Dragonthorn Chapter 2: The Wife-Sister Narratives

There was famine in the land. Abram passed through the Negev toward Egypt, where he would enter civilization for the first time since leaving Harran.

Now Abram's wife was exceedingly fair, and he thought it might come into the head of one of the Egyptians to kill Abram and save his wife alive so he could take her for his own wife.

So Abram told Sarai, "Say to them that you are my sister and not my wife, so that my life may be spared for your sake."

When Abram and his people arrived in Egypt one of the sons of Pharaoh told his father that Sarai was astonishingly beautiful, and Sarai was brought into the household of Pharaoh to be wooed as his wife.

Pharaoh loaded her brother Abram (as it was supposed) with many sheep and oxen and he-asses and menservants and maidservants and she-asses and camels, until Abram's worldly goods had doubled in value from the time he first entered Egypt.

One day Turel came calling to check up on Abram, and he was told an account of everything that transpired. After that, Yahweh sent plagues to plague Pharaoh (hopefully) before he could lay his hands on Sarai.

Yahweh allowed the earthly end of the tunnel to drift from Lake Tana back to the Nile delta and allowed the worst forms of life on Gorpai to come through. After this mobile flora plagued the Egyptian population it died, because it was not suited to flourish in the heat of Egypt. But there was always more.

Then Pharaoh summoned Abram and said, "How could you do this to me! Why didn't you tell me she was your wife? Why did you say she was your sister so that I almost took her for my wife?"

Abram said in his defense, "I was afraid. Besides, she is my sister in truth, but only my father's daughter, not my mother's daughter also."

Pharaoh was angry enough to have Abram put to death, but he remembered the plagues and knew Abram's god must be very powerful. He snapped, "Take your half-sister, or your wife, or whatever she is, and get out of my sight!"

Koth the Accuser told Yahweh that Abram had not come off very well in this episode. Abram didn't trust Yahweh to protect his life from the Egyptians. Abram also lied to Pharaoh and put his own wife in the position of being forced to give her affections to a man who was not her husband.

Soon after this, Turel told Abram, "Yahweh commands that you never call your wife your sister again. And when you have sons Yahweh commands that you teach them never to do it as well."

Abram's cattle drive left Egypt and went south into the Sinai peninsula. Then he turned north again and went back to Beth-el about twelve miles from Salem where he had built an altar on a hilltop just east of the town.

Abram's nephew Lot also had large flocks and herds and large numbers of servants and camels and tents. Abram and Lot saw that the land could not support both of them, and some of Abram's servants were getting into fistfights with some of Lot's servants. So Abram said to Lot, "I believe we must split up. If you take the left path, I will take the right. And if you go right, I will take the road to the left."

Lot saw the well-watered valley of the Jordan River, which was as green, Lot deemed, as the banks of the Nile, at least in those days. In modern times less so. So Lot chose the road to the right, and dropped down out of the hills into the big valley where the Jordan River bends and loops many times before it enters the the Salt Sea. There Lot commanded his people to pitch their tents in the pastures and range lands surrounding the city of Sodom, while Lot himself became a dweller of that city.

Abram stayed in the hill country and the plains nigh to the Mediterranean Sea. This was the land of Canaan, promised to him (according to Turel) by Yahweh himself.

When Turel saw him again, he said that everything Abram could see to the north, south, east, and west would someday belong to him and his descendants. And he bade Abram to take a walking tour of the land. After Abram had seen the length and breadth of the land promised to him, he built his third altar to Yahweh in Hebron.

Soon after Abram and Lot had gone their separate ways, soldiers led by King Chedolaomer sacked Sodom and Gomorrah and took Lot captive, but one of Lot's servants escaped to tell Abram. After that, Abram sent messengers to his kinfolk in Harran and raised a small army from among his relatives, in addition to the able-bodied men of his own caravan.

Thus it came to pass that Abram had three hundred armed men which he led into battle to get back all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as rescue Lot and all of his goods.

Since Abram was not a warrior by trade, Turel was not afraid of creating a dangerous dependency on the nephilim to do all of Abram's warfighting. So Turel entered the scrap armed with the Golden Gift, and sent Iofiel and Guriel into the battle as well.

With the help of the Golden Gift and the nephilim, who were veterans of the constant violence of the world Gorpai, Abram and his three hundred men defeated an army of three thousand.

Then Melchizadek, who was now king of Salem, brought forth bread and wine, for he was also a priest of Yahweh, and he accepted a tenth of Abram's men as a gift.

Melchizadek, like Turel, was an intruder into Abram's world, yet the office of his priesthood was considered superior to one based on blood descent or the heirloom of a divine blessing. After all, Abram tithed to him, not the other way around.

