1And Abraham journeyed onward from there to the Negeb region and dwelled between Kadesh and Shur, and he sojourned in Gerar. 2And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, “She is my sister.” And Abimelech the king of Gerar sent and took Sarah. 3And God came to Abimelech in a night-dream and said to him, “You are a dead man because of the woman you took, as she is another’s wife.” 4But Abimelech had not come near her, and he said, “My LORD, will you slay a nation even if innocent? 5Did not he say to me, ‘She is my sister’? and she, she, too, said, ‘He is my brother.’ With a pure heart and with clean hands I have done this.” 6And God said to him in the dream, “Indeed, I know that with a pure heart you have done this, and I on My part have kept you from offending against Me, and so I have not allowed you to touch her. 7Now, send back the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, and he will intercede for you, and you may live. And if you do not send her back, know that you are doomed to die, you and all that belongs to you.”
8And Abimelech rose early in the morning and called to all his servants, and he spoke these things in their hearing, and the men were terribly afraid. 9And Abimelech called to Abraham and said to him, “What have you done to us, and how have I offended you, that you should bring upon me and my kingdom so great an offense? Things that should not be done you have done to me.” 10And Abimelech said to Abraham, “What did you imagine when you did this thing?” 11And Abraham said, “For I thought, there is surely no fear of God in this place and they will kill me because of my wife. 12And, in point of fact, she is my sister, my father’s daughter, though not my mother’s daughter, and she became my wife. 13And it happened, when the gods made me a wanderer from my father’s house, that I told her, ‘This is the kindness you can do for me: in every place to which we come, say of me, he is my brother.’” 14And Abimelech took sheep and cattle and male and female slaves and gave them to Abraham, and he sent back to him Sarah his wife. 15And Abimelech said, “Look, my land is before you. Settle wherever you want.” 16And to Sarah he said, “Look, I have given a thousand pieces of silver to your brother. Let it hereby serve you as a shield against censorious eyes for everyone who is with you, and you are now publicly vindicated.” 17And Abraham interceded with God, and God healed Abimelech and his wife and his slave-women, and they gave birth. 18For the LORD had shut fast every womb in the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.
CHAPTER 20 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. And Abraham journeyed onward from there to the Negeb region. This second instance of the sister-wife type-scene is in several ways fashioned to fit the particular narrative context in which it is inserted. The emphatic foreshadowing of the sojourn in Egypt of the episode in chapter 12 is deleted. Here there is no mention of a famine as the cause of the patriarch’s migration, and the place he comes to is not Egypt but Gerar, a Canaanite city-state in the western Negeb.
3. And God came to Abimelech. This potentate is immediately given a higher moral status than Pharaoh in chapter 12: to Pharaoh God speaks only through plagues, whereas Abimelech is vouchsafed direct address from God in a night-vision.
You are a dead man. Or, “you are about to die.” Abimelech’s distressed response to this peremptory death sentence is understandable, and leads back to the preceding episodes in the narrative chain.
4. will you slay a nation even if innocent? This phrase, which might also be construed “slay a nation even with the innocent,” sounds as peculiar in the Hebrew as in translation, and has led some critics to see the word “nation” (goy) as a scribal error. But the apparent deformation of idiom has a sharp thematic point. “Innocent” (tsadiq) is the very term Abraham insisted on in questioning God as to whether He would really slay the innocent together with the guilty in destroying the entire nation of Sodom. If the king of Gerar chooses, oddly, to refer to himself as “nation,” leaning on the traditional identification of monarch with people, it is because he is, in effect, repeating Abraham’s question to God: Will not the Judge of all the earth do justice?
5. and she, she, too. This repetitive splutter of indignation is vividly registered in the Hebrew, though the existing translations smooth it over.
6. I have not allowed you to touch her. The means by which consummation is prevented is intimated, cannily, only at the very end of the story.
