take your son back to the land from which you came?"

And Abraham says, quite firmly, no. "See that you do not take my son back there." The promise is about this land. Isaac stays. Then, in the most reassuring sentence in the whole conversation, Abraham says: "The Lord, the God of heaven, who took me from my father's house and from the land of my kindred, and who spoke to me, and who swore to me, saying, 'To your offspring I will give this land,' he will send his angel before you, and you shall take a wife for my son from there."

He will send his angel before you.

I want to pause on that, because it is the quiet heart of the whole evening. Abraham does not say, "Go and arrange it." He does not say, "Here is a plan." He says, in effect, I have walked this road with God for a very long time, and I do not think he has stopped. Go, and you will not be going alone. And if, in the end, the woman will not come, he adds, kindly, you are free from this oath. Only do not take my son back.

And the servant puts his hand under his master's thigh, and swears.

Then he gets ready, and the book tells us how.

He takes ten camels from his master's herd, and, the book says, all sorts of choice gifts from his master, in his hand. Ten camels is a serious expedition. In that world, a camel is something like a very large, very patient, very opinionated delivery lorry. Camels had only fairly recently become common as pack animals in that part of the world, and ten of them, loaded with gifts, would be seen coming for a long way off. A man with ten camels was not a man in a hurry, and he was not a man to be ignored.

And he sets out for Aram-naharaim, which means Aram of the two rivers, in the north, to the city of Nahor. Nahor was Abraham's brother. Abraham had left that country many years before, and had never gone back. It is a journey of many days, across a great deal of dry country, with a great deal of camel.

I do not think the servant was a man who talked to his camels, but I think after about the fifth day he began.

"It is not far now," he would say, in that cheerful voice that people use when they are not at all sure.

The camels, I imagine, said nothing. A camel's silence is a great art. It says: I have heard you. I have my own views. I shall voice them at the first available opportunity, with spit.

On the evening of some day we are not told, he arrives. The book says that he made the camels kneel down outside the city by the well of water, at the time of evening, the time when women go out to draw water.

Pause on that picture, for it is wonderfully ordinary. The wells of a town in that age were the gathering places. They were the post office and the news and the gossip, all in one. The women of the town came out in the cool of the evening, each with a jar, and chatted, and drew water, and went home. A stranger who wanted to find out about a family, and who wanted to do it quietly, could hardly do better than to sit down by the well, and wait.

And then the servant does what the best people do when they are not sure what comes next. He prays.

And his prayer, in the book, is a lovely thing, simple and direct, and it begins with his master. He says: "O Lord, God of my master Abraham, please grant me success today, and show steadfast love to my master Abraham."

Notice what he asks for. He does not begin with himself. He begins with the man he serves, and with God's old faithful love towards that man. It is a servant's prayer, in the best sense: the prayer of someone who has stopped worrying about getting credit.

Then he says: "Behold, I am standing by the spring of water, and the daughters of the men of the city are coming out to draw water. Let the young woman to whom I shall say, 'Please let down your jar that I may drink,' and who shall say, 'Drink, and I will water your camels also' — let her be the one whom you have appointed for your servant Isaac. By this I shall know that you have shown steadfast love to my master."

Now think what he is asking. It is not a magic sign, not a bolt of lightning, not a voice from the clouds. It is a test of character. He is asking to find a young woman who will do something kind, and who will do it far beyond what was asked.

Because here is the thing about ten camels. A thirsty camel, after a long journey, can drink a very great deal of water. A camel that has gone without water for some days may drink something like twenty or thirty gallons in a few minutes. If you doubt it, ask a camel. Ten camels, then, is hundreds of gallons. It is not a chore. It is not a favour. It is, quite plainly, a very hard afternoon's work, drawing water from a well, one jar at a time, with a jar that holds about a gallon or two, and carrying it, and pouring it, over and over and over.

Anyone offering to water ten camels is doing something extraordinary. A person who would do it for a stranger, without being asked, and without even knowing whether he could ever pay her back, is a person with a remarkable heart.

The servant is not asking for a pretty girl. He is not asking for a rich one, or a clever one, or one from a good family. He is asking for the kindest person at the well. I think that is a very wise request. I think many of us, in his place, would have asked for something quite different.

And the book, in a line I have always loved, says that before he had finished speaking, behold, Rebekah came out.

Before he had finished speaking.

