Genesis 16:1-6
Given, then blamed
She is handed over as a solution to a problem that was never hers, and when she conceives the household turns on her. She leaves rather than stay.
People of the Bible
Hagar
An Egyptian slave who ran into the desert, and the first person in the Bible to give God a name.
Hagar has no say in anything that happens to her. She is given to Abram by Sarai, conceives, is treated harshly when the arrangement succeeds, and runs. A messenger finds her at a spring on the road back to Egypt, calls her by her name and her position, tells her to return, and gives her a promise about her son that is the only such promise given to a woman in Genesis. Years later she is sent out again, this time for good, with bread and one skin of water, and she puts the boy under a bush so she will not have to watch him die.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Hagar
- 01
- 02
Genesis 16:7-14
The God who sees me
Found by a spring in the wilderness and asked where she has come from and where she is going. She names the God who spoke to her, and the well is named after the naming.
- 03
Genesis 21:8-14
Sent out at daybreak
After Isaac is weaned she is put out with her son, bread and a skin of water on her shoulder. The text records the provisions exactly, and they are not enough.
- 04
Genesis 21:15-21
The boy’s voice in the desert
The water runs out, she sets him under a bush and sits at a distance weeping. God hears the boy, not the mother, and shows her a well that was there all along.
Why it matters
Hagar is the outsider the story keeps refusing to lose. She is a foreigner, a slave and a woman, with no claim on the covenant at all, and she is the one who gets a personal encounter, a promise for her child and the right to name God. Whatever the family of promise does to her, the account insists that she was seen.
3 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