After the battle, Melchizedek and Abram went for a walk, and when it was night, he asked Abram to look up at the stars and see if he could count them. So would his descendants be.

Abram trusted that Yahweh would do precisely that, and Yahweh laid this trust to Abram's account as righteousness. So a divine bargain had been established, the first covenant between elohim and human. Yahweh agreed to reward Abram with offspring and the land for them to live in. Abram agreed to worship only Yahweh and trust that Yahweh would always follow through with what she promised.

Abram was the head of a large nomadic clan and the possessor of great riches. He was already living in the golden age as far as he was concerned. Abram did not pine away for salvation or an afterlife, such things never entered his mind. He had lived a full and blessed life, and he accepted that he was mortal. The only thing left that Yahweh could promise Abram was that his name and his seed would be carried into the distant future by a people who would live in a land that was to extend from the east bank of the Nile to the west bank of the Euphrates.

Abram's wife Sarai, despite her great beauty, was in her late forties and had proven to be barren. At great personal sacrifice, Sarai married off her young slave girl Hagar to Abram so he could father an heir, just like the Most High God promised him.

As soon as she conceived, however, Hagar began to show contempt for her mistress simply in the way she looked at Sarai, and Sarai could see this in Hagar's eyes. Rival women can annihilate each other with mere glances.

Sarah retaliated silently by giving Hagar the stink eye and Hagar ran away fearing for her very life. Turel rushed to confront her in the desert and convinced her to return to her mistress Sarai.

When Hagar gave birth to her son, Abram named him Ishmael, and Turel ratified the covenant by making name changes and teaching Abram a ritual. Where Abram means exalted father and was heretofore an ironic name, now Turel changed his name to Abraham, which means father of many nations. Sarai's name also was changed to Sarah.

Then Turel introduced the ritual of circumcision. Before this time, all of the elohim-human interactions occurred solely between Abraham and Yahweh, mediated by his nephilim agents Turel and Melchizedek. Sarah followed Abraham because she loved him and she was his wife, but she was really just humoring him when he made pillow talk about Yahweh. Ishmael looked up to his father without question. Abraham's servants followed him because they were either owned by him or at least gainfully employed by him. But now, with the inauguration of circumcision, the worship of Yahweh became corporate worship.

This proto-Judaism was something that would be embedded in the culture, rather than a creed adopted by free choice, because baby boys would be circumcised when they were eight days old, with no confession of faith, and anyone who was not circumcised was to be cut off from the people, in a manner of speaking.

One time it was hot and Abraham was taking a nap in his tent. He stirred awake and saw Turel with his two servants standing outside. Abraham ran outside, bowed to the ground, and begged them to stay long enough for him to bring refreshments. Then he told Sarah to quickly make three cakes while he went out and fetched a calf for his own servant to broil to be served with the cakes, with some butter and milk.

As Abraham stood there and watched them eat, Turel told Abraham that the next time he came around, Sarah would have a son. It was a promise from Yahweh. Sarah giggled because this stretched credulity (she was on the verge of menopause), but Abraham's part of the covenant was to believe everything Yahweh said, so he held his tongue.

Then Turel and his two companions started walking towards Sodom and Gomorrah, so Abraham when along with them. Turel was troubled, because he was investigating whether or not Yahweh should destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, and he debated with himself whether he should hide this thing from Abraham, because it might come across to the man as an injustice. Finally Turel told Abraham what he intended to do if the allegations turned out to be true. Melchizedek had made the initial report, but Yahweh would not move until Turel made confirmation.

Abraham drew near and asked Turel, "Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty?" He was thinking of his nephew Lot and his kin, who lived in Sodom.
What followed then was an astonishing episode of negotiation, where Abraham danced right up to the edge of Turel's tolerance. At the end of the bargaining, Turel agreed that if he could find just ten righteous men in Sodom, he would spare the city on their account. And Gomorrah would get the same deal.

The young Guriel and Iofiel were sent to Sodom to make their investigation, while Turel took Abraham with him and paid a visit to Gomorrah. No account of what they saw survives in any writing of the Patriarchy, and with good reason. Melchizedek's report was true.

The psychology of the two towns had been warped somehow by the trauma of being sacked earlier. They had divided along male and female lines, and the girls went to Gomorrah. It was guarded by a kind of proto-Amazon army comprised entirely of women who guarded the walls so fiercely that Turel and Abraham could not even approach without drawing fire from sling or bow. But they could stand close enough to see some of the women embracing each other.

The merest rumor that such things were possible could not exist in a patriarchal society. Gomorrah simply could not be permitted to be.

Turel said to Abraham, "Homosexuality by itself does not offend Yahweh, you must understand. But these two cities have embarked on a dead-end road, my friend."

