III. ABRAHAM’S SERVANT AND REBEKAH

The 24th chapter of Genesis contains a very beautiful and primitive picture of Eastern manners, in the mission of Abraham’s trusty servant to Mesopotamia, to procure a wife for Isaac from the daughters of that branch of the Patriarch’s family which continued to dwell in Haran. He came nigh to the city of Nahor—it was the hour when the people were going to draw water. He entreated God to give him a token whereby he might know which of the damsels of the place He had appointed to Isaac for a wife. “And it came to pass that behold Rebekah came out, who was born to Bethuel, son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham’s brother, with her pitcher upon her shoulder”—“Drink, my lord,” was her greeting, “and I will draw water for thy camels also.” This was the simple token which the servant had sought at the hands of God; and accordingly he proceeds to impart his commission to herself and her friends. To read is to believe this story. But the point in it to which I beg the attention of my readers is this, that Rebekah is said to be “the daughter of Bethuel, the son of Milcah, which she bare unto Nahor.” It appears, therefore, that the grand-daughter of Abraham’s brother is to be the wife of Abraham’s son—i. e. that a person of the third generation on Nahor’s side is found of suitable years for one of the second generation on Abraham’s side. Now what could harmonize more remarkably with a fact elsewhere asserted, though here not even touched upon, that Sarah the wife of Abraham was for a long time barren, and had no child till she was stricken in years [Gen. 18:12.] ? Thus it was that a generation on Abraham’s side was lost, and the grand-children of his brother in Haran were the coevals of his own child in Canaan. I must say that this trifling instance of minute consistency gives me very great confidence in the veracity of the historian. It is an incidental point in the narrative—most easily overlooked—I am free to confess, never observed by myself till I examined the Pentateuch with a view to this species of internal evidence. It is a point on which he might have spoken differently, and yet not have excited the smallest suspicion that he was speaking inaccurately. Suppose he had said that Abraham’s son had taken for a wife the daughter of Nahor, instead of the grand-daughter, who would have seen in this anything improbable? and to a mere inventor would not that alliance have been much the more likely to suggest itself?

Now here, again, the ordinary and extraordinary are so closely united, that it is extremely difficult indeed to put them asunder. If, then, the ordinary circumstances of the narrative have the impress of truth, the extraordinary have a very valid right to challenge our serious consideration too. If the coincidence almost establishes this as a certain fact, which I think it does, that Sarah did not bear Isaac while she was young, agreeably to what Moses affirms; is it not probable that the same historian is telling the truth when he says, that Isaac was born when Sarah was too old to bear him at all except by miracle?—when he says, that the Lord announced his future birth, and ushered him into the world by giving him a name foretelling the joy he should be to the nations; changing the names of both his parents with a prophetic reference to the high destinies this son was appointed to fulfil?

Indeed the more attentively and scrupulously we examine the Scriptures, the more shall we be (in my opinion) convinced, that the natural and supernatural events recorded in them must stand or fall together. The spirit of miracles possesses the entire body of the Bible, and cannot be cast out without rending in pieces the whole frame of the history itself, merely considered as a history.