pitched his tent. The consonantal text literally reads: “pitched her tent.” Rashi
commented that this means that Abram pitched Sarai’s tent before his own. However,
a similar puzzling syntactic construction occurs in the story of Noah in
conjunction as part of what appears to be a description of worship within a
sacred tent—a proto-temple. Both there
and here, the Zohar offers an explanation that takes the letter he of
the Hebrew feminine possessive to mean “‘the tent of that vineyard,’ namely,
the tent of Shekhinah.” Shekhinah is the Hebrew term for “the
divine feminine” that was used to describe the presence of Yahweh in Israelite
temples. The idea of Abraham putting up a sacred “tent of meeting” is
consistent with the report in the same verse that he built an altar and “called
upon the name of the Lord.” Indeed, in a variant of the same theme, some modern
commentators take the letter he in the Hebrew text of Genesis as
referring to Yahweh, hence reading the term as the “Tent of Yahweh,” the divine
sanctuary. (Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Matthew L. Bowen, and John S. Thompson, In
God’s Image and Likeness 3: The Family of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar [Salt
Lake City: Eborn Books; Orem, Utah: The Interpreter Foundation, 2025], 31)
