Genesis 20:2
וַיֹּאמֶר אַבְרָהָם אֶל־שָׂרָה אִשְׁתּוֹ אֲחֹתִי הִוא וַיִּשְׁלַח אֲבִימֶלֶךְ מֶלֶךְ גְּרָר וַיִּקַּח אֶת־שָׂרָה׃
And Abraham said to Sarah his wife, “She is
my sister”; and Abimelech king of Gerar sent (a messenger), and he took Sarah.
The scene is the arrival of Abraham (and with
him Sarah) at the city of Gerar (see v. 1), as part of the patriarch’s travels
and sojournings in different parts of the land of Canaan. Scholars long have
puzzled how Abraham could have said to Sarah,
“she is my sister”; after all, he must have said this about his wife. Hence one finds renderings such as the following:
RSV, Robert Alter, “And Abraham said of Sarah his wife”; NJPS, NIV, Tikva
Frymer-Kensky, “Abraham said of Sarah his wife”; Everett Fox, “Avraham said of
Sara his wife”; Buber-Rosenzweig, “Abraham sprach von Sfara seinem Weibe,” and
so on. But these modern translations are not the first to solve the apparent
problem in this way, for the oldest Jewish translations do likewise. Hence, the
Septuagint renders the key word as περι peri ‘abut, concerning’, while all three Targumim
of the Torah (Onqelos, Neofiti, and Pseudo-Jonathan) use the preposition על ‘al ‘about’.
All of these scholars and translators
are/were guided by common sense (though see below) and by the fact that in
Hebrew the prepositions אֶל ‘el ‘to, for’ and עַל ‘al ‘on, over, about, concerning’ are sometimes interchanged. But
the confusion between these two words occurs most prominently (in fact, almost
exclusively) in the Israelian Hebrew corpus, as I have demonstrated elsewhere
(Rendsburg, Israelian Hebrew in the Book
of Kings, 32-36). Since there are no indications of northern Israelite
material in the Abraham narrative, however, we should look elsewhere for a solution.
Let us return to the parallel account that
appears earlier in the Abra(ha)m narrative, in Gen 12:10-20. In this story, as
Abram and Sarai enter Egypt to escape the famine in the land of Canaan, the
husband requests of his wife, אִמְרִי־נָא אֲחֹתִי אָתְּ ‘imri na’ ‘aḥoti ‘at ‘say, please you are my sister’ (v. 13). Later
in the episode, after Pharaoh has taken Sarai into his palace, an act that
results in the ensuing plague, he calls for Abram and then berates him with
that statement לָמָה אָמַרְתָּ אֲחֹתִי הִוא lama ‘amarta ‘aḥoti hi’ ‘why
did you say, “she is my sister”?’ (v. 19). From the latter we learn that Abram
used the very phrase אֲחֹתִי הִוא ‘aḥoti hi’ ‘she is my
sister’ while present in Egypt, a declaration that led to the subsequent events.
With this as background, we return to the
verse introduced above, Gen 20:2, which I prefer to interpret as follows. As
the couple are entering Gerar, Abraham says to
Sarah אֲחֹתִי הִוא ‘aḥoti hi’ ‘she is my
sister’, which he had used earlier while in Egypt. The two-word phrase constitutes
code-language, which the two understand fully, along the following lines: ‘Let’s
resort to the ruse we used last time, when I went about Egypt saying אֲחֹתִי הִוא ‘aḥoti hi’ “she is my sister”; let’s try
that again here in Gerar.’ (Never mind that the first effort to pass Sarah off
as his sister got them into a heap of trouble.) And for added effect, I imagine
Abraham sticking his elbow into Sarah’s rib at this point, or whatever the
ancient Israelite non-verbal communication equivalent might have been, to drive
home the point. Understood this way, there is no need for translational
gymnastics: the text means what it says, ‘And Abraham said to Sarah his wife, “She
is my sister.”’ (Gary A. Rendsburg, How
the Bible is Written [Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2019], 550-52,
emphasis in italics in original)