Abraham said, "I do see it. Only the women can breed, and here they can breed only with the men who are weak enough to be captured by them."

Turel was proud that Abraham had reasoned it out. "This is an offense against the natural law, my friend. But I will do what I can to save your kinsman Lot and all that are his."

Guriel and Iofiel were intercepted by Lot at Sodom's gate, and he escorted them through the streets to his house where he ministered to them in much the same way Abraham had ministered to them and Turel. They were willing to stay out in the street all night, but Lot insisted, and they agreed to accept his hospitality.

This hospitality was soon contrasted with the contempt demonstrated by the residents of the city, all of them male, who crowded around Lot's house and wanted nothing more than to rape the two nephilim, who were specimens of astonishing male beauty.

Lot was horrified. So important to him was his oath of hospitality that he was even willing to offer his own daughters to quench the crowd's sexual fire, so long as they put all thought of molesting these two visitors far from their mind. He even told the crowd his daughters were virgins, even though in reality they were both married. The members of the crowd knew this, and the lie and the defiance only infuriated them even more.

They threatened to treat him worse than they wanted to treat his guests. But the nephilim pulled Lot back into the house and used an optical grenade provided by Binah to flood the area with a burst of light so intense that everyone in the crowd was rendered blind.

Guriel and Iofiel had seen quite enough. Yahweh's judgment was well-founded. They told Lot to gather his kin and all his goods and get out of the city, because it was to be destroyed. Lot tried to convince his son-in-laws, the husbands of his two daughters, to leave with him, but they thought he was crazy.

Time grew short. The nephilim accompanied Lot, his wife, and their daughters on a walk far from the city so they would be outside the danger zone. Guriel told them to keep heading for the mountains. "Whatever you do, don't look back!"

Since the elohim are suns, it was not difficult for Yahweh to intrude a small piece of sun-stuff under the foundations of Sodom and Gomorrah using the tunnel that was usually anchored under Lake Tana.

The tunnel endpoint was temporarily relocated to the Salt Sea area, and a small burst of sun fire was sufficient to overthrow the two cities and melt the rock all around them. The light, however, would have been intense enough to blind anyone looking at it, hence the warning of Guriel not to look back.

After he learned that Lot was safe, Abraham went again to the Sinai desert, where he did the whole Sarah-is-really-my-sister thing one more time despite Yahweh's command never to do it again. But instead of Pharaoh, this time Abimelech king of Gerar took Sarah into his household.

Soon afterward, Turel came to him and said, "King, you're a dead man, because Sarah is another man's wife."

And King Abimelech said, "Lord be merciful, that old man Abraham the Immigrant said she was just his sister, and she went along with it. I'm innocent! Besides, she's fifty years old if she's a day."

Turel said, "Restore the man his wife, and no harm done, for he is a prophet, but he likes to play his 'wife-sister' joke every decade or so."

Many years later, in the Sinai again, Yahweh would ban the whole practice of marrying half-sisters when he gave his law to Moses.

Exactly nine months after sleeping in the house of Abilemech, Sarah gave birth to Isaac.

Abraham's second son Isaac was born in the year 2117 BCE and circumcised on the eighth day according to the commandment of Yahweh. Not only did the aging Sarah give birth to him, she nursed him as well, but on the day when Isaac was weaned and Abraham held a large feast in honor of the occasion, Sarah decided the tent wasn't large enough for two sons of Abraham. She insisted that her husband send Hagar and Ishmael away.

Abraham was inconsolable, but Yahweh had assured him, through Turel, that he would make a great nation from the loins of Ishmael also, because he was Abraham's seed every bit as much as Isaac was. So Abraham gave Hagar a skin of water and a little bread and sent the two of them off into the Negev desert outside of Beersheeba, a bitterly arid wasteland.

Very soon Hagar and Ishmael drank all the water in the skin, so Hagar hid the child under some sagebrush and went about fifty paces away to cry. She did not want to see the death of her only child. But Yahweh heard Hagar cry out in her despair, and sent Turel to bear aid. Turel promised Hagar that Yahweh would make of Ishmael a great nation. And he led them to a nearby well of water.

Ishmael and Hagar lived in the wilderness for years under the care of the nephilim. Ishmael became a hunter, and when he was of age, Hagar obtained for him a wife out of the land of Egypt.

One day, Turel relayed the command of Yahweh to Abraham: Take now your only son Isaac to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt holocaust on one of the mountains I will show you. This Abraham promptly began to do, without uttering a word in defense of his innocent son.

This was the same Abraham who negotiated with Turel to spare the wicked city of Sodom if as few as ten righteous men were found within. On the journey (which took an entire month while Sarah waited in Beersheba in mental and emotional anguish) Isaac asked his father where the lamb for the sacrifice was. Abraham deflected his question by saying that Yahweh himself would provide the lamb. Turel led them to the hill Moriah, that would later be called Mount Zion, where the temple of God was later built.