I should tell you who she is, because the book does, and with some care. She was born to Bethuel, the son of Milcah, who was the wife of Nahor, Abraham's brother. So she was Abraham's great-niece. The book adds that she was very attractive in appearance, and a young woman, and that no man had known her. All of which means: she was a respectable young woman from a good family, of marriageable age, and she was exactly the right person, by the oldest standards of the time, in exactly the right place.

But the book does not stop there, and I think the real reason she is remembered is in what she does next, not in who she is.

She goes down to the spring, and fills her jar, and comes up. Everyone does that. It is the most ordinary thing in the world. And the servant runs to meet her, and says, "Please give me a little water to drink from your jar."

Not the camels. Notice that. He asks for himself, just a drink, just the bare minimum one stranger might ask another. A little water. That is all.

And she says, "Drink, my lord." And she quickly lets down her jar upon her hand, and gives him a drink.

She does it quickly. The book lets us see that: not reluctantly, not looking over her shoulder, but promptly, as if giving a drink to a stranger were the most natural thing in the world.

And then, when she has finished giving him a drink, she says the sentence. She says, "I will draw water for your camels also, until they have finished drinking."

Until they have finished.

I want you to hear what she has just promised. She has not said, I will give them a bucket each. She has not said, I will give them a little. She has said, until they have finished, which she must have known, as a girl who had grown up with animals, would be a very long time.

And the book says that she quickly emptied her jar into the trough, and ran again to the well to draw water, and she drew for all his camels.

She ran. She went back and forth, back and forth, between the well and the trough, in the evening light, one jar after another. Ten camels. Ten great, groaning, gulping camels. And I think the camels, who have been disappointed in people for several hundred miles, must have looked at each other and revised their opinion.

And what is the servant doing, all this time? The book tells us, in one of the most beautiful lines in the whole chapter: the man gazed at her in silence, to know whether the Lord had prospered his journey or not.

He gazed at her in silence.

He does not help. He does not offer to carry. He does not interrupt her with questions. He just watches, and keeps very still, and I think holds his breath, as people do when they have asked God for something very particular and suspect that they are getting it. He wants to be sure. He does not rush in with a conclusion. He lets her finish, and he lets the thing be what it is.

It must have taken a good while. You would think it would be awkward to have a stranger staring at you in silence while you worked. But I think there is nothing in the way he looks that frightens her. I think he looks like a man watching a miracle, very carefully, in case it should go away.

When the camels have finished drinking, the servant takes a gold ring, weighing half a shekel, and two bracelets for her arms, weighing ten shekels of gold. That is quite a lot of gold. It is a gift fit for the daughter of a good house, and it is a long way beyond a tip for watering camels.

And then, only then, he asks the question he has been wanting to ask. "Whose daughter are you? Tell me, please. Is there room in your father's house for us to spend the night?"

And she says, "I am the daughter of Bethuel, the son of Milcah, whom she bore to Nahor." And then, before he can answer: "We have plenty of both straw and fodder, and room to spend the night."

Do you see what she has just done? He asked if there was room for him. She answered about the camels. She has just watered ten of them, and she goes on straight away to the straw and the fodder, because she knows what a tired animal needs. A person who thinks first about the animals is a person who will be good to a household.

And the servant heard the answer, and the book says that the man bowed his head and worshipped the Lord.

Think of that moment, for I think it is the most moving one in the chapter. He is standing at a well, a very long way from home, with ten tired camels and a heavy purse, and he has just heard the name of Bethuel, the son of Milcah, the son of Nahor, the brother of his master. His long road has brought him to exactly the right door. And he does not shout. He does not leap about. He bows his head, and he says the shortest and truest prayer in Scripture. He says: "Blessed be the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who has not forsaken his steadfast love and his faithfulness toward my master. As for me, the Lord has led me in the way to the house of my master's kinsmen."

He has been led.

I think that is worth saying again, because it is the sentence that the whole chapter is built around. Not, I found it. Not, I arranged it. The Lord has led me in the way. When you look back at the road and see that you were not walking alone, the right thing to do, apparently, is to stop and say thank you in the middle of the street.

Rebekah, meanwhile, has done the natural thing. She runs home. The book says she ran and told her mother's household about these things.

She ran again. This is a girl who runs everywhere. Perhaps that is the secret of her: she is never slow to do the good thing. She runs to the well, and she runs back to the trough, and now she runs to the house, with a gold ring and two heavy bracelets on, and a story that is quite impossible to explain.

I can picture the kitchen. "A man," she says, out of breath. "At the well. With camels. Ten. I watered them. He gave me this."

"What man?"

