Abraham’s Women

Chayei Sarah; Genesis 23:1 – 25:18

The Torah account of our patriarch Abraham is filled with drama and event, especially when it is enlarged with midrashim about his childhood. Almost everyone with the slightest knowledge of the narrative is aware of the bitter dispute between Hagar and Sarah; in fact, a psychologist friend of mine likes to give talks on the “most

dysfunctional family in the Bible,” namely Abraham, Hagar, Sarah and their two sons.

But an easy wager to win is to bet someone they cannot tell you how many sons Abraham sired. Very few will know the correct answer: Eight.

The Torah portion known as Chayei Sarah, the life of Sarah, begins, ironically, with the death of Sarah, at 127. The sages deduced that Sarah died the day after the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. One midrash argues that Satan came to Sarah in a dream and told her that Abraham had, in fact, sacrificed her son—which precipitated her death!¹

Abraham also dies in this Parashah, but first he remarries to a woman named Keturah and has six more sons. Although it required divine intervention for Abraham to beget Isaac, thirty-five years later he finishes with an impressive burst of fertility.

Even when we accept this unlikely account, however, there remains a question as to how many times Abraham married, as well as how many different wives he had.

The Hagar Question

Earlier in their lives, when Abraham and Sarah were called Abram and Sarai, she began to worry that she was infertile and decided upon a plan in which her maidservant Hagar would lie with her husband and give him a son. In the JPS commentary, Nahum Sarna claims that there was a widespread belief at that time that an infertile woman who adopted a child would become fertile.²

The episode is described in last week’s Torah portion:

Genesis:

16:1 Now Sarai Abram’s wife bare him no children: and she had a handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar.

16:2 And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the LORD hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai.

16:3 And Sarai Abram’s wife took Hagar her maid the Egyptian, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife.

16:4 And he went in unto Hagar, and she conceived: and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes.

16:15 And Hagar bare Abram a son: and Abram called his son’s name, which Hagar bare, Ishmael.

I have emphasized the end of verse 16:3 because, even in the stuffy language of the King James Translation, it is clear that Hagar became Abraham’s wife (Hebrew: eesha) in a time when there was no prohibition against polygamy. The translation of this word as “wife” is in almost every English rendering; occasionally the translator uses “second wife.” This includes the landmark, 1917 JPS translation:

And Sarai Abram’s wife took Hagar the Egyptian, her handmaid, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to Abram her husband to be his wife.

There is an interesting exception, however. The 1985 JPS translation, presumably a superior interpretation of the Hebrew, calls her a concubine³. (The legal status of a concubine is unclear; as a “secondary wife” she enjoyed less financial protection than a primary wife, as well as lower social standing.) Thus, the relationship between them is unclear in a way that troubles the moralistic commentators of later centuries.

For example, though never proscribed, polygamy seems evil to the sages of the Talmudic and medieval epochs. The authors of Avoth tell us that “the more wives, the more witchcraft;” they imply that spending a lot of time with one’s wife is a sinful waste of time, and the Amorim impose sexual obligations on scholars that would make it nearly impossible to meet one’s responsibilities to two wives.

Moreover, Maimonides assures us that Abraham had no lust for Hagar, that he merely acquiesced to his wife’s instructions, taking no pleasure in the affair. (Remember also that the Rambam believes that the main benefit of circumcision is that is reduces sexual pleasure, thereby reducing the appetite for it.)

Further, as much as the later rabbis found polygamy troublesome, some are even concerned that there was no legal relationship at all between Abraham and that their liaison might have been purely sinful, something they are loathe to admit about a patriarch. Until recently, religious scholars struggled valiantly to make an honest woman of Hagar, even suggesting (as we’ll see below) that she was the Keturah that Abraham married later. Lately, though, I am somewhat ashamed to observe that there is a small group of rabbis in Israel determined to convince us that the offspring of Abraham and Hagar was illicit; their goal is to insult Islam by claiming that their founder was illegitimate.

In addition to these speculations about Abraham and Hagar, there is also considerable midrashic opinion about who she really was. The predominant opinion is that Hagar was acquired as a child while Sarai was in the Pharaoh’s harem, in effect a daughter of Pharaoh, presented to Sarai as a gift or settlement for damages. And the most exotic rabbinical speculation is that Hagar was Sarai’s own daughter, fathered by the Pharaoh during her stay. This bizarre theory means that Ishmael was Sarai’s grandson from a different grandfather.⁴

Keturah

Towards the end of Chayei Sarah, Abraham marries again.

Genesis:

25:1 Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was Keturah. 25:2 And she bare him Zimran, and Jokshan, and Medan, and Midian, and Ishbak, and Shuah. 25:3 And Jokshan begat Sheba, and Dedan. And the sons of Dedan were Asshurim, and Letushim, and Leummim.25:4 And the sons of Midian; Ephah, and Epher, and Hanoch, and Abidah, and Eldaah. All these were the children of Keturah.

25:5 And Abraham gave all that he had unto Isaac. 25:6 But unto the sons of the concubines, which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward, unto the east country. 25:7 And these are the days of the years of Abraham’s life which he lived, an hundred threescore and fifteen years. 25:8 Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people.

25:9 And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, which is before Mamre; 25:10 The field which Abraham purchased of the sons of Heth: there was Abraham buried, and Sarah his wife.