Abraham, in obedience, prepared to make a human sacrifice if Isaac, but it was Turel who stayed his hand at the last instant. He said, "Do nothing to the boy, Abraham, for now I know that you fear Yahweh, and have not withheld your son, your only son, from him." And they sacrificed an animal instead, and began the long journey home.

For Sarah, the stress of waiting for her son to die*, followed by the relief at seeing him return alive again, was too much for her. She died on the very evening that Isaac returned, and with her passing Abraham also lost the will to live and followed her into death only four months later. Yahweh had asked for the best from Abraham, and Abraham had withheld nothing.

In the name of Abraham, Turel purchased land in Hebron containing a cave, a field, and trees, and this was where he laid the bones of Abraham and Sarah. In years to come, Abraham's son Isaac and wife Rebecca would be laid in the tomb of the Patriarchs, as well as his grandson Jacob and his wife Leah. This is the second holiest site in Judaism after the Temple Mount. Muslims revere the site as well, and share joint custody. Abraham was, after all, their exalted father too.

After the death of Abraham and Sarah, the nephilim called Turel journeyed once more to Mesopotamia, the land of Abraham's own people. By chance he ended up at the very house of Abraham's original clan, and saw there

Bethuel, son of Milcah the wife of Nahor, who was Abraham's brother. That meant Rebbecca was Abraham's great niece, and therefore Isaac's first cousin once-removed. Turel told her father of his mission, and showered the family with many lavish gifts from the estate of Abraham.

Then Bethuel called Rebbecca and asked, "Will you go with this man?" And she said, "I will go." By this acceptance, Rebbecca took her place in the great story set in motion when Yahweh inserted herself into human history and first commanded Abraham to go to the land of Canaan.

Yet Rebbecca did not make her decision on the basis of Isaac's character, which remained unknown to her, but on the basis of how Turel represented himself to her and her family: courteous, humble, and devout. The gold and jewels were obligatory, but Rebbecca decided to go on a hunch. This servant Turel (as she thought him to be) was a good man. And the master of that man must be a good man as well, she reasoned.

When Turel brought Rebbecca to Beersheba, Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah's tent, and took her as his wife, and he loved her. Thus was Isaac comforted after his mother's death. Turel, in a sense, had provided Isaac with a replacement mother to love. Rebbecca felt perhaps a twinge of regret, but she had assented to the marriage. She was committed.

Then Turel knew his service on Earth was completed, and he returned to Gorpai, where in recompense for his long service he was elevated by the Patriarch Kirodiel Gerash to king of the city of Aramel. But his loyalty had been attached for many years to Yahweh rather than Koth, and when the prophetess Ariel began to preach throughout the Middle Lands, he sided with her: Turel, along with the people his whole city and the lands all around. After that, Koth refused to send more nephilim as buffers for Yahweh to have dealings with his people.

Isaac, who was over sixty years old, emigrated to Gerar, whose king was named Abimelech. This king has a friend named Ahuzzath and captain of the guard named Phichol. Back about nine months before Isaac was born, Abraham saw a king of Gerar who was also named Abimelech, and by an amazing coincidence, that king also had a friend named Ahuzzath and captain of the guard named Phichol.

Before Isaac's mother was pregnant with Isaac she was a real hottie, only ninety years old and many years past menopause, and Abraham was afraid that someone in Gerar would try to kill him so they could scoop Sarah right up. So Abraham told everyone that Sarah was his sister. That didn't work out too well, just like it didn't work very well the previous time when Sarah was very young and Abraham took her to Egypt.

Abraham must have told Isaac about this trick, because Isaac grew worried that the Philistines would do him in so they could bag Rebbecca. So he told everyone in Gerar that his wife was really (wait for it)...his sister!

The difference was that Abraham was smart enough never to be caught fondling his "sister". This was not the case for Isaac. Abimelech discovered Isaac snuggling with Rebbecca and the king said, "Aha! That's not your sister, that's really your wife!"

The last time this happened, the wombs of all the women in Gerar were closed up as a "plague" to punish Abimelech for allowing himself to being deceived by Abraham's lie, but Turel told him if he begged Abraham to pray for him, he would be forgiven for believing the lie and the plague would be removed. This time, Abimelech didn't even want to start down that road. He decreed that if anyone ever touched Rebbecca in an inappropriate way, they would be put to death.

After that, the desert oasis of Beersheba was named for the first time (again), consecrated for the first time (again) and Abimelech, Phichol and Azzuhath signed a peace treaty with Isaac to cover multiple generations, just like the other peace treaty they signed with Abraham to cover multiple generations.