The Laughter of Sarah

Biblical Exegesis, Feminist Theory, and the Concept of Delight

C. Conybeare

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137370914
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

The laughter of delight has gone unheard in the Western tradition. This work brings new light to the notion, and has a consistent leitmotif: the delighted laughter of the matriarch Sarah in the book of Genesis, when she gives birth to her son Isaac. This laughter is "heard" through biblical commentaries and twentieth-century theorists of laughter.

1

Sarah in the Bible: A Peculiar Laugh

Abstract: Here, we read the biblical narrative of Sarah’s laughter at the birth of Isaac, as well as the two immediately preceding instances of laughter in the book of Genesis, the anxious and doubting laughs of Sarah and her husband Abraham when they are told that they are going to have a late-born son. We then look at biblical commentaries from late antiquity – both Jewish and Christian, as well as early commentary on the Qur’an – that respond to this laughter ad litteram, according to a literal interpretation, to show the difficulty which they have in “hearing” the second, delighted, laugh of Sarah.

Conybeare, Catherine. The Laughter of Sarah: Biblical Exegesis, Feminist Theory, and the Concept of Delight. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137370914.

The laughter of Sarah, and of Abraham her husband, is the first laughter we hear in Jewish scripture; and hence, it is the first we hear in Christian scripture too.

There are three moments of laughter, each utterly individual. They are embedded in a story of suffering and displacement and almost unbearable belatedness.¹ God has promised Abraham that he will be the father and forefather of multitudes; but the couple wait and wait, and no children come.

Sarah and Abraham were originally called Sarai and Abram. They are old. Although God has promised them heirs, Sarai is ninety and Abram is a hundred and they have long despaired of having children of their own. Some fourteen years before, in fact, Sarai sent Abram to have a child with her Egyptian servant woman, Hagar, who duly conceived.

Sarai resented Hagar’s impending motherhood and sent Hagar away. An angel stopped Hagar on her way back home to Egypt and urged her to humility, and promised her countless descendents. Hagar returned and gave birth to Ishmael, whom Abram brought up as his son.

The biblical account is spare; but it leaves the reader in little doubt of the tensions between this interlaced trio. In a household that must in fact have been numerous, we meet only Abram, Sarai, and Hagar, standing out in sharp relief, and we feel the heat of their anguished encounters.² This is not fertile ground for laughter.

At this point, God makes another promise. He changes Abram’s name to Abraham and Sarai’s to Sarah, interposing the Hebrew consonant Hē, as a sign of God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendents; and he enjoins upon Abraham and all his descendents the rite of circumcision. But this is not all. In Robert Alter’s incomparable translation from the Hebrew:

And God said to Abraham, “Sarai your wife shall no longer call her name Sarai, for Sarah is her name. And I will bless her and I will also give you from her a son and I will bless him, and she shall become nations, kings of peoples shall issue from her.” And Abraham flung himself on his face and he laughed, saying to himself,

“To a hundred-year-old will a child be born,

will ninety-year-old Sarah give birth?” (Gen. 17:15–17)

Abraham’s laughter seems to be that of bafflement and disbelief, and perhaps amusement at the absurdity of the idea, even though the announcement comes from God; he deflects the blessing onto his son Ishmael: “Would that Ishmael might live in your favor!” But God insists that a new child will come – “Yet Sarah your wife is to bear you a son” – and his name is to be Isaac. Isaac means, in Hebrew, “he will laugh.”

Sarah’s first laugh is disbelieving, too. Three men – who are, or who represent, God – visit Abraham as he sits at his tent flap in Mamre.

And they said to him, “Where is Sarah your wife?” And he said, “There, in the tent.” And he said, “I will surely return to you at this very season and, look, a son shall Sarah your wife have,” and Sarah was listening at the tent flap, which was behind him. And Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years, Sarah no longer had her woman’s flow. And Sarah laughed inwardly, saying, “After being shriveled, shall I have pleasure, and my husband is old?” And the Lord said to Abraham, “Why is it that Sarah laughed, saying, ‘Shall I really give birth, old as I am?’ Is anything beyond the Lord? In due time I will return to you, at this very season, and Sarah shall have a son.” And Sarah dissembled, saying, “I did not laugh,” for she was afraid. And He said, “Yes, you did laugh.” (Gen. 18:9–15)

Sarah’s laugh betrays a rich sense of the absurd: this birth is impossible. It seems a laugh fitted to the occasion. But God’s response marks it out as disbelieving: “Is anything beyond the Lord?”

Apparently not:

And the Lord singled out Sarah as He had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as He had spoken. And Sarah conceived and bore a son to Abraham in his old age at the set time that God had spoken to him. And Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him, whom Sarah bore him, Isaac. And Abraham circumcised Isaac his son when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. And Abraham was a hundred years old when Isaac his son was born to him. And Sarah said,

“Laughter has God made me,

Whoever hears will laugh with me.”

And she said,

“Who would have uttered to Abraham –

‘Sarah is suckling sons!’

For I have borne a son in his old age.” (Gen. 21:1–7)

This is a moment of exuberant delight. Is Sarah actually laughing? Commentators ancient and modern have assumed so – helped by the fact that in Greek or Latin Sarah’s first exclamation is simply, “God has made laughter for me.” The whole narrative leading up to the birth of Isaac rings with laughter. It seems to me that here the biblical narrator stands back and allows Sarah herself to announce her dissolution into laughter. She is consumed with laughter; she has become laughter: “Laughter has God made me.” But God has also made laughter for her: both her son, Isaac, “he will laugh”; and the laughter itself, which expresses all the joy of the unexpected birth and the release from anxiety and grief and despair. The laughter is infectious, as laughter is prone to be: this delight is not solipsistic, it bursts forth, drawing in everyone who hears it with its joy.

