I had an idea for a shiur series – alliteratively entitled Qontroversial Questions on the Parashah – that over the next few weeks, I hope to experiment with as a written, email-only shiur.
I.
A few weeks ago, a member of my community was sharing some of his greatest frustrations with the Jewish education he had received at a very (very) traditional yeshiva. Among his major gripes was his teacher’s insistence, per Rashi, that Yitzḥak married Rivkah when she was three years old.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the Torah explicitly tells us that Yitzḥak was forty at his wedding (Gen. 25:20)!
I apologize to anyone who had decided to eat lunch while reading this, but there were no typos in what I wrote above: Rashi unequivocally writes that forty-year-old Yitzḥak married Rivkah when she was three.
Yep. Three.
Instantly, the “ick” factor comes to the fore. And though I’m often inclined to invoke the argument that we cannot judge previous generations by the standard of our own moral compass, there is still a line (admittedly, undefined) that I cannot cross – and the idea of any Biblical figure, let alone one of our patriarchs, marrying a three-year-old seems a little too much.[1]
That being said, I have known for a long time that the idea that Rivkah is three when she marries Yitzḥak is very much a midrashic understanding – that is, it’s an interpretation of the Biblical story – and not accepted by many other Torah commentators. In other words, it’s not something we must believe. And while it’s still a problem that many teachers and rabbis nonetheless insist that it’s the default way to read the story, the possibility of other interpretations is helpful.
But what I had never paid much attention to until the past couple of weeks was why Rashi insists Rivkah is three when she marries forty-year-old Yitzḥak. And what I’d like to suggest is that while Rashi very clearly does state that Rivkah is three and Yitzḥak is forty, it’s not actually the main thrust of his comment.
I’d argue that we should label Rashi’s claim about Rivkah’s age at her marriage as “interpretative collateral damage.” Because what seems clear is that Rashi, at the end of the day, doesn’t care too much about Rikvah’s age per se. He’s far more interested in interpreting other things concerning Yitzḥak’s life, but he ends up being forced to follow these interpretations to their logical conclusion – leaving him with a really, really young Rivkah at her marriage.
All of which is not to say that Rashi had some objection to Rivkah being three – he clearly doesn’t – but it is to say that Rivkah’s age was his last concern. But to appreciate all of this, we need to first track Rashi’s entire logic and see how he arrives at such a shockingly young age for Rivkah.
II.
To see how Rashi reached his conclusion, we need to first establish the facts of the story before grappling with the interpretations Rashi offered. Here, there are four crucial pieces of information we know from what the Torah tells us:
Sarah is 90 when she gives birth to Yitzḥak (Gen. 17:17 and 21:5).
Sarah dies when she is 127 (Gen. 23:1).
Yitzḥak is thus 37 when Sarah dies.
Yitzḥak is 40 when he marries Rivkah (Gen. 25:20).
But something that’s important to note is that what Rashi is interested in exploring is not Rivkah’s age at her wedding – even though it’s clearly missing from the Torah itself. Instead, Rashi is bothered by something very different.
Because the Torah contains an intriguing flow from the very end of Parashat Vayera to the beginning of Parashat Ḥayyei Sarah. It starts with the Akeidah (Gen. 22:1–19), then gives us five verses in which Avraham learns of the family born to his brother, Naḥor – including the birth of Naḥor’s granddaughter, Rivkah (Gen. 22:20–24). After this, the Torah turns to the death of Sarah (Gen. 23:1).
Now, nothing is stopping a reader from reading the juxtaposition of these three events as anything other than three different vignettes from Avraham’s life. But Rashi doesn’t. He sees their juxtaposition as significant – the Torah’s decision to record all three in a row teaches us that they all happened one after the other.
