Sarah who Loved a Man Captured by the Presence and His promises.

I thought I’d try to imagine Sarah’s life with Abraham from her perspective. I’ve been taking a course on the Book of Jubilees, a series of oral traditions compiled around 150 BC that expand the story of Genesis. Abraham scattering crows comes from there. And in another class we were challenged to find a biblical story and try our hand at the horror genre. 

I fell in love with my brother when I saw him scattering the crows. The crows that were pecking at our seeds, the seeds we scattered so we could live. But the seeds needed rain. They needed time to nestle in the dirt.  He shouted Be Gone. His voice was the voice of a ram’s horn. I felt his authority in my breastbone. All in one, the flock lifted off the fields and flew away—not just to the oaks close by, the holy oaks, but they kept flying until they were dots in the sky. He was dressed in black, robes flapping out behind him. Were his clothes part of his magic? My heart caught in my throat.

Now meals together with Abram were a trial. I could barely hold my spoon steady when we ate soup. I watched him to see how he liked it. Mother’s weaving kept her so busy she granted me the cooking fire and the knife to slaughter the baby goat for our meal. I learned to make good food.

We danced and sang at my wedding, our legs prancing in time with each other as we danced in circles joined together arm in arm. We circled one way and then the other. We drank good wine. Abram and I fell into our wedding bed. I proved he was mine. My beloved is mine and I am his. Soon my belly would grow, and I would be satisfied with a baby and many babies after that. He refused the temple prostitute to insure my fertility. He refused to drink the goat’s blood that was part of our tradition. We were shunned by our neighbors. And my womb gave us no babies. Every month, when my womb seized up and I vomited like I carried a baby, but the blood came, I wept.

Did the gods hold it against me, Abram’s refusal to practice their rites? I wept, because if he’d gone to the temple woman, if he’d drunk the goat’s blood, maybe my babies would have come. But he took me outside one clear night.

“You can’t make creation do what we want it too. Whoever’s behind all this. Look up,” he whispered as though he were in a sacred place. I heard that holiness. My neck ached with the looking. Each and every one of the stars pricked my eyes.

Abram spoke, “You know how the sun and moon move across the sky and come back to the same place? And the stars. They tell me when it’s time to plant. You can’t make the Creator do what you want him to do by drinking goat’s blood. We don’t drink the animal’s life to bring life to us. Why should I know a temple prostitute when my body is yours. The old stories say it’s wickedness like that got the world buried in a flood.”

I often woke after the sleep that comes with love making, with Abram outside studying the stars. One night I heard him weeping. I had dried up. I had not given him a son or a daughter. I closed my eyes on sand. I held his hand when he came back to our pallet. We left our father’s house, our people, we settled by magnificent oaks, the oaks of Mamre that shaded us, holy enough to beckon us to worship.. There was no temple with rites that came to set my teeth on edge. Abram’s goodness had that effect. 

The day he chased the giant scavenger birds off his sacrifice, Abram frightened me. It was like there was a presence I couldn’t see that was telling him things. He took a heifer, a female goat, a ram, a turtledove and a pigeon. He had cut them in half. His fury at chasing the birds, I’d not seen it, not once in all our years. But I did see him lie down, exhausted. I did see a smoking fire pot and flaming torch moving among the pieces, touching them setting them aflame. But there was no one holding the pot or the fire. My head throbbed. I vomited.  Was there a baby? No.

That next night Abram took my hand. We walked away from our campfires. He did not hold me this time. His voice cracked, “Look up.” It was a command. I looked. The stars were smeared together. I caught my breath with how tiny I felt. The ground I stood on was bigger, solid, but it felt like I could fall through any minute. “The Presence said I would have as many children as those stars. As many children as sand on the seashore. He said he would give us this country for our own.”

I was silent.

“I believe him,” Abram said. “I believe him.”

After I bled, yet again, I told Abram, “God has given me no children, take Hagar my slave. Her child will be mine to give to God.” I heard them in Hagar’s tent. Her moans and cries bounced off each of the trees. I swaddled my head in cloths.

God gave Hagar a son. She held me in contempt. “Make me,” she said when I asked her to make bread. “Right here in my belly is the one God promised Abram.” She slowed down with every task I asked her. She made eyes at my husband. His face softened towards her. His face wearied toward me. I’m ashamed to say how I treated her. “Get out,” I screamed. And she left.

Hagar returned, her eyes on the ground, “A man told me to come back. At least he looked like a man with the shine we sometimes see around our shadows in the grass when the sun hits it just right, but there was no dew and no shadow. “His name will be Ishmael. The man said he would make a great nation.”

I bit my tongue. Her humility. How can I argue? My tears were as dry as my womb. The promise of the stars, that was for Hagar. Not me. God didn’t speak to me.

