The Outcasting - Genesis 21:14-34

21:14-21 - This whole situation is just tragic because Abraham is letting Sarah dictate the destinies of Hagar and Ishmael. Even though God promises to take care of Ishmael and make him a great nation, I still think this is a horrible move on Sarah’s part. Honestly I was a fan of Sarah but now not so much. After receiving the promise from God, Abraham gets up early in the morning “and took bread, and a bottle of water… and sent her away,” with Ishmael. I read in an article that he would have been about 16 years old at this point, which really hits home for me because my son is almost 16 and I feel like we were abandoned by his dad. I know that my hardships as a single mom are nothing compared to that of Hagar, but I really feel like I identify with her just trying to take care of her boy and shouldering that crushing responsibility alone due to no fault of her own. Obviously, wandering in the desert with a loaf of bread and a bottle of water doesn’t usually end up having good results and this is no exception. Finally, it gets to the point where Hagar and Ishmael are about to die from dehydration, so Hagar puts Ishmael “under one of the shrubs,” which I think means that she put him in the shade. She walks away from him “as it were a bowshot,” which I read is traditionally considered to be half a mile, because she doesn’t want to watch her child die. This might seem like a terrible attitude to have toward your child, but I don’t think we are in any place to judge the actions of a woman in the throws of death herself based on a few words written thousands of years ago. She sat “over against him” and just cried, and who could blame her, but with all her crying and praying, it was the quiet prayer of Ishmael under the bushes that prompted “the angel of God” to call to Hagar, where she’s now promised that God “will make him a great nation.” I don’t like the implication here that Hagar is crying about the painful death she and her child are facing, but it’s the boy’s prayer that is heard, and I don’t like the angel’s question “what aileth thee, Hagar?” Like how flippant is that, they are literally dying and the angel just kind of shows up and is like filing his nails and smacking on gum like “what’s the matter sweetheart?” It must have made sense to the people reading it anciently but I don’t like it. Anyway, “God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water,” and they went and drank from the well, “and God was with the lad; and he grew, and dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer,” and they lived in the wilderness “and his mother took him a wife out of the land of Egypt,” which makes sense because that’s where she was from. 21:22-34 - Going back to Abraham, Abimelech and his “chief captain” came to Abraham and recognized “God is with thee in all that thou doest,” and they made a covenant to each other to deal fairly with each other for the next several generations, and there was something about a well that Abraham’s people had dug but the servants of Abimelech violently took it away, so they squash that and Abraham gave Abimelech a bunch of sheep to signify that Abraham had dug the well and that he owns it. I don’t know why this incident is worthy of half a chapter, but somewhere I read that it was important because it established Abraham as the owner of the well in Beer-sheba, which probably plays into territory disputes later.