"I don't know. He asked whose daughter I was. He asked if there was room."

"And what did you say?"

"I said there was straw."

I like to think that her mother, at this point, put down whatever she was holding.

And now, in this household, we meet someone else: Rebekah's brother, whose name is Laban. And the book gives us a sharp little observation about him. It says: when he saw the ring, and the bracelets on his sister's arms, and when he heard the words of Rebekah his sister, he ran out to the man, at the spring.

Now, I do not want to be unkind to Laban. We will meet him again, in a later story, and he gets rather more complicated. But I think the book wants us to notice, very gently, that he ran out when he saw the gold. I do not say he did not also care for his sister. I say only that the book has noticed what we have noticed. Some people are drawn to the well by a kindness, and some by a bracelet. And some, I suppose, are drawn by both at once, and can hardly tell the two apart.

But whatever his reasons, his welcome is warm. He says: "Come in, O blessed of the Lord. Why do you stand outside? For I have prepared the house and a place for the camels."

And the man comes in. The camels are unloaded, and given straw and fodder, just as Rebekah had said. Water is brought for the servant to wash his feet, and for the feet of the men with him, for he had company, the book says, though it never says how many. Everything is done properly. Everything is done with the old and formal courtesy of the East.

And then food is set before him. A good meal. A meal for a man who has been eating dry bread for a week.

And the servant says: "I will not eat until I have said what I have to say."

I think I love this man more than any other person in the story. After all that travelling, and all that waiting, and all that praying, he has a hot dinner in front of him. And he says, not yet. I have an errand. I have a duty to my master. Let me do that first.

And Laban says, "Speak on."

And so the servant tells the whole story again, from the beginning. It is the longest speech in the chapter, and it is, if you read it closely, almost word for word what we have just heard: Abraham's wealth, and his old age, and Isaac, and the oath, and the camels, and the prayer, and the well, and Rebekah running with her jar. He leaves nothing out.

And I find it a little funny, and a little moving, that the book repeats it. It would have been quite easy to say, and then he told them all of it. But the book gives it to us a second time, as a thing worth hearing twice. You may think, as I did the first time I read it, that the repetition is padding. But if you were a family at a table, and a stranger had come out of the dusk to ask for your daughter on behalf of a man you had never met, you would want to hear every detail. You would want to know exactly what he had prayed, and exactly what she had done, and you would turn each piece over in your hands, like a coin.

Now, there is one small change in the telling, and it is a delicate one. When the servant tells the story, he tells it to a family, and he tells it in a way that they can follow. He tells them the thing that matters most about Rebekah, which is not that she is beautiful, but that she was the one who said, "Drink, and I will draw for your camels also." He lets her kindness speak for her.

And at the end of it all, he does not push. He says: "Now then, if you are going to show steadfast love and faithfulness to my master, tell me; and if not, tell me, that I may turn to the right hand or to the left."

It is an honest thing to say. He is asking them not to be polite. He is asking them to be true.

And Laban and Bethuel answer. The book notes that it is Laban who speaks first, and then Bethuel, which tells you something about who was running things in that house, and it also tells you, perhaps, that Bethuel was old. They say: "The thing comes from the Lord; we cannot speak to you bad or good. Behold, Rebekah is before you; take her and go, and let her be the wife of your master's son, as the Lord has spoken."

The thing comes from the Lord.

They have heard the whole story. They have seen the gold. They have listened to a man who walked for days to ask for their daughter. And what moves them is not the gold, and it is not the ring. It is the pattern of the thing. Too many things have fitted together, a well, an evening, a prayer, a girl, a name, to be anybody's accident.

And the servant, hearing that, does what he did at the well. The book says that when Abraham's servant heard their words, he bowed himself to the earth before the Lord.

Twice, now, that we have seen him bow. It is the posture of his whole life: head low, hands open, eyes on the ground and the heart turned up.

Then comes the giving of the gifts. He brings out jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and garments, and gives them to Rebekah. And he gives costly things to her brother and her mother. It is the way of the age, a bride-price and a gift to the family, a mark of respect and a sealing of the promise.

And then, at last, he eats. I hope the meal was still warm.

They stay the night. And in the morning, the servant gets up early, and he says: "Send me away to my master."

Which is the very opposite of what a family wants to hear. The book says that her brother and her mother said, "Let the young woman remain with us a while, at least ten days; after that she may go."

