2. Put your hand . . . under my thigh. Holding the genitals, or placing a hand next to the genitals, during the act of solemn oath-taking is attested in several ancient societies (a fact already noted by Abraham ibn Ezra in the twelfth century), though here it may have the special purpose of invoking the place of procreation as the servant is to seek a bride for the only son Isaac.

4. to my land and to my birthplace you shall go. These words are still another echo of the first words God speaks to Abraham at the beginning of chapter 12 sending him forth from his native land.

7. Abraham’s language explicitly echoes the reiterated covenantal promises he has received. Later in the story, when the servant gives the family a seemingly verbatim report of this initial dialogue with his master, he discreetly edits out this covenantal language.

10. camels. The camels here and elsewhere in Genesis are a problem. Archaeological and extrabiblical literary evidence indicates that camels were not adopted as beasts of burden until several centuries after the Patriarchal period, and so their introduction in the story would have to be anachronistic. What is puzzling is that the narrative reflects careful attention to other details of historical authenticity: horses, which also were domesticated centuries later, are scrupulously excluded from the Patriarchal Tales, and when Abraham buys a gravesite, he deals in weights of silver, not in coins, as in the later Israelite period. The details of betrothal negotiation, with the brother acting as principal agent for the family, the bestowal of a dowry on the bride and bethrothal gifts on the family, are equally accurate for the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. Perhaps the camels are an inadvertent anachronism because they had become so deeply associated in the minds of later writers and audiences with desert travel. There remains a possibility that camels may have already had some restricted use in the earlier period for long desert journeys, even though they were not yet generally employed. In any case the camels here are more than a prop, for their needs and treatment are turned into a pivot of the plot.

11. by the well of water at eventide, the hour when the water-drawing women came out. This is the first occurrence of the betrothal type-scene. The conventionally fixed sequence of motifs of this type-scene is: travel to a foreign land, encounter there with the future bride (almost always referred to as naʿarah, “young woman”) at a well, drawing of water, “hurrying” or “running” to bring the news of the stranger’s arrival, a feast at which a betrothal agreement is concluded. As a social institution, the well was probably a plausible place to encounter nubile maidens, though the well in a foreign land also has an archetypal look, suggesting fertility and the nuptial encounter with the otherness of the female. This version is the most elaborate and leisurely of the betrothal type-scenes, rich in detail, full of stately repetition. It is also the only version in which the bridegroom himself is not present but rather a surrogate, and in which the young woman, not the man, draws the water, with the verb of hurrying that is linked with the bringing of the news amply describing her actions at the well. There is surely some intimation in all this of the subsequent course of the marriage of Isaac and Rebekah—he in most respects the most passive of all the patriarchs, she forceful and enterprising.

17. Pray, let me sip a bit of water. With perfect politeness, the parched desert traveler speaks as though he wanted no more than to wet his lips. In the event, prodigious quantities of water will have to be drawn.

18–19. Drink, my lord . . . and let him drink. And she let him drink his fill. As Meir Sternberg (1985) acutely observes, this long delay before she finally produces the requisite offer to water the camels is a heart-stopper, enough to leave the servant in grave momentary doubt as to whether God has answered his prayer.

onto her hand. The motion, as Rashi notes, is lowering the jug from her shoulder to her hand, so that she can pour water out.

20. and drew water for all his camels. This is the closest anyone comes in Genesis to a feat of “Homeric” heroism (though the success of Rebekah’s son Jacob in his betrothal scene in rolling off the huge stone from the well invites comparison). A camel after a long desert journey drinks many gallons of water, and there are ten camels here to water, so Rebekah hurrying down the steps of the well would have had to be a nonstop blur of motion in order to carry up all this water in her single jug.

22. beqa. The term beqaʿ is derived from a verb that means “to split” and so may refer to half a shekel, the standard weight, though that is not certain. Following the convention of earlier English translations, I have not used the mark for ayin in the text.

25. bran. The Hebrew teven appears to have two different meanings in the Bible. In the brick-making process mentioned in Exodus, and in several other occurrences, it means “straw,” and this becomes its only meaning in later Hebrew. But there are several texts in which teven is clearly edible (Isaiah 11:7, 65:25; 1 Kings 5:8), and despite the preponderance of English versions, both Renaissance and modern, that opt for “straw” here, edible grain makes more sense.

30. when he saw the nose ring, and the bracelets. A brilliant moment of exposition of character. The narrator makes no comment about what kind of person Laban may be. His sharp eye on the precious gifts surely invites us to wonder about him—though for the moment, we might conclude that he simply sees here evidence that Isaac comes of good family. Hovering suspicions about Laban’s rapacity will be confirmed many decades later in narrated time in the course of his slippery dealings with Jacob. In contrast to the marriage so easily arranged for Isaac, Jacob will face immense difficulties, created by Laban, in working out the terms of his betrothal.

31. Come in, blessed of the LORD. Laban’s gesture of hospitality stands in a direct sequence with Abraham’s and Lot’s. The language is courtly, the hospitality “Oriental,” but we are not meant to forget his just noted observation of the nose ring and bracelets.

32. the men who were with him. The servant would of course have had men with him and his ten camels, but in keeping with the rigorous economy of biblical narrative, these are not mentioned until now, when they become requisite participants in the hospitality scene. Before this, they are only fleetingly intimated in the “us” of verse 23.

35. The servant’s speech, in keeping with the biblical technique of near verbatim repetition, echoes in detail the language first of the narrator and then of his own dialogue with Abraham at the beginning of the chapter. But as several modern commentators have noted, he makes numerous adjustments of the language he is quoting because of the practical and diplomatic requirements of addressing this particular audience. Thus, the narrator simply said that “the LORD had blessed Abraham in all things.” The servant, cognizant that this is a preamble to a proposal of marriage, fleshes out that flat statement by speaking of how his master has “grown great” in sheep and cattle and other livestock, in slaves and silver and gold.

