(א) בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם אֲשֶׁר קִדְּ֒שָֽׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָּנוּ לַעֲסֹק בְּדִבְרֵי תוֹרָה:
(1) Blessed are You, Adonoy our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to be engrossed in the words of Torah.
(1) Abraham was now old, advanced in years, and Hashem had blessed Abraham in all things.
The Gemara asks: Which statement of Rabbi Yehuda is this referring to? If we say it is referring to the statement of Rabbi Yehuda with regard to the term “with everything [bakkol],” that is difficult. The Gemara cites Rabbi Yehuda’s statement. As it is taught in a baraita: “And Abraham was old, well stricken in age; and the Lord had blessed Abraham with everything [bakkol]” (Genesis 24:1). Rabbi Meir says: The blessing was that he did not have a daughter. Rabbi Yehuda says: The blessing was that he had a daughter, and her name was Bakkol. One could tentatively understand, according to R. Yehudah: "that a daughter also was not kept from him by the Merciful One," that a daughter is better than a son.
. . .with all of these threads of inquiry and commentary, what might we conclude about Bakol? Our understanding allows us to draw a rough sketch of the much younger sister to two great nations, the daughter of Avraham and Sarah, dying young but sometime aer the death of both of her parents. Bakol might have witnessed the price her family unit paid for being the originators of a monotheistic covenant: a half-brother she barely knew, cast out into the wilderness with his mother; the silence between her brother Yitzhak and her father Avraham aer they returned from their fateful journey on Mount Moriah; her mother’s subsequent death, and the search for a wife for her brother. Perhaps the little kaf of ve-livkotah does hint at Avraham’s double-pronged mourning: for his late wife, and for the small daughter she le behind to be raised in a family of fractious holy men
זקן ושבע ימים, “old and content.” Seeing that the Torah had told us previously that Avraham had been blessed by G’d in all that mattered, and that he had been the recipient of material wealth and honour of every conceivable kind, the Torah tells us that because of this he died without any regrets, did not feel that there were things he had not been able to achieve. This was in pronounced contrast to the fate of the average person of whom we are told in Kohelet Rabbah 1,34 that “when a person dies, half his aspirations in life for acquisitions went unfulfilled.” If he had once made the acquisition of say 1 million his objective, he had raised this objective as soon as he had realised it, so that when he died he had felt cheated by life. The author of Kohelet called this syndrome אהב כסף לא ישבע כסף, “he who loves silver will never get enough of it (Kohelet 5,9).”
Ravina asked: But isn’t there Ishmael, about whom gevia and asifa are written, as it is stated: “And these are the years of the life of Yishmael…and he expired and died [vayyigva vayyamot]; and was gathered to his people” (Genesis 25:17)? Meanwhile Rava, who had heard the discussion in his dozed state, fully awoke and said to them: Children [dardekei], this is what Rabbi Yoḥanan says: Ishmael repented in the lifetime of his father, as it is stated: “And Isaac and Ishmael, his sons, buried him” (Genesis 25:9).
Bakol does not appear in this episode, neither in peshat or traditional commentary, but we may find in this moment of family reconciliation a hint of the forgotten sister. Perhaps the daughter who had so blessed Avraham had continued to live with him, aer his sons grew up and moved away, and the Patriarch married Keturah and started a third family.
Just as Sarah and Rivkah endured literarily “rhyming” trials of concealed identity and sister-wifehood in the court of King Avimelekh in Bereishit 20 and 26, Bakol could have lived a life in parallel to with her cousins, the daughters of Lot. These two women sleep with their father—Avraham’s nephew and former heir—after their mother is killed in their exodus from Sodom. Fearing that they will be alone and unpartnered, Lot’s daughters push their father to drink himself into a stupor, and copulate with their father, becoming pregnant (Bereishit 19:31-38).
Instead of an episode of existential anxiety culminating in incest, perhaps we could we could imagine Bakol’s rhyming story as an intertextual, midrashic complement to her cousins’ fateful decisions. Rather of becoming another cast-out, violating, or nearly-sacrificed child like her cousins and brothers, one could imagine Bakol living alongside her father aer her mother’s death and her brothers’ departures in a quiet healing. Perhaps it was with this last child of covenant that Avraham was able to form a parent-child relationship rooted not in violence and divine injunction, but in healthy relationship. Perhaps we could imagine Bakol as the silent, healing matriarch, who stands among her turbulent family members as an example of familial love, free of rivalry or exploitation, behind the scenes, imbuing monotheism’s first family with the only blessing that seems to escape them: healthy relationship.