ABRAHAM AND SARAH


The night was quiet. No breeze blew across the dessert. The tent flaps were still. But the seeming tranquility was deceptive. In Abraham's heart there was apprehension as the last rays of sunlight disappeared beneath the western horizon. But Abraham did not look westward. His eyes were to the east, toward the cities of the Plain. In his heart there was a confusion of feeling. For El Shaddai had told him that only by the presence of ten righteous  would the cities be spared. Yet in his heart, he knew that there were not ten, not five, and he feared for those of his household who had chosen to take up residence in those cities. Yet not for them alone did he feel concern, but for all the inhabitants whom he sensed would not live thorugh the night. Now his thoughts turned to that other message which had been given him, - that his wife Sarah would soon conceive and bear him a son thorugh whom the nations would be blessed. So as the aura of death hung in the air, so did the promise of life suffuse the tent.

Now Sarah was old and had ceased the way of conceiving women, and she had laughed at El Shaddai's message that she and her husband would bring forth, by an act of loving, new life. For she had said, "Am I to have pleasure after having grown old, and my husband is also old"? Yet miraculously, at one hundred years of age, Abraham, like Moses at one hundred and twenty, had strength within his being, the force between his thighs not abated.

Doom hovered in the air. Doom cloaked in silence. Abraham felt the need of solace, the need to be in his woman's arms.

Now the rabbis say that when Sarah was one hundred years old, she looked like a woman of twenty. All the more so now at ninety years of age. So Abraham entered the tent of his wife, and behold she was beautiful.

Sarah looked up at her husband from the bed upon which she was reclining. She sat up at his entering and smiled. "What is my lord's will?', she asked. But when she saw the look in his eyes, she blushed in astonishment! So Abraham lay down beside her and held her, and said, "My bride is old but still more beautiful than a youthfull concubine of twenty years. And is your lord so old that he cannot perform for his bride's pleasure"? Sarah's blush turned redder still, and she whispered to him as she yielded to his embrace and carressed his face, "Your bride has been very foolish, and before the angels, triply foolish." So they held each other close and kissed. Then a wind, soft at first, now slowly building, sighed outside the tent, matching the sighing within of the two old, yet young, lovers. Now the stillness of the night was transformed into intensity as passions rose, as heaving sighs filled the dessert air. Now the sky began to brighten - crimson red - as the blood coursed through the veins of those two, husband and wife, rising to crescendo. The kisses and carresses within the tent - the bodies moving to a renewed love. The night - so dark barely moments ago, took on an eerie glow, and the earth moved. The reddened sky burst suddenly assunder, and fire fell upon the earth.

Abraham and Sarah clung together, wrapped in each others arms, filled with life. In the distant east, death rained down upon the evil doers. The world without was ablaze with the fires of destruction, and cries brought about by El Shaddai's all consuming vengence. Within the tent Isaac was being conceived, and Sarah laughed.


See Miram Stanley's poem about Abraham and Sarah - Click Here

  Return To the Biblical Romance index   Return to the literary index   Email Shlomoh