And what this means for Rashi is that, first and foremost, the Torah doesn’t record the Akeidah and then decide to start wrapping up Avraham’s story by describing the events around Sarah’s death – it tells us Sarah died after the Akeidah in order to connect the two: Sarah died because of the Akeidah:
וְנִסְמְכָה מִיתַת שָׂרָה לַעֲקֵדַת יִצְחָק לְפִי שֶׁעַל יְדֵי בְּשׂוֹרַת הָעֲקֵדָה, שֶׁנִּזְדַּמֵּן בְּנָהּ לִשְׁחִיטָה וְכִמְעַט שֶׁלֹּא נִשְׁחַט, פָּרְחָה נִשְׁמָתָהּ מִמֶּנָּה וּמֵתָה:
The narrative of the death of Sarah follows immediately on that of the Binding of Isaac, because through the announcement of the Binding – that her son had been made ready for sacrifice and had almost been sacrificed – her soul flew from her, and she died. (Rashi, Gen. 23:2)
For Rashi, this also creates a crucial corollary: if Sarah dies at the same time that the Akeidah takes place, it means Yitzḥak’s age at the Akeidah is the same as his age when Sarah dies – he’s 37.
This adds another interpretative layer to the entire story. While the verses themselves seem to imply that Yitzḥak is a young child at the time of the Akeidah, Rashi makes him a grown adult – an understanding that radically reframes the entire way we imagine the story.
But Rashi is not done with his interpretations. Because he reads the passage in between the Akeidah and Sarah’s death – which describes the birth of Rivkah – as also significant to the passage of time within the story. As he puts it, the Akiedah left Avraham reflecting on his family’s future – how, had he gone through with the Akeidah, he would have had no descendants. This, per Rashi, led Avraham to panic about needing to marry off Yitzḥak quickly to one of the daughters of the Canaanite people. For this reason, God had Avraham informed that Rivkah had just been born to his nephew, Betuel – and she was the only one fit to marry Yitzḥak and carry on the family.
And what this means is that Rivkah is born around the same time as the Akeidah takes place. And given that Rashi established that Yitzḥak is 37 at the Akeidah, the math is undeniable: Rivkah is born when Yitzḥak is 37; Yitzḥak is 40 when he marries Rivkah – Rivkah is thus three at her marriage.
And while I’ll explore shortly why we really don’t need to reach this conclusion, I think it’s important to step back and recognize why Rashi is claiming what he’s claiming – because what I think is undeniable is that he really doesn’t care how old Rivkah is, he cares far more about everything else.
III.
Rashi is motivated by the belief that there is narrative significance to how the Torah presents its stories: that the Akeidah, the news of Rivkah’s birth, and the death of Sarah are all linked.
Because of this, he wants to claim that Sarah dies as a result of the Akeidah. Now, this is an idea that completely transforms our understanding of the Akeidah – and while I don’t want to explore it in any detail, it adds a powerful layer to how we process God’s demand and Avraham’s obedience.[2]
The obvious consequence of this interpretation is Yitzḥak’s age at the Akeidah – now he’s an adult. And this, too, is a powerful idea I won’t explore. Rather than an innocent child being led on by his father he’s a willing participant.
And finally, Rashi sees the narrative as introducing what will be a theme of Ḥayyei Sarah: Avraham’s descendants must not marry into the Canaanites dwelling in the land.
But, because Rashi is so determined to raise these interpretative ideas, he’s forced into a bizarre age for Rivkah – and that’s what I mean by “interpretative collateral damage.” Rivkah’s age is not really important: Rashi cares about the cause of Sarah’s death, the age of Yitzḥak at the Akiedah, and introducing the need for Avraham’s family to marry their own.
Yes, the idea of her being three is icky – and should serve as the ultimate defeat of his hypothesis. If Rivkah ends up being three as a result of Sarah dying at the Akeidah, then maybe the whole idea should be adjusted.
But I also imagine a situation in which I give a shiur on Sarah dying as a result of the Akeidah – exploring the powerful ideas that evokes – and, at the end, someone raises their hand and points out that, if that is the case, Rivkah must be three at her marriage. My response would be to invoke poetic license and that I was never claiming it was peshat, I was just using the idea as a launch point to address a major theological idea.
Now Rashi clearly isn’t thinking that way. He has no qualms with Rivkah being three. But I also think he also really doesn’t care. If forced to drop the idea that Sarah died because of the Akeidah and that Yitzḥak was an adult for it or accept the idea that Rivkah was three, he’d much rather do the latter (insert some harmful stereotype about the Medieval French here).
