Read Online The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels by Thomas Cahill - Free Book Online
Authors: Thomas Cahill
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Avram exhibits a sly resourcefulness that we seldom associate with madmen. When famine strikes Canaan, Avram heads for Egypt—“to sojourn there.” But in this even more alien territory, where he must guard not against primitive tribes but against a god-king whom no one can gainsay, Avram hatches a scheme, saying to Sarai his wife:
“Now here, I know well that you are a woman fair to look at. [One can imagine Sarai enjoying this compliment and then her face falling as—]
It will be, when the Egyptians see you and say: ‘She is his wife,’
that they will kill me, but you they will allow to live.
Pray say that you are my sister
so that it may go well with me on your account, that I myself may give thanks to you.”
Sure enough, Pharaoh sticks Sarai in his harem, her “brother” Avram receiving in return “sheep and oxen, donkeys, servants and maids, she-asses and camels.” 2 We are never told whether Pharaoh gets around to violating Sarai, nor does the text give any clue to Sarai’s feelings in the matter. But we are told that Avram’s god “plagued Pharaoh with great plagues” and that somehow Pharaoh learns the cause. Avram is brought before the Egyptian king, who utters a memorable
“Ma-zot?!”
(“What’s this?!”), an almost comic exclamation of frustration often heard in modern Israel. Then, in a turn of phrase not far removed from an old vaudeville routine, Pharaoh sputters:
“Why did you not tell me that she is your wife?
Why did you say: ‘She is my sister?’
So I took her for myself as a wife.
But now, here is your wife, take her and go!”
Off goes Avram, brought as quickly as possible to the Egyptian border by Pharaoh’s bouncers, “who escorted him and his wife and
all that was his.”
These being the last words of this episode, the narrator, who is getting a big kick out of recording the little farce, wants us to know that Avram has not only saved his neck but greatly increased his wealth. Then, just in case we’ve missed the point, he adds at the beginning of the next episode that “Avram traveled up from Egypt” and “was exceedingly heavily laden with livestock, with silver, and with gold.” In the Egyptian anecdote Sarai has served only as a pawn whose feelings are of no account: the point is the nomadic progenitor’s cleverness at the expense of the Egyptian big wig.
How did powerless Avram, nomadic sojourner in the wilderness of Canaan, ever come in contact with mighty Pharaoh, stationary god-king of Egypt? Almost on the heels of the Egyptian anecdote comes a strangely worded episode that gives us the answer. The famine has passed, and Avram’s nephew Lot is now settled in Sodom, one of the “cities of the plain” that may have stood in what is today the southern basin of the Dead Sea. But Avram, refusing city life, has pitched his tent on the west side of the Jordan “by the Oaks of Mamre.” Word reaches Avram that Lot has been taken prisoner in the course of a war between two leagues of kings, one of Canaanites, the other of Sumerians:
One who escaped came and told Avram the Hebrew—
he was dwelling by the Oaks of Mamre the Amorite, brother of Eshcol and brother of Aner,
they were Avram’s covenant-allies.
When Avram heard that his brother [actually nephew] 3 had been taken prisoner,
he drew out his retainers, his house-born slaves, eighteen and three hundred, and went in pursuit as far as Dan.
Ma-zot?
Avram has 318 slaves, not to mention family members and other “retainers”? Avram has “covenant-allies,” like any great chieftain? Avram, the quixotic quester, the self-conscious nomad, can organize an army of pursuit that marches all the way from Mamre (modern Hebron) in the Canaanite south to Dan in the extreme north, a journey of some hundred miles? The clue to the correct interpretation of this text lies in its
“Now here, I know well that you are a woman fair to look at. [One can imagine Sarai enjoying this compliment and then her face falling as—]
It will be, when the Egyptians see you and say: ‘She is his wife,’
that they will kill me, but you they will allow to live.
Pray say that you are my sister
so that it may go well with me on your account, that I myself may give thanks to you.”
Sure enough, Pharaoh sticks Sarai in his harem, her “brother” Avram receiving in return “sheep and oxen, donkeys, servants and maids, she-asses and camels.” 2 We are never told whether Pharaoh gets around to violating Sarai, nor does the text give any clue to Sarai’s feelings in the matter. But we are told that Avram’s god “plagued Pharaoh with great plagues” and that somehow Pharaoh learns the cause. Avram is brought before the Egyptian king, who utters a memorable
“Ma-zot?!”
(“What’s this?!”), an almost comic exclamation of frustration often heard in modern Israel. Then, in a turn of phrase not far removed from an old vaudeville routine, Pharaoh sputters:
“Why did you not tell me that she is your wife?
Why did you say: ‘She is my sister?’
So I took her for myself as a wife.
But now, here is your wife, take her and go!”
Off goes Avram, brought as quickly as possible to the Egyptian border by Pharaoh’s bouncers, “who escorted him and his wife and
all that was his.”
These being the last words of this episode, the narrator, who is getting a big kick out of recording the little farce, wants us to know that Avram has not only saved his neck but greatly increased his wealth. Then, just in case we’ve missed the point, he adds at the beginning of the next episode that “Avram traveled up from Egypt” and “was exceedingly heavily laden with livestock, with silver, and with gold.” In the Egyptian anecdote Sarai has served only as a pawn whose feelings are of no account: the point is the nomadic progenitor’s cleverness at the expense of the Egyptian big wig.
How did powerless Avram, nomadic sojourner in the wilderness of Canaan, ever come in contact with mighty Pharaoh, stationary god-king of Egypt? Almost on the heels of the Egyptian anecdote comes a strangely worded episode that gives us the answer. The famine has passed, and Avram’s nephew Lot is now settled in Sodom, one of the “cities of the plain” that may have stood in what is today the southern basin of the Dead Sea. But Avram, refusing city life, has pitched his tent on the west side of the Jordan “by the Oaks of Mamre.” Word reaches Avram that Lot has been taken prisoner in the course of a war between two leagues of kings, one of Canaanites, the other of Sumerians:
One who escaped came and told Avram the Hebrew—
he was dwelling by the Oaks of Mamre the Amorite, brother of Eshcol and brother of Aner,
they were Avram’s covenant-allies.
When Avram heard that his brother [actually nephew] 3 had been taken prisoner,
he drew out his retainers, his house-born slaves, eighteen and three hundred, and went in pursuit as far as Dan.
Ma-zot?
Avram has 318 slaves, not to mention family members and other “retainers”? Avram has “covenant-allies,” like any great chieftain? Avram, the quixotic quester, the self-conscious nomad, can organize an army of pursuit that marches all the way from Mamre (modern Hebron) in the Canaanite south to Dan in the extreme north, a journey of some hundred miles? The clue to the correct interpretation of this text lies in its
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