Hagar - Genesis 16

Abram and Sarai are old, and even though the Lord promised Abram that after 400 years his descendants would inhabit the land of Canaan, they still don’t have any children. Probably seeing that her childbearing years were behind her, Sarai gave her “handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar” to Abram and basically told him to have sex with her so that she can get pregnant and have a child, “that I may obtain children by her.” This seems weird to us, but anciently, this was a very standard practice, the IM comments, “According to the custom of the time, Sarah’s giving her handmaid, Hagar, to be a wife to Abraham was an expected and logical act.” Abram does what Sarai asks and Hagar gets pregnant, “and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes.” I always thought that Hagar was bad because of this, she should have just known how important Sarai was and calmed down, but at this point, I can’t ever in any way condemn someone’s reaction to their enslavement. And besides, Hagar was pregnant, and pregnant women are crazy, I certainly was when I was pregnant and I see it all the time at work, completely unreasonable, so let’s cut Hagar some slack. Sarai asks Abram to deal with Hagar’s attitude and Abram demurs saying, “Behold, thy maid is in thy hand; do to her as it pleaseth thee.” It says that Sarai “dealt hardly with her,” but who actually knows what happened, and who, if anyone, overreacted. But Hagar was offended enough that “she fled from her face,” and ran away. She stops at “a fountain of water in the wilderness,” and an angel finds her there and asks her where she came from and where she’s going. Hagar says that she ran away from Sarai, and the angel instructs Hagar to “return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands,” with the promise that she will have an innumerable amount of descendants. The IM notes, “The angelic message to Hagar shows that the promises to Abraham go even beyond those which have come through Isaac.” I have always heard that the Arabs are the descendants of Ishmael and the consensus is mixed about how true that really is, but it opens up an interesting concept, that of the “unchosen ones.” There’s Ishmael as the first, but then after Sarah dies, Abraham has 6 more sons with a woman named Keturah I believe, and then there is Esau who I feel gets a bad rap, and then the 11 other sons of Jacob who aren’t the special ones. These are all within 4 generations of the promises to Abraham, but it appears that they aren’t fulfilled through these lines, but what if they were. If we look to the “Lost 10 tribes of Israel” and all the other people throughout the earth, maybe that promise is still in effect in places that we don’t expect to find it. The angel also gives the baby a name “Ishmael; because the Lord hath heard thy affliction,” and describes the kind of person he will be, saying, “he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall swell in the presence of all this brethren.” Now if someone were to describe the life of my unborn son this way, that would not be a happy description for me, I would hate to know that the life that awaited my son was violence. The IM gives some clarifying explanation, saying, “he is called a ‘wild man,’ or in Hebrew, a ‘wild ass,’ which metaphor implies one who loves freedom. This metaphor could be a prophetic description of the nomadic life of the descendants of Ishmael.” So I guess there’s that. Hagar is obedient to the angel and goes back to Sarai, has her baby and names him Ishmael, and Abram was “fourscore and six years old, when Hagar bare Ishmael to Abram.”