If that was too hard to follow, here’s a table:

Keturah, a name that suggests spice or incense, appears from nowhere. There is neither Biblical nor external information about her origins or nationality. Documentary critics see the Keturah account as a late redaction of the text, meant to serve some unclear political purpose involving her descendants. (Little is known about her descendants as well.)

She is generally regarded to have been a dark-skinned woman and all her descendants with Abraham are believed to have been Arabs (although some writers speculate that she was an ancestor of the Queen of Sheba). Verse 25:6 refers to the sons of Abraham’s concubines, which most scholars deduce to be Hagar and Keturah, therefore two separate women.

But the majority belief among the scholars of the Talmudic period, expressed confidently in Genesis Rabah, not seriously challenged until the Middle Ages, is that Hagar and Keturah are the same woman. Rashi, who has no doubt, asserts that after Hagar was expelled from Abraham’s house, she kept herself chaste, waiting for the day when she could be reunited with Abraham. She smelled so sweet to him, that he changed her name to Keturah.

Perhaps the strongest evidence in support of this one-woman theory is that Ishmael rejoins the family to participate in Abraham’s funeral. How else, one might ask, could Ishmael have found his way back?

Although contemporary critics see no reason to conclude that they are the same woman, they rarely comment at length on the apparent need of our sages to make them into one.

Talmudic Prudery

It is impossible to escape the observation that our patriarchs and other Biblical forbearers were virile, lustful men, comfortable with having several wives and concubines. Further, if we assume that most of the negative mitzvoth and ordinances were developed to counter actual practices that Israelites engaged in, then a study of the Holiness code suggests that our forefathers were having lots of sex with the women in and around their families, not to mention their captured slaves and other targets of opportunity.

And, of course, the second part of the observation is that the men of the Talmud, all the way up to Maimonides, were prudish and, frankly, afraid of the power of women and sex. In their mind, for example, the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, are, in fact, two different creations. The woman created in the first account (male and female he created them) was rejected by Adam because she was too assertive; the midrash says “she wanted to have sex on top,” which made her undesirable. The midrashim of Genesis also make it clear that Adam’s great sin is NOT eating the forbidden fruit, but, rather, yielding to the influence of his (second) wife!⁵

If you spend some pleasant hours hours with Ruth Calderon’s A Bride for One Night,⁶ a discussion of the legends about sex and marriage that appear in the Bavli, you see repeated cases in which great scholars on the way to the study house are so sexually inhibited and fragile that when they see an inch or two of a woman’s ankle they are turned into wild, rapacious beasts on the spot.

It is not surprising, then, that the sages couldn’t bear the thought of a patriarch having sex with someone without marriage. They shivered at the thought of a lustful Abraham—who could not have been thinking about Torah (our patriarchs are assumed to have known the contents of the Torah before it was revealed) if he was indulging himself with a younger woman.

The image of the Jewish man in the post-Biblical period is transformed from that of a virile, lustful, powerful, bellicose, and effective desert sheik to that of a quiet, mild- mannered, skinny, myopic man of letters,⁷ all of his appetites sublimated into his study of Torah. These men view sexual intercourse as a Torah obligation and admire those men who get the least pleasure from it. This transition from proud to humble corresponds to the loss of the Temple and the land and the conversion of the Jews to a powerless, exiled, struggling society—always in existential danger.

But there is a third part to this observation as well. This downward curve of perceived Israelite machismo, it now appears, was U-shaped after all. Ever since the 1967 War in Israel, the perception and reputation of Jewish men—especially Israelis—has changed. Today, just about the only time we see representations of the old, weak Talmud Jews in movies and TV is when a crime is set in New York’s diamond district. More typically, we see handsome and intelligent Israeli soldiers, murderously skillful and devastatingly desirable Mossad officers, brilliant and cunning spies, international business experts….

And Israeli/Jewish women have also benefitted from the transition. Consider Ziva David, the brilliant, beautiful Mossad agent who was the beating heart of the NCIS TV series for several years, who ultimately was strong enough to shoot her own brother to death when he proved to be a traitor. And, of course, there’s Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress whose husband wears an “I’m Married to Wonder Woman t-shirt.”

Modern Jews delight in the fact that our patriarchs and heroes were real people, outsized appetites and all. Even feminist readers, who see countless cases in which our leaders-of-old abused or exploited women, would not want to paper over their actions for the sake of purifying them. No, we are free today to appreciate that Abraham was with at least three women in his lifetime, at least one other than Sarai while he was still married to her. We also appreciate that, at an exceedingly advanced age, he is said to have had the potency and drive to father son-after-son, six times. And we say: Yasher Koach!

Notes

1. Thus, if Sarah died the day after the Akedah, then Isaac would have been over thirty-years old. ↩︎
2. Most of us know of at least one instance in which a “barren” woman adopted a child and subsequently became pregnant. ↩︎
3. I have seen in more than one feminist website that Hagar has become a symbol of maternal surrogacy. ↩︎
4. I haven’t checked the Holiness Code to see whether sex with your wife’s daughter by another man is
   one of the many banned couplings ↩︎
5. This sin is known technically as uxoriousness. ↩︎
6. Ruth Calderon is both an MK and the head of a Women’s Talmud Institute in Jerusalem. I had the privilege of helping in the preparation stages of this book’s English version, published by JPS. ↩︎
7. If you were casting the role of the Rabbi’s son in Fiddler on the Roof, what would he look like? ↩︎