Hagar & Ishmael (Genesis 16-17 & 21)

We come now to a narrative that in some ways is the worst story in all of scripture. The reason it is so bad is because many trace the present-day conflict between Jews and Arabian peoples back to the story, the narrative of Abram, Sarai, Hagar, and Ishmael. A deadly feud that is always in danger of breaking out in full out war, like now - that many see this story as the start of it all certainly makes it a haunted story.

It all begins in Genesis 16. The story basically goes like this: Abram and Sarai grow increasingly impatient that the child God promised them isn’t arriving. Sarai especially is having difficulty waiting. Without consulting God, Sarai hatches a plan. Have Abram marry one of their enslaved. Hagar is chosen. Hagar and Abram consummate their union and indeed a child is conceived, a boy who will be named Ishmael.

But as the story goes in Genesis 16, the pregnant Hagar makes her lack of fondness for Sarai increasingly known. Sarai responds in kind and worse. A feud begins.

Since there’s an unfair power dynamic at work, Hagar being enslaved, Sarai will always win this battle. She bullies Hagar into submission, and Hagar, pregnant with Ishmael, flees to the wilderness.

While in the wilderness, God visits Hagar. God is present with her and hears her misery.

A pregnant woman in the wilderness, the survival of that woman, and a healthy birth are not at all mutually inclusive! So God convinces Hagar to return to Abram's estate. The lesser of two evils is her choice. A mom and her child’s death in the wilderness versus enslavement – these are impossible options. She chooses mere survival.

Back at Abram's estate, Hagar gives birth to Ishmael, Abram’s first son. 

Ishmael's birth gives way to a few significant events taking place. First, Abram's name is changed to Abraham. Second, a new covenant is established, the covenant of circumcision. And third, Ishmael, age 13, is the first to be circumcised. 

Ishmael included in this covenant, Abraham then asks God that Ishmael be the conduit of the promise, God's promise to Abraham of a people chosen and blessed by God. God says, no, stating that Abraham and the newly named Sarah, the first couple, will birth a son to be named Isaac. Isaac will be the conduit for a new people called Israel.

Nonetheless, God blesses Ishmael and promises another great nation, a people descended from Abraham, Hagar, and Ishamel. This lineage will be blessed but not the focus of God’s connection.

That’s not the end of the story, though. We jump ahead a few chapters and years to Genesis 21. Ishmael is around 16 and Isaac has just been weened.  Ishmael is leery of this toddler, his half-brother named Laughter. Verse 9 describes Ishmael as teasing his young brother. Sarah sees this and throws a fit. She ponders the worst. What if Ishmael, the first born, is given the inheritance as was the custom?

Upset and anxious about the future, Sarah kicks Hagar and Ishmael out of the estate. Abraham tries to stop this from happening. He loves both his sons. But God seemingly convinces Abraham it’s for the best, reminding Abraham that Hagar and his son Ishmael will be taken care, and that a great nation is their future, too.

Hagar and Ishmael return to the desert wilderness. Despite having prepared for the hardship of the desert, Hagar and Ishmael soon grow desperate when the water is gone. Hagar, a mom frantic to protect her son, begins to cry. Ishmael begins to cry as well. The story of Hagar and Ishmael ends with these words, verses 17-21:

¹⁷ And God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. ¹⁸ Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” ¹⁹ Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.

²⁰ God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow. ²¹ He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

Now, how to understand this story has been the subject of debate for thousands of years. The debate continues. To our modern ears, the story is in some ways unrelatable, even despicable. It seems pretty obvious to us that Hagar and Ishmael receive and endure a very unfair deal. While God shows compassion in parts, that God allows the discarding of a mother and her child, that seems beyond harsh.

Now, I’d like to tackle our difficult text in a couple ways. First, I’d like to say that the story is not as bad as it may seem from a surface level reading. The story at least shouldn’t be seen as the beginning of the blood feud that is the Jewish-Arab divide. Here is a good (and short) article that points this out and explains why the story is a more than redeemable one.

My second point is this. We must read the Bible with an evolutionary lens, or want to call a trajectorial lens. The biblical story evolves upward from start to finish (which for me as a Christian is the New Testament, namely the Gospels). Here in the beginning book of the Bible, our author of Genesis – let’s call him Gene - sees God within the context of his tribal worldview. From Gene’s perspective, each people have their own god(s) and religiosity. And from Gene’s perspective, situated in his time and place, it is his own people, of course, that have the right God and the right religiosity.  And so, of course, the Ishmaelites and Ishmael are not fully included within the parameters of the Gene’s own tribe.