The mistake we make – the mistake made by the teachers of my member with a very (very) traditional education – is in elevating the idea that Rivkah was three. Indeed, in my anecdotal experience, teachers and rabbis tend to shy away from exploring the idea that Sarah died as a result of the Akeidah, tend to be okay with the idea that Yitzḥak is an adult at the Akeidah, but teach the idea that Rivkah was a child bride as fact.
And this results in problematically elevating the interpretative collateral damage over the actual interpretation itself.
IV.
It’s worth taking a moment to note that many commentators (such as the Da‘at Zekenim commentary of the Ba‘alei ha-Tosafot) suggest that Rivkah was much older when she married Yitzḥak. And while they still make her definitionally young (she’s 14 from their perspective) that puts her at a normal marriageable age for most of human history – given that so many people died young and many women died in childbirth, marriage usually took place as soon as a person could biologically start having children. Yes, it still makes Yitzḥak really old comparatively – but I’m guessing that that was only slightly weird even in medieval times.
And I also think it’s important to suggest an alternative path in interpreting the flow from the end of Vayera to the beginning of Ḥayyei Sarah – one that doesn’t leave Rivkah three at her marriage.
First, there’s no reason to assume that the events described all flow from one another. The entire story of Avraham, after all, reads as a series of vignettes from his life (my favorite example of this is the fact that there’s a thirteen-year gap between the birth of Yishamel, “Avram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Avram” (Gen. 16:16) and God reappearing to Avraham, “When Avram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him …” (Gen. 17:1)).
And this allows us to separate out each of the stories as their own event, temporally independent from the others. First, we are told of the Akeidah – the capstone to the entire Avraham narrative, which takes place when Yitzḥak is a young child.
Next, we have the end of that chapter, which mentions that Avraham learns of the family of his brother, Naḥor. Here, a familiarity with Rashi’s commentary as a whole helps suggest that this is distinct from the Akeidah. Because even though Rashi’s commentary to this passage suggests it happens as a result of the Akeidah, a comment elsewhere suggests otherwise.
Because the verse introducing Naḥor’s family begins vayhi aḥarei hadvarim ha-eleh, “some time later after these things” (Gen. 22:20). In an earlier comment, Rashi distinguishes between two different words the Torah can use to describe an event following another. If the Torah uses the term aḥar, it means the event happens straight after the preceding one. But if the Torah uses the term aḥarei, it means the event happens much later (Rashi, Gen. 15:1).
Why Rashi didn’t follow his own rule here has everything to do with his desire to connect the stories – but it allows us to read Avraham learning of Naḥor’s family as disconnected from anything to do with the Akeidah. The reason the Torah might mention it all here is to foreshadow what’s to come. Yitzḥak will need a wife from Avraham’s family and so we get a brief mention of them already.
It’s also worth stressing that the notice Avraham receives need not be a literal birth notice for Rivkah – it could just be some general information about the various family members being born.
And all of this means that Sarah dies many years later. Again, we get a vignette from Avraham’s life, decades after the Akeidah, which tell us how he buried Sarah and began a search for Yitzḥak’s wife.
*
So, was Rivkah three at her marriage? No – there’s no reason to think that. And the only reason that idea became a thing was due to Rashi’s own willingness to interpret other features of the story in a specific way.
Ultimately, for all the things the Torah demands we believe, there are still things we can draw a line before. And so there is no reason for us to believe that our forty-year-old forefather Yitzḥak married a three-year-old child.
[1] I’m aware that Ḥazal, too, entertain the idea of child marriage – but there I think you can more easily argue that either (a) they’re reflecting a reality in their world or (b) are obsessed with every possible legal scenario no matter how likely it is. Either way, unlike Rashi’s comments here, Ḥazal are never claiming that revered figures of Jewish married children.
[2] As Ruthy pointed out, it completely destroys the end of the Akeidah, which is supposed to be God declaring that Avraham’s family shouldn’t suffer as a result of following God’s word. But if you think that Sarah died because of the Akeidah, it means that there was still a sacrifice that needed to be made – but it wasn’t a ram in lieu of Yitzḥak, it was Sarah.