I think we can understand them. You have a daughter, a quick and kind one, who has been running through your kitchen all her life, and a stranger comes out of the dust and says that she must go away to a distant country, to a man she has never seen, and that she must go now. A mother might reasonably ask for ten days. A mother might reasonably ask for ten years.

But the servant says: "Do not delay me, since the Lord has prospered my way. Send me away that I may go to my master."

He is not being rude. He is a man who has seen how thin the thread was, and who is afraid of pulling it. When God has opened a road, you walk it, before it closes.

And then comes, I think, the most beautiful moment of the entire story. They say: "We will call the young woman and ask her."

We will ask her.

I would like you to hold on to that. In a world where marriages were very commonly arranged, and where a daughter's wishes were not always asked, this family stops and says: let us put the question to her. Let us hear what she says. They call Rebekah, and they say, "Will you go with this man?"

And she says: "I will go."

Three words in English, and a single word in the Hebrew. I will go.

She does not say it as a girl who has no choice. She says it as a girl who has seen what she has seen, and who has been brave all her life, and who knows, in whatever way a person knows these things, that this is the road. It is the same quick and generous spirit that ran to the trough, running again, this time towards a country she has never seen.

And I would say that the Church, in both East and West, has long loved her for that answer. It is a sort of echo, if you listen, of other answers we will hear in other stories: of Abraham, who went out not knowing where he was going, and of a young woman in Nazareth, many centuries later, who said another small, brave yes. Rebekah's yes is not Mary's, and it is not the same. But it comes from the same well.

So they send her away, and her nurse with her, the book says, and the servant and his men. And the family does the thing that families do at a leave-taking, which is to say something they cannot quite say. They bless her. They say: "Our sister, may you become thousands of ten thousands, and may your offspring possess the gate of those who hate them."

It is a very old blessing, and a very large one. It is the sort of blessing a family gives when it knows it will never see its daughter again, or not for a very long time, and has nothing to give her but words, and has decided to make the words as big as the sky.

And Rebekah and her young women arise, and mount the camels, and follow the man. And the servant takes Rebekah, and goes his way.

I think the camels were the happiest creatures on the road. They were going home. They had been watered. They had been fed. They had somebody new on one of their backs, who had been kind to them before she even knew their names. And I think they walked, for the first time in a fortnight, at something close to a spring.

Now the story turns, as the best stories do, to the other person in it. We have heard a great deal about the servant, and about Rebekah, and about the family at the well. We have heard almost nothing about the groom.

And here is where the book shows us Isaac. It says that Isaac had come from Beer-lahai-roi, and was dwelling in the Negeb, the dry southern country. And then comes one of the loveliest sentences in the whole book of Genesis. It says that Isaac went out to meditate in the field toward evening.

Some translations say walk. Some say meditate. Some say, more simply, that he went out to pray, or to think. The old Hebrew word is a rare one, and scholars have argued about it for a very long time. But all the readings have the same picture: a man in the fields at the end of the day, alone, at peace. A quiet man. A man who has lost his mother, and has not been consoled, and who goes out in the evening to be with God in the open air.

And the book says: And he lifted up his eyes and saw, and behold, there were camels coming.

I love that. He lifts up his eyes, and there they are. Not as the answer to a prayer he knew he had prayed, for he had no idea there was an errand. But as the thing that was always going to come, over the hill in the last light, ten camels and a long line of dust.

And Rebekah lifts up her eyes also. The book says that when she saw Isaac, she dismounted from the camel and said to the servant, "Who is that man, walking in the field to meet us?"

She does not wait. She slips down from the camel, as quickly as she once ran to the trough. And when the servant says, "It is my master," she takes her veil, and she covers herself.

That is a gesture of modesty and respect, and a very old one. She is about to meet the man she has promised to marry. She does not know him. And she is not a girl who makes a show of herself. She covers her face, and she walks to meet him as a woman who knows who she is.

And the servant, the faithful servant, who has done everything he was asked to do, tells Isaac all the things that he has done. It is the third time we hear the story, now to the groom. I imagine Isaac listening in the evening air, as the camels settle in the dust, and his face doing slowly what faces do when they hear that the thing they had not dared to hope for has already happened.

And then the book says, very simply: Then Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother's death.

Let me say that again, slowly, because it is the last line of the story, and I think it is the best.

Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother.

The old tent. The one that had been Sarah's. The tent where she had laughed, and cooked, and waited, and been, in the family's long story, the heart of the household. Isaac does not give his wife a new tent. He brings her into his mother's, as if to say: this place is going to be alive again.

And he loved her. And he was comforted.