9–10. And Abimelech . . . said . . . and Abimelech said. The repetition of the formula for introducing direct speech, with no intervening response from Abraham, is pointedly expressive. Abimelech vehemently castigates Abraham (with good reason), and Abraham stands silent, not knowing what to say. And so Abimelech repeats his upbraiding, in shorter form (verse 10).
11–12. When Abraham finally speaks up, his words have the ring of a speaker floundering for self-justification. Introducing the explanation of Sarah’s half-sister status—there might be a Mesopotamian legal background to such a semi-incestuous marriage—he uses a windy argumentative locution, wegam ʾomnah, “and, in point of fact,” that may hint at a note of special pleading.
and they will kill me because of my wife. What Abraham fears is that Gerar, without “fear of God,” will prove to be another Sodom. In Sodom, two strangers came into town and immediately became objects of sexual assault for the whole male population. Here again, two strangers come into town, one male and one female, and Abraham assumes the latter will be an object of sexual appropriation, the former the target of murder. In the event, he is entirely wrong: Abimelech is a decent, even noble, man; and the category of “Sodom” is not to be projected onto everything that is not the seed of Abraham. On the contrary, later biblical writers will suggest how easily Israel turns itself into Sodom.
13. the gods made me a wanderer. The word ’elohim, which normally takes a singular verb (though it has a plural suffix) when it refers to God, as everywhere else in this episode, is here linked with a plural verb. Conventional translation procedure renders this as “God,” or “Heaven,” but Abraham, after all, is addressing a pagan who knows nothing of this strange new idea of monotheism, and it is perfectly appropriate that he should choose his words accordingly, settling on a designation of the deity that ambiguously straddles polytheism and monotheism. It is also noteworthy that Abraham, far from suggesting that God has directed him to a promised land, stresses to the native king that the gods have imposed upon him a destiny of wandering.
in every place to which we come. The writer, quite aware that this episode approximately repeats the one in chapter 12, introduces into Abraham’s dialogue a motivation for the repetition: this is what we must do (whatever the problematic consequences) in order to survive wherever we go.
14. And Abimelech took sheep and cattle. Unlike Pharaoh in chapter 12, who bestows gifts on Abraham as a kind of bride-price, the noble Abimelech offers all this bounty after Sarah leaves his harem, as an act of restitution.
16. to your brother. Surely there is an edge of irony in Abimelech’s use of this term.
a shield against censorious eyes. The Hebrew, which has long puzzled scholars, is literally “a covering of the eyes.” That phrase may mean “mask,” but its idiomatic thrust seems to be: something that will ward off public disapproval.
18. For the LORD had shut fast every womb. Contrary to some textual critics who conjecture that this verse was inadvertently displaced from an earlier point in the story, it is a lovely piece of delayed narrative exposition. Shutting up the womb is a standard idiom for infertility, which ancient Hebrew culture, at least on the proverbial level, attributes to the woman, not to the man. But given the earlier reference to Abimelech’s having been prevented from touching Sarah, this looks suspiciously like an epidemic of impotence that has struck Abimelech and his people—an idea not devoid of comic implications—from which the Gerarite women would then suffer as the languishing partners of the deflected sexual unions. (Nahmanides sees an allusion to impotence here.) It is noteworthy that only in this version of the sister-wife story is the motif of infertility introduced. Its presence nicely aligns the Abimelech episode with what precedes and what follows. That is, first we have the implausible promise of a son to the aged Sarah; then a whole people is wiped out; then the desperate act of procreation by Lot’s daughters in a world seemingly emptied of men; and now an entire kingdom blighted with an interruption of procreation. The very next words of the story—one must remember that there were no chapter breaks in the original Hebrew text, for both chapter and verse divisions were introduced only in the late Middle Ages—are the fulfillment of the promise of progeny to Sarah: “And the LORD singled out Sarah as He had said.” As several medieval Hebrew commentators note, the plague of infertility also guarantees that Abimelech cannot be imagined as the begetter of Isaac.