Water from the Well - by Anne Roiphe (Paperback)

About the Book

A writer of women's lives for over thirty years, Roiphe turns her keen eye and graceful prose to the Bible and the stories of the Matriarchs--Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah. The author makes the biblical landscape come alive as she focuses on these remarkable role models and their experiences of love and terror, pain and pleasure, routine and uncertainty.

Book Synopsis

Water from the Well is a journey four thousand years back to the time of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah. The graceful prose of renowned author Anne Roiphe brilliantly captures these biblical women and makes their fascinating stories come alive.

As each story unfolds, we find that the matriarchs had to overcome the same devastating obstacles women face today--infertility, lust, abandonment, and uncertainty--yet they managed to cope with betrayal, death, sacrifice, and jealousy while dealing with the emerging reality of a new faith. This remarkable volume demonstrates how their lives helped to lay the foundation of womanhood in the Western world. Combining the deep insight of Bruce Feiler with the narrative skill of Antonia Fraser, Anne Roiphe delivers a fascinating work that deftly brings these four biblical matriarchs into our own age.

From the Back Cover

By retelling the stories of the Matriarchs through a sympathetic eye, Anne Roiphe will create portraits of the Bible's women that will show how they played a role in Western history, how they taught us what is important and what is not, how they inspire our moral and immoral imaginations. She will also bring the reader closer to the biblical landscape by describing in detail the actual lives these woman led: the animals they cared for; the terror of illness; the sense of helplessness and fear they must have experienced; the packing up of the tent; the terrors caused by drought and rain and flood; the ache of infertility; the joy of birth; the pleasures of love.

Review Quotes

"[A] lovely meditation on the innate power of women" -- Booklist

"Although Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel and Leah lived in biblical times, their experiences speak to women today." -- Washington Post Book World