Dangerous Sisters of the Hebrew Bible

5: Sarah

5 Sarah In the last chapter, I argued that the story of Lot’s daughters can be read as a dangerous-sister story in which the sisters’ successful conspiracy to seduce their father subsequently results in the destruction of their natal household. My reading counters Seth Daniel Kunin who considers Genesis 19 to be a fantasy of incest in which Lot effectively marries his daughters to ensure the purity and continuity of his line.1 Contrary to Kunin, I consider incest to be a destructive force within the narrative. Incest is the means through which Lot is deposed as a rival patriarch to Abraham. Surprisingly, incest appears in the Bible’s next narrative but involves a brother-sister relationship. In Genesis 20, at first glance, incest does not appear as a destructive force. In this narrative, the motif of incest, as manifest in the presumed brother-sister relationship between Abraham and Sarah, seems a productive force that enriches Abraham. Genesis 20, along with its companion narratives found in Gen 12:10-20 and Gen 26:6-11, offer the Bible’s most positive narrative representation of incest. Abraham (twice) and Isaac (once) present their wives as their sisters in an effort to protect themselves from foreigners.2 Despite the repetitive subject matter, the differences in narrative detail, as well as the placement of these stories within the broader framework of Genesis, argue for their careful inclusion and intentional design. Placed immediately before or after moments of covenantal promise or fulfillment, these narratives provide tension by prolonging and complicating the fulfillment of God’s promise to the patriarchs while at the same time describing how the patriarchs were enriched and had their status elevated among the nations. Each time the ruse is discovered, the patriarchs do not suffer for acting deceitfully. On the contrary, they prosper when the duped foreign kings offer gifts of appeasement that also serve as an incentive to leave. In this way, the wife-sisters function as ideal sisters who bring benefit to their patriarchal homes, which in this context, as they were in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, 87 are a conflation of the conjugal and natal households. As I note in chapter 3, God is both Israel’s father and husband in the marriage metaphor developed by these prophets. Therefore God’s house is Israel’s conjugal and natal home. Similarly, Abraham and Isaac are presented as Sarah’s and Rebecca’s brother and husband, respectively. Their houses also conflate the conjugal and natal homes and, therefore, provide the appropriate focus of a sister-story. Given the outcome of the three wife-sister stories, it is easy to see why scholars like Kunin identify them as fantasies. For Kunin, Genesis 19 and 20 function as a narrative unit that reflects a common ideological preference for endogamy.3 Through the shared motif of incest, they work to transform problematic (in a literary sense) outsider wives into privileged insider wives to enable the patriarchs to procreate appropriately. In Genesis 19, Lot’s daughters replace his outsider wife to preserve his line after the cataclysmic destruction of Sodom. In Genesis 20, Sarah transforms into Abraham’s sister to ensure the fertility and purity of Abraham’s line. After she is re-designated as a wife-sister, Sarah can give birth to Abraham’s designated heir Isaac in Genesis 21.4 Like Kunin, J. Cheryl Exum also argues that the three wife-sister stories encode fantasies. Although she acknowledges the possibility of an underlying incest fantasy,5 Exum argues that the primary shared fantasy of the three wifesister stories is that the patriarch’s wife will have sex with another man. Within Exum’s psychoanalytic-literary reading, the fantasy reflects the patriarchs’ fears and desires and offers a means to work through them.6 Although the text is not explicit, Exum offers several insights into the nature of these fears and desires. As the text states clearly, the patriarchs fear for their lives. While traveling in foreign territory, Abraham and Isaac fear that foreigners will kill them in order to take their beautiful wives. As neither patriarch tests the waters to see if this is true before passing off his wife as his sister, Exum notes that his action all but guarantees that his wife will be taken.7 For Exum, this suggests that latent desires other than self-preservation might be at work. Perhaps the patriarch wants to know that his wife is attractive to foreigners, which, by implication, would...