To laugh — Abraham's face-down laugh at 17:17 mints the name Isaac (Yitschaq, 'he laughs'); Sarah's laugh (18:12) and her 'God has made laughter for me' (21:6) keep the pun running — until its sting: at 21:9 Sarah sees Ishmael metsacheq, 'laughing,' the participle of Isaac's own name-verb. Whatever he was doing, in Hebrew he was doing ISAAC — and it costs him his home (KJV 'mocking'; Douay 'playing'; Paul, 'persecuted,' Galatians 4:29). ⚠ The name-verb keeps costing people things: Isaac himself is caught metsacheq with Rebekah at 26:8, unmistakably conjugal (it is what gives their marriage away to a watching king), and the identical intensive form returns, in a false accusation, when Potiphar's wife claims the Hebrew slave came 'to sport with me' (Genesis 39:17, already on these pages). By the time Israel 'rises up to play' (le-tzachek) after building the golden calf (Exodus 32:6, already on these pages), this intensive stem has never once described innocent play in an adult — the word itself is a warning the feast rarely gets read as. → first discussed at Gen 17:17