Hagar

Ten years in Canaan and the promise has produced nothing. Sarai's solution is legal and ordinary for her world: a slave could bear on her mistress's behalf and the child would count as the mistress's own. What the Book of Genesis does with the scene is not ordinary. Sarai said, and Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai, which is the sentence pattern of Genesis 3:17, where the man hearkened unto the voice of his wife and took the fruit. The reader is being told how to read this. Hagar is Egyptian, and Abram came out of Egypt with servants in 12:16, so she may be part of what he gained from the last time he tried to secure himself without waiting. She is given, she conceives, and the household tilts: her mistress was despised in her eyes.

The angel of the LORD appears here for the first time in the Bible, and he appears to a runaway foreign slave. He found her by a fountain of water in the wilderness, on the road to Shur, which is the road back to Egypt. She is going home. He calls her Hagar, Sarai's maid, naming both who she is and what she is, and asks the two questions that let her say her own situation out loud: whence camest thou, and whither wilt thou go. She answers only the first. The command that follows is hard, return and submit, and it is paired with a promise given directly to her: I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude. That is the promise made to Abram in 15:5, and Hagar is the only woman in Scripture who receives it in her own right. The son is named before birth, Ishmael, God hears, because the LORD hath heard thy affliction.

At Isaac's weaning feast Sarah sees Ishmael mocking, and the word is the same root as Isaac's own name, laughter. Whatever the boy was doing, Sarah reads it as a claim on the inheritance and demands the removal of both mother and son: cast out this bondwoman and her son. The thing was very grievous in Abraham's sight because of his son. He is not indifferent, and the text says so plainly. God's answer does not excuse Sarah; it tells Abraham to do what she says while attaching a promise to the boy: also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation, because he is thy seed. Then the sending, described in small physical detail, bread, a bottle of water, put on her shoulder, and the child. A household worth flocks and herds sends a woman into the desert with what she can carry.

Two verses close her account, and they are quiet ones. God was with the lad; and he grew, and dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer. The formula God was with him is used later of Isaac, of Joseph and of David, and it is not withheld from the son who was sent away. Hagar's last recorded act is a mother's ordinary one: his mother took him a wife out of the land of Egypt. She goes back to her own people for a daughter-in-law, which is what Abraham will do for Isaac three chapters later. The Egyptian slave who was given to a Hebrew husband chooses an Egyptian wife for her son, and the line that follows her runs outside the covenant but under a promise of its own.