Say You Are My Sister

The famine in Canaan was severe, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while. Sarai went with him, leaving the land they had only recently entered. They had traveled toward Canaan with their household and possessions; now the need to survive carried that same household across another border.

As they approached Egypt, Abram spoke to his wife about her beauty. “Look, I know that you are a beautiful woman,” he said. He expected the Egyptians to notice her, and he expected them to recognize that she was his wife. In the danger he described, they would kill him and let her live.

Then he asked her to give them a different account of their relationship. “Please say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake, and on account of you my life will be spared.” His request placed his safety in what she would say about herself. He named the benefit he hoped to receive.

No answer from Sarai is recorded. The account moves from Abram’s request to their arrival, where the Egyptians saw that she was very beautiful. Her appearance drew exactly the attention he had expected. What followed was told through the actions of the men who saw her and spoke about her.

Pharaoh’s officials saw Sarai and commended her to Pharaoh. She was taken into his palace, away from the household in which she had arrived. The account gives no conversation at the palace door and no words from her within it. Abram had asked to be treated well on her account, and Pharaoh did treat him well.

Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, menservants and maidservants, and camels. The list was long and particular, item after item added to what he possessed. Sarai’s removal into the palace stood beside her husband’s growing wealth. The arrangement he had requested was bringing him the advantage he had named.

Then the LORD afflicted Pharaoh and his household with severe plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife. The account calls her his wife even while she is in another man’s palace. It does not describe the plagues or tell how Pharaoh learned what Abram had concealed. It goes directly to Pharaoh summoning him.

“What have you done to me? Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife?” Pharaoh asked. His questions brought the marriage into the open. The relationship Abram had asked Sarai to conceal was now the thing Pharaoh demanded an explanation for, and the man who had benefited from its concealment stood before him.

Pharaoh continued: “Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her as my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!” He named what Abram had said and what he himself had done because of it. No reply from Abram follows the rebuke.

Pharaoh gave his men orders concerning Abram, and they sent him away with Sarai and all his possessions. She left the palace and departed Egypt with her husband. The animals and servants went too; the wealth acquired on her account remained with him. The account records their departure without giving Sarai a speech to close it.

She had entered Egypt as Abram’s wife, been taken into Pharaoh’s palace, and been sent out again as Abram’s wife. Ahead lay their continuing life in Canaan and the years in which she would still bear no child. In that household, another woman would soon be named: Hagar, Sarai’s Egyptian maidservant.