I find that one of the most quietly beautiful lines in all of Genesis. There is so much grief in the story of that family, so many long journeys and hard bargains and difficult tests. And at the end of this chapter, after all the camels and the gold and the bowing and the running, it comes down to a man and a woman and a tent, and a sentence about being comforted.

God's steadfast love, which the servant named at the well, turns out to have a very small and warm shape. It is a tent in the evening, with a lamp in it, and someone who is glad you have come.

That is the end of what Genesis tells us in this chapter. But there is a little more to say before you sleep, because one wonders what became of the people in it.

Abraham, the book tells us in the next chapter, lived many years more. He married again, and had more children, and when at last he died, at a hundred and seventy-five, in a good old age, his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him together in the cave at Machpelah, beside Sarah. So the cave that he bought with such care became, in time, the family tomb, and the first small piece of the land he had been promised.

Rebekah and Isaac waited a long time for children, twenty years, the book says, and Isaac prayed for her, and she bore twins, whose names were Esau and Jacob, and whose story is another night altogether, and a rather noisier one. Rebekah is a wise woman in that story, and a determined one, and sometimes a puzzling one. We will leave those evenings for later. Tonight she is only the girl at the well.

And the servant, the old nameless servant, goes quietly back into the pages of the book. We do not hear of him again. He does the thing he was sent to do, and he does it carefully, and he does it without ever once asking to be remembered. And yet, three thousand years later, here we are, remembering him, for no other reason than that he prayed a good prayer, and kept silent at the right time, and bowed at the right moments, and would not eat his dinner until he had done his master's errand.

I sometimes think that is a pattern for most of us. Most of the people who carry out God's work in the world are never named. They are the servants, the kitchen helpers, the ones who set out the chairs. They go on an errand with ten camels, and they come back, and nobody writes their name on the page. But the page would not be there without them.

If you are the sort of person who likes to see how the old people read their own books, you will notice that the Church, from very early on, loved this chapter. The fathers of the Church read it as a picture of how God brings a bride to the one he has chosen, and they saw in Rebekah's yes the pattern of the Church's yes. We will not argue about that, tonight or ever. We will only say that it is a chapter that has been loved, and loved for a very long time, by people who knew it by heart.

And the Orthodox Church honours the righteous forefathers in the weeks before Christmas, and the long line of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the women who stood beside them. Rebekah's name is spoken at weddings, in the old Orthodox marriage service, and in the old Latin blessing of the bride, which prays that she be wise as Rebekah. Which is, I think, a good thing for anyone to pray for, in a marriage, or out of one.

Now. Notes for the curious.

Everything in tonight's episode that comes from the story of Rebekah comes from Genesis, chapter twenty-four, with a little background from the chapters on either side of it. That is where the servant, the ten camels, the prayer at the well, the gold ring and the bracelets, Laban's running out, the question put to Rebekah and her answer, the veil, the tent of Sarah, and the line about Isaac being comforted all come from.

What the book does not tell us is the servant's name. Later readers have often guessed that he was Eliezer of Damascus, whom Abraham mentions years earlier as the steward of his house, but the text of this chapter never says so, so we did not either.

What we invented is the weather, the long road, the camels' private opinions, the little scene in Rebekah's kitchen, and the remark that the camels revised their view of people. None of that changes what happens or what it means, and all of it is in the spirit of the original.

Two details are worth being careful about. First, the camels. Scholars argue about when camels became common as pack animals in that part of the world, and some have said the camels in Genesis belong to a later age than Abraham's. We have simply told the story as the book tells it. Second, the scene in which Rebekah is asked, "Will you go with this man?" is in the text. The book is quite clear that her family asked her. That is worth remembering, and worth saying.

The ancient and later Jewish and Christian traditions say a great deal more about Rebekah, her age at the well, her nurse's name, and her character. We left those out on purpose, because they are traditions rather than text, and because tonight we wanted to tell only what the page says.

That's the story of Rebekah for tonight. If you would like to remember the family of Abraham and Isaac in your prayers, the Orthodox Church does so in the weeks before Christmas, and the Catholic Church keeps these ancestors in the readings of its liturgy through the year. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is an old blessing, from the book of Genesis itself, the one Rebekah's family gave her at the gate. May you be blessed, and may those who come after you be blessed. May you always be kind to strangers, and may you always find the water you need. May the Lord lead you in the way, as he led the servant, and as he led Abraham. And may you come, at the end of every long road, into a warm tent, where someone is glad you have come.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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