an men's, faulty anatomical equipment, making infertility an inescapable female problem.Propagation is a central these in Genesis. In the Noah story, which is God's attempt to reconstruct the world after the first few generations of humankind have proven incorrigible, God commands Noah "to be fruitful and multiply" (9:1) immediately after Noah emerges from the ark. Clearly, the production of offspring is integral to the divine conception of this world, just as it was in Genesis 1. And later in Genesis, when God sets out to build his chosen people, part of his blessing to Abraham is to make his offspring as abundant as "the dust of the earth" (13:16). In fact, the blessing of fruitfulness was "given to Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" (Calloway 15). Women are the obvious vessels necessary for the realization of the blessing. Thus, any women who does not conceive is in direct opposition to both God's desire to populate the world in general through Noah and his descendants, and his aspiration to see his select nation proliferate. And culpability is not an issue. The narrative voice in Genesis is objective. The biblical tone ascribes neither guilt nor vindication, despite the desperate pleas of many of these women for children. Fertility is the divine right of the male establishment, and barren women are the material obstacles to the acquisition of this divine inheritance. The text does not dwell explicitly on the significance of barrenness. Instead, barrenness is presented as a straightforward problem, much like a technical glitch that requires either a major or a minor repair.In the case of God's specific goals for a select nation headed by the patriarch Abraham, Sara's infertility most severely jeopardizes God's plan. Not only does she impede the perpetuation of the Abrahamic line, her infertility also prevents the possibility of any progeny inheriting her husband's legacy and breeds dissension in the House of Abraham. "In ...
