"She is my sister" — again. Abraham moves south into Beer-lahai-roi country ("between Kadesh and Shur," 16:14's map) and sojourns in Gerar — the verb is gur, the resident-stranger's verb, and the town's own name nearly rhymes with it: the sojourner sojourns in Sojournville. And there he runs the Egypt play again, word for word — "Say, please, that you are my sister" was 12:13; here the narrator needs only three words, achoti hi, because the reader has seen this show before. So has the tradition: chapters 12, 20, and (with Isaac, ahead) 26 are the Bible's most famous doublet — three tellings of the wife-sister ruse. Readings differ on why: source critics hear the same tale told by different hands (this version has all the marks of the strand scholars call E — God in dreams, moral argument, "prophet"); traditional readers see a man repeating a real habit of fear — and the text supports at least the habit, for verse 13 will reveal the ruse was a standing arrangement, "at every place we come to." Shown, not sanded. One thing said honestly: Sarah is about ninety here, and readers ancient and modern have asked how she endangers a royal harem — the rabbis gave her restored youth (a tradition the next chapter's conception invites), the source critics an original setting earlier in her story. The text itself is silent, and it is the silence this translation keeps.

The pagan king gets the courtroom. God comes to Abimelech "in a dream by night" — no plagues this time, as in Egypt; a hearing. "Look — you are a dead man" (KJV: "thou art but a dead man" — the "but" is the translators'; the Hebrew is blunter), "for she is a married woman" — literally be'ulat ba'al, "owned by an owner": the ancient legal idiom, printed here in its plain modern sense. And Abimelech answers with a sentence the reader has heard before: "Lord, will you kill a nation even though righteous?" — tsaddiq, the word of Abraham's own argument two chapters ago ("will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?", 18:23-25). The pagan king of Gerar, without knowing it, files Abraham's brief back at heaven — and the Judge of all the earth honors it from a Philistine's lips exactly as from a prophet's. His plea rests on "the integrity of my heart" — tom-levavi, the noun of tamim, the very wholeness God demanded of Abraham at 17:1 ("walk before me and be blameless"; KJV ASV "integrity of my heart," NIV "clear conscience") — and the chapter's sharpest irony is that in this scene the tom belongs to the pagan, and the scheming to the prophet.

"For he is a prophet." The first occurrence of navi in the Bible — and note what defines it: not prediction but intercession — "he will pray for you, and you shall live." A prophet is one who stands between; it is exactly what Abraham did for Sodom (18:23-32), and God describes him by it. God also volunteers something extraordinary: "it was I who held you back from sinning against me" — Abimelech's innocence was itself grace, restraint given before it was known to be needed. The alternative is stated in Eden's own formula: "know that you will surely die" — mot tamut, the doubled death-sentence of 2:17, served here on a king.

"What have you done to us?" Pharaoh's exact question (12:18), now asked at Gerar — and Abimelech goes further: "things that are not done, you have done to me" — the pagan king lecturing the patriarch on basic decency, and the text lets the lecture stand. Abraham's defense comes in three descending steps. First the assumption: "Surely there is no fear of God in this place" — demonstrably false; Gerar's whole court "was very afraid" at one dream, and its king argued righteousness with God at midnight. Abraham's fear slandered a town. Second, the technicality: "she truly is my sister — my father's daughter, though not my mother's daughter" — after twenty chapters, the text finally discloses Sarah's parentage, and it is a half-truth doing full-time work (later law will close even this loophole, Leviticus 18:9). Third, the habit: "at every place we come to, say of me, He is my brother" — the ruse was the standing travel policy, from the very first wandering; and he calls it chesed — "this is the kindness you must do me" — the great covenant word of 19:19, spent here on a survival scheme. The grammar of that same sentence carries a famous oddity: "when God caused me to wander" uses a plural verb with Elohim — the one word the dictionary entry calls "plural in form, singular in verb" here takes its plural verb after all (Hebrew grammar allows it in a Gentile's hearing, say some; a trace of an older idiom, say others). The versions all hide it in English, which cannot decline "God"; the note is where it survives.

The generous ending Egypt never had. Pharaoh loaded Abram with gifts before the truth and expelled him after it (12:16, 19-20); Abimelech gives the flocks and slaves after being wronged — and instead of "take her and go," says "my land is before you; settle wherever is good in your eyes." Then he turns to Sarah, and speaks the chapter's most disputed sentence. "I have given your brother" — the word chosen with an edge, her own cover-story handed back to her — "a thousand pieces of silver. Look, it is for you a covering of the eyes…" The idiom (kesut einayim) is found nowhere else, and the shelf scatters like startled birds: KJV "behold, he is to thee a covering of the eyes" (reading the covering as the husband); Geneva adds its margin that the money is "to buy thee a vaile"; ASV "it is for thee a covering of the eyes"; NIV paraphrases the sense — "to cover the offense against you"; TLB flattens it to compensation. Most likely it means the payment publicly "covers the eyes" of onlookers — no one may look at Sarah as a woman dishonored; the final word, venokhachat ("you are cleared," or "set right"), is itself rough enough that the Douay, following the Vulgate, reads a rebuke instead: "remember thou wast taken." This translation keeps the strange idiom and the clearing, and files the dispute here.

The prophet prays, and wombs open. The first thing the Bible's first-named prophet does with the title is intercede for the foreigner who wronged-and-was-wronged-by him — "and God healed Abimelech, and his wife, and his slave-women, and they bore children." Then the narrator's closing line lands the verb: Jehovah had "shut fast every womb" — atsor atsar, the doubled form of atsar — the very verb Sarai used of herself: "Jehovah has kept me from bearing" (16:2). The house that took Sarah was given, for a season, Sarah's own condition. And hold the shape of this ending: Abraham prays for other wombs, and they open — and the very next verse in the book (21:1) begins, "And Jehovah visited Sarah." The man who interceded for strangers' children receives his own. The closed break {ס} draws the line, and the twenty-five-year promise is one verse from payment.