Rachel and Leah (Women of Genesis) Read Online Free PDF

so beautiful that the servant fell in love with her, but because he was only a servant and had given a most solemn oath, he could not woo her for himself, and instead he faithfully discharged his office and led her home to marry Isaac. Some people said the servant killed himself out of grief; others said he went mad; others said he continued to serve Abraham and then Isaac all his life, but he never married because he always loved Rebekah in his heart. Father said these tales were all nonsense, and he should know, because he had carried out the negotiations, and the servant was never in love with Rebekah.
    But Rachel loved the story anyway, every version. Her favorite, though, was the one where the servant kept working in the same household with the woman he loved, never able to speak of his longing. It was a very lovely story, tragic and beautiful, and she cried now and then thinking of it.
    So when she heard those words, of course she began to see the story in her mind as she had always imagined it.
    But it wouldn’t stay. It kept changing. The woman kept not being the beautiful Aunt Rebekah but instead was a gawky girl of twelve or so, and the man was no servant bearing noble gifts, but a lone traveler on foot. And instead of the girl fetching water for the man, it was the other way around. Itmade no sense. Could it possibly be that everyone had told the story wrong for all these years?
    The voice made no sense to her, the vision made no sense, and yet it was very real to her. So of course she told Leah about it, because Leah was older and understood many things.
    “I don’t know,” said Leah. “It could be a vision from God, or it could be a dream—”
    “I wasn’t asleep,” insisted Rachel.
    “Or you could be crazy,” said Leah. “Probably that.”
    So Rachel went to her father, and of course Leah tagged along, because Leah couldn’t
stand
to be left out of anything, though of course with her weak eyes she was left out of a lot of things just because she couldn’t see well enough to stay out of the way and not get hurt, which made her furious, and Rachel could understand that, but she hated the way Father always made her stay with Leah, until the day she got furious and said, “Why should I always stay with Leah?
I’m
not blind!”
    That had been a very bad thing to say—Father gave her a sharp swat and angrily forbade her ever to call her sister “blind” again, and Leah didn’t speak to her for weeks. But from then on, Father no longer insisted that Rachel stay with Leah. However,
Leah
continued to insist on staying with Rachel, including this time, when Rachel wanted to tell Father about the vision.
    “Girls dream of romance,” said Father. “My sister’s story has become very romantic, the way people tell it. But it wasn’t. It was very complicated. Delicate negotiations. Businesslike, that’s what it was. So of course you have dreams about it.”
    “It wasn’t a dream,” insisted Rachel. “I was awake.”
    “I often have dreams like that,” said Father, and then he went on to talk about dreams so real he didn’t realize he wasn’t awake until he woke up—but the more he talked, the clearer it became that Father had no idea of the kind of dream Rachel had.
    Finally, frustrated that he thought he knew everything when obviously he understood nothing, she stamped her foot and shouted at him—though she was only a few steps away. “I didn’t wake up at the end because I was never asleep!”
    He looked at her, quite startled. Then he replied, softly, “You mustn’t yell at me like that.”
    “I never yell at people,” said Leah.
    Which was such a lie, thought Rachel. But it did no good to argue with Leah, because everybody took her side because they pitied her blindness. Let her say what she wants, and just remember that
you
can see.
    Why doesn’t anybody ever tell
Leah
to remember that Rachel can see, and therefore maybe she might know some things that Leah didn’t