40. The LORD, in whose presence I have walked. To “walk before,” or live in devoted service to, a particular deity is an idea that would have been perfectly familiar to Abraham’s polytheistic kinfolk back in Mesopotamia. What the servant is careful to delete in his repetition of the dialogue with his master are all the monotheistic references to the God of heaven and earth and the covenantal promises to give the land to the seed of Abraham. Similarly excluded is Abraham’s allusion to having been taken by God from his father’s house and the land of his birth—a notion the family, to whom this God has not deigned to speak, might construe as downright offensive.

from my clan and my father’s house. Abraham had actually said, quite simply, “from there,” but at this point the servant chooses to elaborate his master’s meaning in terms that emphasize to the kinfolk Abraham’s admirable sense of family loyalty.

47. And I asked her. . . . And I put the ring in her nose. The one significant divergence in the servant’s report of the encounter at the well is that he claims to have asked Rebekah about her lineage before placing the golden ornaments on her, whereas he actually did this as soon as she had drawn water for all the camels, and only afterward did he inquire about her family. This alteration of the order of actions is again dictated by considerations of audience. The servant, having seen the stipulation of his prayer completely fulfilled by the beautiful girl at the well, is entirely certain that she is the wife God has intended for Isaac. But to the family, he does not want to seem to have done anything so presumptuous as bestowing gifts—implicitly betrothal gifts—on a young woman without first ascertaining her pedigree. This is a small but strategic indication of the precision with which social institutions and values are adumbrated in the dialogue.

49. turn elsewhere. The Hebrew says literally, “turn to the right or the left,” a biblical idiom for seeking alternatives to the course on which one is set.

50. and Bethuel. The convincing conclusion of many textual critics is that the appearance of Bethuel is a later scribal or redactorial insertion. The surrounding narrative clearly suggests that Bethuel is deceased when these events occur. Otherwise, it is hard to explain why the home to which Rebekah goes running is referred to as “her mother’s household.” It is her brother who is the male who speaks exclusively on behalf of the family; only her mother and brother are mentioned, never her father, elsewhere in the report of the betrothal transaction, and even in this verse, “answered” is in the singular, with an odd switch to the plural occurring only for “said.”

neither good nor evil. The sense of this idiom is “nothing whatsoever.”

55. ten days or so. The time indication in the Hebrew is not entirely clear, as the phrase—literally “days or ten”—has no parallels. The present translation reflects a modern consensus, but some medieval commentators note, correctly, that “days” (precisely in this plural form) sometimes means “a year,” in which case the ten would refer to ten months. The request for such an extended prenuptial period at home might be more plausible than a mere week and a half.

59. her nurse. As in other societies, for a young woman to retain her old wet nurse as permanent companion is a sign of social status (one recalls Shakespeare’s Juliet). The nurse’s name will be given when she is accorded an obituary notice in chapter 35.

60. Our sister. Rebekah’s family sends her off to her destiny in the west with a poem that incorporates the twofold blessing of being progenitrix to a nation multifarious in number and mighty in arms. The poem itself may in fact be authentically archaic: the prosodic form is irregular—the two “lines,” approximately parallel in meaning, are too long to scan conventionally and each invites division into two very short versets—and the diction is elevated and ceremonial. “Myriads teeming” is literally “thousands of myriads,” and the term for enemy at the end of the poem—literally, “haters”—is one that is generally reserved for poetry, hence the faintly archaic “foes” of this translation. The virtually identical phrase in the prose blessing bestowed on Abraham in 22:17 uses the ordinary word for “enemy.”

63. to stroll. The translation reproduces one current guess, but the verb occurs only here, and no one is sure what it really means.

and he raised his eyes and saw and, look, camels were coming. The formulaic chain, “he raised his eyes and saw,” followed by the “presentative” look (rather like voici in French), occurs frequently in these stories as a means of indicating a shift from the narrator’s overview to the character’s visual perspective. The visual discrimination here is a nice one: in the distance, Isaac is able to make out only a line of camels approaching; then we switch to Rebekah’s point of view, with presumably a few minutes of story time elapsed, and she is able to detect the figure of a man moving across the open country.

65. covered her face. This is an indication of social practice, not of individual psychology: unmarried women did not wear a veil, but there is evidence that it was customary to keep the bride veiled in the presence of her bridegroom until the wedding.

67. into the tent of Sarah his mother. The proposal of some textual critics to delete “Sarah his mother” as a scribal error should be resisted. Rebekah fills the emotional gap left by Sarah’s death, as the end of the verse indicates, and with the first matriarch deceased, Rebekah also takes up the role of matriarch in the family. It is thus exactly right that Isaac should bring her into his mother’s tent. Interestingly, no mention whatever is made of Abraham at the end of the story. Many have construed his charging of the servant at the beginning of the story as a deathbed action: it would not be unreasonable to surmise that he is already deceased when the servant returns (the genealogical notation concerning Abraham in the next chapter would be out of chronological order—a kind of pluperfect that ends by placing Isaac around Beer-Lahai-Roi, where in fact we find him upon Rebekah’s arrival). The conclusion of the betrothal tale in this way creates a curious symmetry between the household of the bride and the household of the groom. She, evidently, is fatherless, living in “her mother’s household.” It is quite likely that he, too, is fatherless; and though he was bereaved of his mother still earlier, it is to “his mother’s tent” that he brings his bride.