I laughed when God told all the men to be circumcised, including Ishmael. I was glad to hear the intake of their breath, the yelps they could not contain. My husband, who chased away crows so we could eat, asked me to not claim our marriage when we stayed in Eygpt. The Pharoah took me to his harem. And I rested in all that luxury. Pharoah gave him livestock and gold as was the custom, to honor a woman’s closest relative. Before Pharaoh could take me to his chambers, locusts and frogs and darkness fell. I told my eunuch I was Abram’s wife. While Abraham bled, when he was cut for the sake of the Presence, I remembered Abraham’s fear, his whoring me out to Pharaoh. It served him right. I don’t know how I could look at his man part and not laugh.

Three strange men came to my husband. They were other worldly, almost creepy. I heard them before a saw them, like the flock of doves flying north to home. I am so tired. He ran to me to to kill one of our bottle calves, told me to bake bread with our finest flour. I leaned my fists into the dough. I cracked the tent to listen and laughed when they said I would bear a child a year from now. I am old now. Ninety years old. Would I have pleasure in my old age? I doubt it.

“Why did you laugh? Is anything too hard for the Lord?” they asked.

“I did not laugh.” I denied my cynicism. How many years have I watched Ishmael, the child God did give my husband grow? These men frightened me. They are the Presence. 

“Yes you did,” they said with a smile around their eyes. 

That was the night before the cities on the plain exploded into a black whirlwind, smoke covering the sky, clouds so thick. lightning flashed inside and out. Abraham said he’d bargained with God to save Lot and his family. He’d been nothing but trouble, his men fighting with our men, so he took the best land by the cities. He’d been kidnapped so Abraham took our men to rescue him and others. Our shepherds said his wife had turned to a pillar of salt, her back turned away from escape. We never saw him again though we heard he fled into the mountains with his daughters.

When Isaac burst out of my body, Hagar caught him and laid him on my chest. How warm he felt. He nuzzled into me, latched onto my breast, that would later grow sore, but right then I swooned with pleasure. My heart lifted up. Then I fell asleep from the work of giving birth. I sang. Day and night I sang. And Abraham joined in. We danced like it was our wedding day: 

When Abram said he was taking my son, Isaac, the son of my joy and laughter to God’s mountain, to worship God, I asked, my voice caught in my throat, “Where is the sacrifice?” Always before this Abraham took a goat. Did I tell you the Presence changed our names? Abram to Abraham. Sarai to Sarah. But what good were names when my husband was loading our draft donkey with enough wood to burn a body. I know how people worship their gods around here. The first born gets tossed in the fire. But that’s Ishmael. Ishmael who mocked Isaac, on the day he was weaned. We had a great feast and Ishmael mocked him because the inheritance would be his as the first born. I drove him out of the camp. We heard later The Presence showed up for Hagar again. He pointed her to a well, and water, and the promise her son would birth twelve sons.

Abraham clamped his hands on my arms, squeezed. His eyes more frightened than the words. “The Presence, the Presence hasn’t told us wrong yet. He gave us this land. If he said he will make Isaac into a great nation, he will.”

I looked at the holy mountain in the distance. “This is not the Presence who showed you the stars and promised your son would bless the world. Don’t come back here.”

I watched my son’s new sandals that I had crafted, dancing in the dust, as he walked with his father and our servants. I know my son, excited for a new adventure. I watched that faithful donkey walk toward that damnable holy place until they were out of sight. I poured wine and tore bread. I poured wine again. I drank and I ate. I drank.

The strange priest/king of Salem who offered my husband bread and wine, with the words, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth and blessed be God most high who has delivered your enemies into your hand” I wanted him to walk up to the tent, I wanted him to say the promise was true but all I heard was sand hitting the walls, the door flapping.

And yet, and yet, thousands of years in the future, Sarah was commended. As the writer to the Hebrews says, “By faith Sarah herself received the power to conceive even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.”(Heb. 11:11 – 12)

Who knows how we will be commended, as we live our ordinary, hard  lives, as we fight to believe the promises. Sometimes I’m struck by fear, the question, will I be faithful, am I faithful? The powers of darkness can fall on us, preaching fear and lies, but they are mere shadows, that frighten, that hold no power, even though they can rattle us like an earthquake rattles shelves.    

Martin Shaw has said the fairies sit around their fires watching our lives like grand stories. Maybe he’s talking about the saints, a great cloud of them, praying over our lives. Maybe that crowd is full of angels, whirring with strange wings and faces. I have forgotten them, and even the grace of our animals, tending to us. And the saints, a great cloud of them,  

As a barren woman, missing the children and grandchildren who were never conceived, I can take heart in Sarah’s story and St. Paul’s commendation from Isaiah: “Rejoice oh barren one who does not bear; break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than than those of the one who has a husband”(Gal 4:25, ESV). It was Sarah who birthed the child of promise, and like Sarah’s son we are children of promise, a promise that kicks us in the shins and says, “What about there is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus don’t you understand?”

Okay, one more thing. I made the short list for the Masters Review Best Emerging Writers 2025 Anthology for the essay, “How I Shucked Who People Thought I Was Or a Virgin and the Writer’s Workshop.” This is one of the most vulnerable things I’ve written, part of the memoir I’ve avoided these last few years. They say some nice things. Here’s the link. https://mastersreview.com/best-emerging-writers-2025-shortlist/

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