Water from the Well Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah Hardcover - 2006

From the publisher

Water from the Well is a journey four thousand years back to the time of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah. These biblical matriarchs and their fascinating stories come alive in the hands of renowned author Anne Roiphe, whose graceful prose captures the biblical landscape and makes it take flight.

As each story unfolds, we find that the matriarchs had to overcome the same devastating obstacles women face today, such as infertility, lust, abandonment, and uncertainty. Roiphe demonstrates how the lives of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah helped to lay the foundation of womanhood in the Western world. Though these women lived many years ago, their lives bear a striking resemblance to our own. They suffered the same pressures and pitfalls, enjoyed the same pleasures and activities, and shared the same responsibilities as today's wives, mothers, and daughters. What is more, they managed to cope with betrayal, death, sacrifice, and jealousy while dealing with the emerging reality of a new faith period.

Little of the drama in the Bible is seen from a woman's perspective. Would Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah share the same point of view as contemporary women? With life having changed so drastically from the days of the Bible, what can we really know about the women who appear in one of our most sacred text? In Water from the Well these questions and many others are addressed in a most enriching fashion, allowing us to discover that women played larger roles in biblical history than many care to acknowledge.

Roiphe opens a window onto the distant past and presents it, through the tales of four remarkable women, to the modern reader with relevant observations and allegories. Combining the deep insight of Bruce Feiler with the narrative skill of Antonia Fraser, Roiphe delivers a fascinating work that deftly brings these four biblical matriarchs into our own age.