At the same time, this laughter has a complicated undertow. Its richness is of darkness as well as delight. Sarah is aware that she is conspicuous: “Sarah is suckling sons!” Her conspicuousness may cause mockery as well as delight. The phrase “whoever hears will laugh with me” may also be translated “will laugh at me.”³ Sarah is exultant, but her laughter is not simple, not least in acknowledging that others’ laughter may erupt as well, and it may have an edge. Each laugh is peculiar, unique, complex, and bound up in every other one.

Sarah’s laugh of delight is deeply inflected by her laugh of disbelief, and her husband’s laugh of disbelief as well, and that of all the other possible people laughing; and yet it is still the laughter of delight, of joy, and it resonates back through her disbelief and forward into the other great exultant moments of birth in the Bible.⁴ Hannah rejoices like this when she dedicates her long-awaited son Samuel to God in the temple. This time the laughter finds words: her prayer of joy, exultation, defiance, and humility before God articulates and yet does not complete the consuming laughter of Sarah. Mary rejoices like this when she visits her cousin Elisabeth, once barren, now with child: the miraculous pregnancies of Sarah and Elisabeth are linked by the repeated phrase “For with God nothing shall be impossible” (Luke 1:37 and Genesis 18:14). Mary’s joy finds expression in the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55). But perhaps it is Elisabeth’s baby who most fully expresses delight, for he “leaps in her womb”: Elisabeth says, “As soon as ever the voice of thy greeting sounded in my ears, the child in my womb leaped for joy.” We can imagine him, who will become John the Baptist, exclaiming, “Laughter has God made me.”

So the first laugh of delight in Jewish and Christian scripture is the laugh of an old, old woman who has given birth to a son. She knows she is old, she knows this is absurd and impossible, and she laughs. And the son himself is named in commemoration as Isaac, “he will laugh.” It is in this moment of delight that I wish to dwell for the remainder of this book.

* * *

The first Christian commentators on scripture worked in a context notoriously hostile to laughter.⁵ It was pointed out very early on that the gospels contain no account of Jesus laughing, and this became something of a leitmotif in early Christian sources.⁶ Indeed, the insistence of early Christian writers on the subject seems to betray a deep anxiety about laughter, animated on the one hand by fear of identification with the Jews who purportedly mocked Christ on the cross,⁷ and on the other by fear of being tainted with Gnosticism. Gnosticism told the story of a last-minute substitution of Christ on the cross: Christ himself ascended instantly to heaven and sat by his father laughing at the travails of the dying mortals below him.⁸ No wonder laughter was a source of anxiety.

This anxiety is reflected in the treatment of laughter in Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus, written around 200 CE, which advises the Christian on how to comport himself in the world. Clement devotes a section of the Paedagogus specifically to laughter – sandwiching it, revealingly, between a discussion on how to behave at banquets and a treatment of aischrologia, shameful speech – and though he admits that laughter is “natural,” he is mostly concerned with constraining and delimiting it (Paed. II.5.46). That theme continues in the Rules for the regulation of monastic life compiled by Basil of Caesarea in the 360s CE.⁹ When Basil takes on the topic of laughter, it is not surprising, given a context of asceticism, that he views it with suspicion, since for Basil, bursting into laughter tends to show a lack of self-control. He too repeats the time-honored motif that “our Lord never laughed.” All the same, he warns, “Let the ambiguity (homōnymia) of laughter not mislead us.” The simple term “laughter” (in Greek, gelōs) can refer to different types of effusion – and they do not necessarily involve the loss of self-control that Basil finds obnoxious. He gives three instances from the Bible of acceptable laughter: the consolation of Bildad to Job, “[God] will fill a truthful mouth with laughter” (Job 8:21); the ultimate laughter of the beatitudes, “blessed are those who weep now, for they shall laugh” (Luke 6:21), of which we shall hear more in chapter 2;¹⁰ and – first in Basil’s order, as in the biblical chronology – the laughter of Sarah, in Greek gelōta moi epoiēsen ho Theos, “God has made laughter for me.” All these instances of laughter, these uses of gelōs, says Basil, express “instead of frivolous gaiety (hilarotēs)¹¹, spiritual exultation (hē kata psychēn agalliasis).” Agalliasis, “exultation,” is a word first used in the Septuagint, the second-century BCE translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. (My Greek dictionary glosses it, rather sweetly, as “exceeding great joy.”) It seems to capture exactly the sense of explosive, exalted delight that we hear in the laughter of Sarah.

So the word “laughter” is ambiguous, as Basil tells us. Indeed, we need a term fuller than “ambiguous,” which in its origins only suggests a spanning of two possible meanings: we need something that embraces the many possibilities inherent in the notion of laughter. Clearly, even a thinker as invested as Basil in outlawing laughter can mark the occasional excellent instance of laughter. Clearly too, the so-called fathers of the church will be deeply invested in the interpretation of Genesis, and hence will be confronted with the laughter of Sarah. What do they mak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Ridebat de facto Sara
• 1  Sarah in the Bible: A Peculiar Laugh
• 2  Sarah, Philo, and the Laugh beyond Laughter
• 3  Laughter and Power
• 4  Laughter and the Body
• 5  Laughter, Volatility, Instability
• 6  Empty Speech: Laughter and Language
• 7  A Time for Laughter
• Bibliography
• Index