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named Istara, who did the bookkeeping for her father. Please remember that writing had already existed at that time for more than two thousand years, and all firms large and small kept records of their dealings, although to call Istara a bookkeeper when her “books” were written on clay and on dried animal skins, is clearly an anachronism, while to call her a tablet-keeper would be more accurate but an anachronism as well if you’re thinking of a computer tablet.

      Reading the Torah that exists now, you find that our familiar familial story begins with Abraham and that the focus is all on him. Well, that isn’t wrong, but it isn’t exactly right either. For everything that Abraham did or said, there were just as many things that Sarah said and did. When I was little and being unruly, as all little children are (or should be, if the spark of life isn’t beaten out of them too early) my mother and my aunts would shake a finger at me and say, “Serach, remember that you’re the descendant of a princess. So start acting like one!” Mothers often say things like this to their daughters, especially if they’re tomboys like I was. But in my case, what they said was the truth. Sarah really was a princess, a minor one, but a princess none the less. Still it was hard for me to understand what that meant when I was small. After all, we were living in tents, and even then lots of little girls imagined princesses living in beautiful stone castles, or their ancient equivalents. But when I was older and had seen something of the world, I came to understand just what a princess is—a girl whose life is exalted and whose fate is restricted. You’ve seen some famous princesses in your time come and go, like Grace and Diana, so you know what I mean. Back then I was very glad that my ancestress was a princess who’d been born in a castle, but that my mother was the wife of a very very rich man who lived in a tent. A fancy tent, class-wise, but still a tent.

      Torah tells us that Sarah’s birth name was Sarai, later changed to Sarah, but it was actually Innati, the name of a local goddess. Sarai or Sarah both mean princess in two different Semitic dialects, and that was her title—Sarai Innati—but for the sake of our narrative, let us continue to call her Sarah. Now Sarah was raised in a stone villa in Ur, the daughter of a rich Hebrew princess named Ataah, back in the days when women still had some power in the world. Sarah’s mother did business with Terah, Abraham’s father, who was from a less important Hebrew family. Sarah’s father, Haddad, managed his wife’s estates. Our ancestors met one afternoon when Abraham came to the villa with his father, with fabric and jewelry to sell. The two took one look at each other, Sarah and Abraham, and that was that. A flame was kindled in their eyes that raced across the gap between their bodies faster than the speed of light, something we intuitively understood, even way back then.

      When Sarah and Abraham went off to Canaan they both changed their names, hers to her title in the local dialect and his from Abram to Abraham. Scholars tell us that Abram means something like, “Father is Exalted”—Father being God, and that Abraham means “Father of Many Nations,” which is more or less accurate, but they miss the meaning behind those name changes. I remember back in the late 1960’s when my young New York City neighbor Barry changed his name to River and his lovely girlfriend Mary Catherine, a self-defined “hippie-chick” changed hers to Owl. When Abram and Innati got to Canaan, they too wanted new names and new identities, and they did exactly what Barry and Mary Catherine did, after running away from their nice Jewish and Catholic families on Long Island to live in a crash pad in the Lower East Side.

      All of that has been forgotten, and this has been forgotten too; had Innati been the daughter of a rich family, that spark of love which flashed between her and Abraham, who was still just called Abram, would have been snuffed out by her mother. But fortunately for her, and for all of us, Sarah was the heiress to a long vanished fortune, so Ataah was more than willing to let her daughter marry the handsome son of that very rich trader, Terah. Down through time I’ve seen this happen again and again that the children of rich, aristocratic, noble, royal, and even at times imperial lines become impoverished and are willing to ally themselves with nouveau riche clans they’d otherwise look down their noses at. You can get a handle on them by thinking of similar right-and-wrongnesses from your own time. Romans and Sicilians. South Indians and North. Ashkenazi and Sephardi. Sephardi and Mizrachi. Religious and secular. Uptown and downtown. Red and Blue, Left and Right. You know what I’m talking about.

      Sarah’s mother Ataah set up the newlyweds in a large wing of her crumbling villa, but the two were never very happy there. Ataah had her own ideas for her daughter and son-in-law and they had their own ideas about how to live their lives. Ataah also had her own ideas about how her daughter’s husband ought to use his money, and immediately began to renovate the old place. In the Torah we are told that it was God who prompted Abraham to move to Canaan but in fact it was Sarah who came up with the idea. (I don’t discount the likelihood that God inspired her, although the workings of God are still unclear to me after all these years.) My mother and grandmother both told me that Sarah was a princess and a priestess and a very devout woman as well, and since the two of them never agreed on almost anything, when they did, I assume that they were telling the truth, even if it was a goddess she prayed to, the Hebrew embodiment of the Great Goddess, and not the idea of what we now call God.

      Abraham was quite uncomfortable with his wealth, and was even more uncomfortable when his father died and he came into his inheritance. If they had the word then, we might say that our ancestor Abraham was something of a Socialist, happy to share his good fortune with others, who didn’t mind giving money to his mother-in-law. He only wished she’d done better things with it, like help the poor or start a school in town. Instead, she used it to fix up her villa, buy clothing, and go on fancy vacations. (Some things about human beings have changed over time; others have not.) Sarah kept grumbling about it, Abraham kept telling her that it wasn’t worth getting upset about, but our history hinges on the long forgotten afternoon when Sarah found out from a servant that her husband had just given her mother money to visit the ancient equivalent of a famous temple health spa in nearby Haran. Furious, she went storming back to their quarters and said to Abraham, the equivalent of, “I can’t take it anymore. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

      Back in those days, in that area, a man moved in with his wife’s family, but times were changing and the hip, cool, with-it, trendy, avant-garde were doing things differently, so, hoping to calm his wife down, Abraham suggested to Sarah that they could move in with his father. “It’s the modern thing to do.” In those days the nuclear family didn’t exist yet and couples didn’t have houses of their own. Everyone lived in extended families of three or more generations. Well, Sarah thought about that and said, “If we go live with your dad, it’s going to be the same old story. He’s sweet, and kind, and generous, but he’ll just keep bugging us. And my mother will keep bugging us too. And you’re too nice to tell her to shut up and go away. So, darling, let’s just quit this place all together. ” Abraham realized she was right and that’s when Sarah went off to light some incense at the family shrine and pray. In the midst of her prayers the idea came to her, and she went back to tell her husband, “I think we ought to go to Canaan. The land is beautiful, the countryside is fairly open, and instead of agents going back and forth we can set up a permanent branch of your family’s business there.” Abraham thought it was a good idea, consulted with his older brother Nahor, who was in charge of the business since their father died, and Nahor agreed, so they moved, along with Abraham’s nephew Lot, the son of his late brother Haran, a kind of a hippie in his own right who was always looking for adventure.

      If you’re wondering how I know about things that happened two or three generations before I was born, remember how life was in those days. No television, no movies, no books, just a lot of time to sit around and talk. Everyone loved stories, and we all told them. My grandmother Zilpah, my mother Arsiyah, and my aunt Channah were all excellent storytellers. When I was little, Grandmother, who was always sick in bed, was the living repository of our family’s history. Family members would come to her all day with local gossip and go to her for information. I took over her position when she died, and I’m still at it. I sat around listening to these stories from the time that I was old enough to sit up by myself. I heard them again and again for years and years. And once upon a time, as some storytellers say, the stories that I’m telling you were all written down. Perhaps one day some scraps of them will turn up in a cave somewhere, just like the Dead Sea Scrolls, and then you’ll see that everything I’m telling you is the

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