All these Abrahamic mothers—sisters, cousins, slaves, Israelite and foreign, despairing, determined, powerful—must conceive children or die, as Rebecca laments.
Sarah is defined as the mother of God’s promise in contrast to Hagar, the Egyptian, who is indisputably an “other”, just as Hagar’s son, Ishmael, is transformed from family to “other” by Sarah. The claim of Sarah and Isaac to unequivocal kinship status is solidified through the greater “otherness” of Hagar and Ishmael.
When Rebecca becomes pregnant, it is with twin boys (Jacob and Esau) who, God tells her, are warring nations in her womb. Indeed, Esau is born first, yet Jacob immediately follows, grasping the heel of his brother’s foot to pull him back and gain the first-born position. We might be forgiven for thinking this is probably not what she wished for: her very womb becomes a battleground in the male struggle to be chosen as God’s favored seed.
Leah and Rachel are sisters and they too become Abrahamic mothers, giving birth (along with their slaves Zilpah and Bilhah) to twelve sons, whose descendants become the twelve tribes of Israel. It is a foundational story of great significance in the history of Israel. However, none of this happens without a good deal of desperation, determination, and trickery on Leah’s and Rachel’s parts, including their use of their slaves, as Sarah before them had done, to conceive sons.
The Davidic Mothers’ actions continue generations of assertive interventions by the Abrahamic mothers of the Genesis narratives, who repeatedly take matters into their own hands to conceive children of the promise.
The story of Lot’s daughters is difficult to absorb for many readers today, for several reasons: First, because it features sex between Abraham’s nephew, Lot, and his daughters and second, because Lot’s daughters are bartered for their sexual/procreative purity because Lot values the spiritual ideal of righteous hospitality to guests above his own daughters’ bodies.
What holds Tamar back is not a womb closed by God, but the failure of the chosen fathers to follow God’s laws. Tamar conceives the forefather of King David through her own desperation and righteous determination, all through sexual subterfuge that is by the norms of her day highly condemnable. And in doing so she ends up furthering God’s plan for Israel.
What is so interesting about Ruth’s story is that the female competition and mutual betrayal that characterized the other mothers’ stories is absent. Here, again, we have an Israelite woman and a foreign woman at risk and in need of a man’s protection, and yet they are tied together in solidarity and love. Naomi and Ruth do not abandon each other.
Mary’s story is most foregrounded in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
The Christian depiction of Mary and her de-sexed, obedient motherhood was a response to, and attempted resolution of, the Hebrew Bible’s ambivalence about the sexuality and religious obedience of Israel’s mothers… Any genuine interest in Mary, her body or her feelings, if any existed at all, is overridden by the need to use her as a proof God was made man, became flesh, and died for human sin on a Roman cross. As a result, Mary and her body had to become more like Jesus, other-worldly, asexual, pure in mind and heart… How else could she become worthy of birthing a god? How else to prove that Jesus is God?
