I will be on the road a good part of the summer, giving workshops and retreats, but I would hate to lose touch with those of you who have been "Monday readers." So, I would like to introduce a summer series that I am calling Biblical Sidebars. It is not that I think these incidents are unimportant. They are not. They are little rays of light into an often much larger story, footnotes to history, and so humanly appealing.

I have collected all of them for just that latter reason. The great light I had in my early biblical studies in Rome was that, in the Bible, there are human beings, living in another time and culture, but so like me with their problems and choices. I resolved then that, if ever I got the chance to teach the Bible, it would be the humanity of its people I would want to underline.

Perhaps the first sidebar will best illustrate the direction of my thinking.

In Genesis, after the initial creation stories, we meet Abraham, the first biblical person upon whom we can fix an approximate date. He walks out of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) into the 19th century before Christ. We meet him as a wandering herdsman, very soon wealthy in animals and servants, but, because of his employment, essentially landless.

To this day, the true shepherd follows in his sandalsteps. His sheep wander for pasture across land he does not own. And when those lands are no longer fit for grazing, he looks elsewhere.

That sums up Abraham's nomadic life until his wife Sarah dies, and he is faced with a dilemma. Where can he bury her? Genesis 23 spells out his solution to the problem. He asks the Hittites, among whom he is currently residing, for the right to buy a cave in which to bury Sarah. Ephrom, the owner, offers to give it to him, but he refuses. He must pay for it.

A deal is struck, and Abraham, for 400 shekels, has a field with a cave and trees. The first bit of the land to be later known as the Promised Land passes into the hands of a Hebrew, and it is the burial place of a woman.

Today it lies beneath the vast Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. I walked there just once on my first visit to Israel. Shepherded by the Arab driver who got us past the shouting, gesticulating crowds, I stood in a light-filled room where dust motes dances in the sunbeams, and I smiled.

A woman started all this.