Long known for his science fiction and fantasy stories, with some branching out into horror and a notable historical fiction novel, Orson Scott Card is now making a significant dent in the Biblical fiction category–specifically the Old Testament. Beginning with Stone Tables, a novel about Moses, he has continued on with a series known as “Women of Genesis.”
His first book in the series was titled Sarah, after the wife of the patriarch Abraham. His second book, the one we are addressing now, is Rebekah, the wife of the son of Abraham, the second in line of the patriarch. Presumably the third book will be about one of the wives of Jacob, probably Rachel?
These books about giant figures in Old Testament history are fascinating studies of bigger-than-life legends. Who doesn’t remember hearing the stories of Moses, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah in Sunday school? Card brings these virtually mythical figures back down to earth where we can see them with the clarity of the person next door. He untangles the ambiguities of actions and occurrences that are hard for us to understand today, making them seem like perfectly reasonable events.
The only problem is, the Biblical record is so devoid of the details necessary to accomplish these things, Card is obliged to resort to his primary novelist tool, which he has long wielded with the skill of a master–his towering imagination. Most of the details are filled in by Card himself, speculating on motives, feelings, and actual behavior of individuals that are more icon to us than flesh.
The result is inevitably a mixture of fascinating conjecture and almost-unsettling deflation of sacred heroes. The protagonists of the Old Testament suddenly become card-carrying Card characters with all the earthiness and smart-mouthed banter that that involves.
Rebekah falls into this pattern without a glitch. The book is divided into five parts. Not until the third part–page 145 of a 413 page book–does Card begin to intersect with the Biblical record at all. Everything up to that point establishes the backstory of Rebekah, all the past experiences needed to explain the part of her history we do have. Card uses all the plot development skills he knows to fill in a sizeable period in her life that is a complete fabrication.
He then meshes this in with the sparse information the Bible provides, embellishing his way through the paltry three chapters the Old Testament spends describing Isaac’s life, and comes up with a portrait of Rebekah, Isaac, and their sons Esau and Jacob, that is fascinating to read, imaginative in its detail, and self-consistent in its speculation.
The book begins with Rebekah’s life in the tents of her father Bethuel, who, in Card’s world, is deaf. We meet her brother Laban, the future marriage-nemesis of her future son Jacob, who is now just a barely-grown lad. In addition to the embellishment of a deaf father, Rebekah also has a mentally-challenged nurse and an absent mother who suddenly reappears in an entertaining way that also acts as a foreshadowing of events in the presumed book to come. Rebekah develops a veil fetish for unusual reasons, as if Card thought her use of a veil over her face when she first meets Isaac is a special event that needs explaining, and not a common Mideastern custom.
As Rebekah blends in with the Abrahamic family, we get an innovative characterization of Isaac, one that I never saw in the scriptural record, but one that Card no doubt felt was a reasonable extrapolation from the information available. We also get a thoroughly fleshed-out portrait of the feuding brothers Jacob and Esau, which feels much more justified by the scriptures.
But as things develop, and as one begins to get the urge to strangle this particular Isaac, or beat a little sense into his head, we find one more curious thing happen under the control of the magic fingers of Card. As Rebekah and Jacob conspire to wrest the birthright from the technically deserving, but completely unworthy Esau, we witness one of the greatest whitewashings of a Biblical figure since Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber painted Judas Iscariot as the good guy.
The book ends at a natural climax in the life of Rebekah, but for some reason Card feels a great urgency to wrap things up. The denouement feels rushed, as if Card had contracted for a maximum number of words. Or maybe the too neatly tied-up ending was embarrassing for Card, and he just wanted to hurry and get it done, hoping we would blink and not notice.
There wasn’t much else Card could do about all the fictionalizing. The information available to him was spotty at best. To conjure up a novel about Rebekah, he had no choice but to embellish on the facts. He did so with the assurance and abandon of an accomplished and award-winning novelist. He drew upon his science fiction skills and set the ground rules for his religious world, which he adhered to religiously. He provided a possible explanation that accounts for all the data we do have, one possible explanation out of many.
Without reservation, I can say that Rebekah is enjoyable to read, like a science fiction book by Card always is: to see what clever thing he will think of next as he tells an engrossing story of characters we come to care about. But if you’re looking for insights into one of the figures of the Old Testament, look elsewhere. One comes away feeling like one has gained much more insight about Orson Scott Card and his colorful imagination than about Isaac, the placeholder patriarch, and his miraculously provided and impregnated wife.
