Say Thou Art My Sister

A large ancient building made of bricks, in very good condition, with a grand staircase leading up to the top.
Remains of the Ziggurat at Ur, a tiered brick building dating from at least 2,100 BCE and a major administrative center for the Mitanni Empire of Mesopotamia. Abraham, the biblical ancestor of the tribes of Israel, is said to have been born in Ur. Image credit: Amjedha95, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I’m writing a historical novel retelling the Exodus, but I want to ground it in 21st century archaeological discoveries so I do a tremendous amount of research on that period in history. There is so much material, and the interpretations of it are often so conflicting, I tend to avoid articles in the various publications I subscribe to that cover prior or later eras. This past month, though, I came across one that compelled me to change an early episode in my book.

The scene takes place during a lesson in the Hebrew alphabet just before my twin protagonists’ thirteenth birthday, when they will become slaves to Pharaoh. As an educator myself, I know that the more associations a student makes with a particular piece of information, the better it will be remembered. So I have the twins’ teacher, an elder in the community who instructs all of his clan’s children, combine his students’ work on the last letter of the alphabet with a word that appears in a tale involving Abraham, Sarah and a king named Abimelekh (Genesis 20:1–18). The letter is tet, the word is akhot, sister, and the narrative deals with Abraham’s peculiar habit of introducing his wife Sarah to various monarchs as his sibling before she is swept off into the royal harem.

In the biblical text, Abimelekh is furious when God visits him in a dream and warns him not to touch Sarah because she is married. Abraham explains to the king that Sarah is actually his half-sister, because they have different mothers — and in the first draft of the scene, my characters duly recite this rationale during their lesson.

But of course this doesn’t really explain the patriarch’s apparent insouciance about whether his wife sleeps with the king. Nor does it when Abraham has a completely different excuse for telling Pharaoh, in Gen. 12:11–13, the same untruth about his and Sarah’s relationship: Her beauty is so tempting that Abraham fears he’ll be killed if Pharaoh knows she is his wife and wants her anyway. (In that chapter it is implied that she actually does become one of Pharaoh’s concubines, and Abraham makes a tidy profit in sheep, cattle, donkeys, servants and camels before God strikes Pharaoh’s household with disease and the Egyptian king sends Abraham and Sarah packing.)

A 17th century oil painting showing Abraham kneeling outside a palace and stretching his arms out to Sarah while she, standing, stretches her arms out to him and the king, wearing a turban, presents her.
Abimelekh returns Sarah to Abraham. Painting by Nicolaes Berchem, a 17th Century Dutch painter famous for his Italianate scenes. Image credit: GetArchive

Despite my discomfiture at these inexplicable Abrahamic shenanigans, I didn’t think I needed to go beyond what the Hebrew Bible says for that particular scene in my book. My characters were learning this odd story, so I figured I should pretty much stick to it. I never would have dreamed that there were any archaeological discoveries making clear why my putative forefather seemed to confuse incest and marriage.

It turns out that almost a century ago, thousands of clay Mesopotamian records from around the time of Abraham were unearthed in what is today northeastern Iraq. The Nuzi Tablets, so called because that was the name of the ancient city where they were found at its height of wealth and productivity, describe a number of practices that give vital context to some famous scenes in Genesis. For instance, Sarah’s gift of her maidservant Hagar to Abraham when she thought she was infertile — an episode from Genesis 16 brilliantly expounded upon by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale — was apparently commonplace in Nuzi, and there were inheritance laws governing the issue of such unions. So was naming unrelated male heirs, as Abraham does in Gen. 15:1–5.

There are others, but of particular interest to me was a kind of adoption procedure that turned especially favored or beloved wives into legal sisters. These high-status women were then referred to interchangeably as wives or sisters in documents thereafter. Although Abraham’s home town is given as “Ur of the Chaldees” (Gen 11:27–31), which was hundreds of miles southeast of Nuzi, the Hurrian culture from which the Nuzi tablets stem was common to both places at the time.

A map of the Mitanni Empire and neighboring empires stretching from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea.
Map of the Mitanni Empire circa 1500 BCE, at its height but at the tail end of possible dates for the Age of the Patriarchs. Ur can be seen close to the edge of the Persian Gulf on the Euphrates River, while Nuzi is north along a tributary of the Tigris. Image credit: Simeon Netchev at World History Encyclopedia.

Thus, Abimelekh and Pharaoh were victims not of calculated dishonesty, but of cultural misunderstanding. If there really were individuals named Abraham and Sarah who traveled from Ur to Canaan and then to Egypt and back, Abraham had probably presented Sarah as his sister in order to demonstrate her importance to him — not out of fear of royal murder or due to questionable marital relations.

This means that the “explanations” for these actions were likely put into Abraham’s mouth by later editors of the biblical text who were unfamiliar with Hurrian norms centuries later. We can conjecture this because the camels that Pharaoh supposedly gave Abraham in exchange for Sarah’s favors do not actually appear in the near Eastern archaeological record for almost a thousand years.

But it also points to what may be the extreme antiquity of the biblical stories — which, in my scene about learning how to write the letter tet, I assume were passed down orally from generation to generation before they were ever committed to papyrus or goatskin parchment. So I changed the dialogue in my scene to reflect a slightly garbled version of the much earlier and far distant wife/sister custom.

And then breathed a sigh of relief that my ancestral forebears probably did not share half of their DNA.

Children’s illustration of Sarah giggling while men speak with Abraham outside the tent.
An illustration for a children’s version of Genesis chapter 18, showing Sarah laughing as angels tell her husband that she will become a mother in her 90s. Image credit: Distant Shores Media/Sweet Publishing, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

2 thoughts on “Say Thou Art My Sister”

    1. Thanks so much, Debbie! Quick question: Did you know the stories about Abraham and Sarah? They’re not exactly the most famous, but I’m just wondering if you ever learned about these particular incidents.

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