What is redeemable about the narrative, though, is that Gene doesn’t give us a God that wholly rejects the people outside his own group. That was the norm in the religious traditions surrounding him in ancient Mesopotamia. To Gene, God doesn’t outright reject his close, inter-related neighbors. God is present to them as well. God grants them a promise and a future. Albeit not on the same level as Gene’s own people, but close to it.

While Gene’s vestiges of tribalism remain implicit to the story he tells, the story was progressive in that day and age. For God is not completely confined by the norm of tribalism. Gene presents us with a God that looks beyond just his chosen few. He presents a God that hears the cry of suffering mothers and children outside the gates.

Now, we are not quite at any kind of egalitarian universalism here. There is still a hierarchy to God’s favor. There are limits to God’s mercy here at the beginning of the larger biblical story. The gates between Abraham and Sarah’s clan and every other clan will not be torn down in full for years to come. A nation-transcending, universal approach is way ahead in the distance – in the promise born in Bethlehem, fully revealed on a cross, and fulfilled seen in an empty tomb. But even here with this difficult story we are headed on the right trajectory that leads to Christ.

Just a word about enslavement, a sordid, inescapable reality in the Hagar and Ishmael narrative. As is made painfully clear in that narrative, enslavement as a societal practice is never explicitly rejected in the Bible. I cannot help but to be honest about that. 

Certainly, the Bible pushes for a lessening of the explicit vileness when it comes to enslaving peoples. Jewish law called for leniency when it came to enslavement. But enslavement’s implicit vileness – that the wealthy own people – is not taken off the table. 

What makes this extra sad for us is that the Jewish people were once enslaved in Egypt. God freed them, giving great and lasting hope to enslaved people ever since. But God did not free the non-Israelite enslaved or outlaw it thereafter. The once enslaved Israelites will later enslave others.

As for the New Testament, neither Jesus or Paul, or any other New Testament author, call for the outlawing of enslavement. Again, there is implicit messages that point us forward to enslavement’s sinfulness. For example, Jesus in Luke 4 declares he has come to set the captives free, suggesting that he himself is the Jubilee – where the enslaved are freed – made flesh and come to life. Paul famously declares in Galatians 3, “there is neither slave nor free… for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Yet Christ, while using enslaved people in parables to teach truths, never mandates what is a clear truth to us – enslavement is evil. And Paul calls for an enslaved person who has escaped, a man named Onesimus, to be received back by Philemon. Now, Paul calls Philemon to receive Onesimus as a brother and not as one enslaved, but Paul doesn’t mandate it or decry enslavement as morally corrupt and unchristian. That it is unchristian may be implied, but the opposite might easily be implied as well, that enslavement is acceptable, namely for non-Christians.

Again, the New Testament never explicitly declares enslavement to be wrong nor rejects it as evil. For us, that enslavement is wrong and evil is a no-brainer. But that presumption was not a thing in the Old and New testaments.

What are we to do with this hard fact?

Again, we must look at the evolution happening within the text and beyond, a trajectorialist approach to reading the Bible. 

This approach asks the following questions. What is the trajectory of the text? What is the text pointing us toward?

That abolitionists in both England and in the U.S. used select biblical texts to fight for enslavement’s outlawing make it clear. The trajectory of the Bible points to enslavement not being morally sustainable. 

God’s mercy is forever expanding and widening the table of inclusion. That is what the Bible continually points to.

Love is the only law that applies in the end. And the law of Love overrules the law of control and oppression. Love frees us. It doesn’t coerce or confine.

One last question that might arise. Was enslavement always wrong? Yes! But earthly life means we see through our glasses dimly. And that semi-blindness was especially pronounced in the distant past. So, for century after century, human beings didn’t see that wrong clearly. Even Jesus, as divine as he was, could not fully escape humanity’s dimming lens.

Fortunately, as time moved onward, and the corrective lens of Christ and the Cross fully took hold, the abolitionist movement would take hold. Jesus, Paul, and the early church fathers pointed in that direction. But we have the Quakers in particular to thank for fully applying the Christian principles of love and equality. A Christian-based group, they got the ball of Abolition rolling, thanks be to God.