Hagar is what some call “the other woman” in the story of Abram and Sarai. Abram, whose name means “exalted father,” is the head of the household, the one who has all the authority. Sarai, whose name means “the princess,” is his wife. And Hagar, whose name in Hebrew sounds like “the outsider,” is Sarai’s Egyptian slave.
The wife’s life revolves around her husband, and her slave’s life around her. Both women’s lives, though, revolve around the man, the “exalted father.” This shared situation, however, does not unite them, does not make them allies. Far from it. It makes them unequal rivals vying for status in the household. “Biblical co-wives,” writes Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “even blood sisters like Rachel and Leah, are such rivals that the Hebrew word for ‘co-wife,’ … is also the word for ‘trouble.’”[1]
Remember, it was Abram whom God called, Abram who received the divine promise, “I will make of you a great nation,” Abram who tried to imagine descendants as countless as the stars.[2] Nothing in the promises given to him specified who the matriarch of the great nation to come would be, not until ch. 17. And in ch. 16, after years of waiting have gone by, Sarai takes matters into her own hands.
In accordance with documented ancient Near Eastern practice, she offers her female slave as a surrogate mother. Abram accepts. Neither one mentions obtaining the enslaved woman’s consent. If that ties your stomach in knots and raises your heart rate, good. It should. Ancient societies broadly accepted slavery as a regular part of social life. And just as an enslaved person’s muscles and skills can be utilized for the good of the master, so can an enslaved woman’s womb. In Sarai’s plan, Hagar’s womb is simply a legal extension of her own. “Go in to my slave,” she tells Abram; “it may be that I shall obtain children by her.”[3]
Abram agrees. He sleeps with her and she gets pregnant. Throughout, neither Sarai nor Abram call Hagar by her name. In their plan, she doesn’t appear as a person; she’s merely a “womb with legs.”[4] But now Hagar is pregnant, and she knows it, and she makes sure Sarai knows. “She looked with contempt on her mistress,” it says. “What sort of girl do we imagine Hagar to have been?” Lore Segal wonders.
Beautiful? Young? Was it a native meanness in her that made her kick the other woman where she knew her to be sore? Was it the primitive triumph of pregnancy? I think the Egyptian slave must have grabbed at the opportunity for once to take it out on the mistress who ordered her into the master’s bed. Why would she not have hated her Hebrew overlords the way the Hebrews would come to hate the Egyptians?[5]
Sarai confronts Abram about Hagar’s contempt, and he tells her, “Your slave is in your power; do to her as you please.” The narrator tells us that Sarai dealt harshly with her, without further details, but there are echoes from Exodus and Deuteronomy where Israel remembers how “the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us.”[6] And like Israel, Hagar runs away. An angel of the Lord finds her by a spring and speaks to her. “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?”
“I am running away from my mistress Sarai.”
“Return to your mistress, and submit to her.”
Some of us already swallowed hard when the angel called her, “Hagar, slave of Sarai” as though that was her identity. And now she is to return? Return to her mistress? Return to oppression and abuse? If that ties your stomach in knots and raises your heart rate, good. It should.
“You shall not return to their owners slaves who have escaped to you from their owners,” is what biblical law demands. “They shall reside with you, in your midst, in any place they choose in any one of your towns, wherever they please; you shall not oppress them.”[7] And the angel of the Lord tells her to return, in accord with ancient Near Eastern laws and the laws of this country before the Civil War, laws in which property rights trump the liberty and dignity of creatures made in the image of God. And Hagar? She goes back. Tikva Frymer-Kensky writes,
She neither argues nor avoids the request. But before she gives up her autonomy, she exercises it by naming God according to her own experience. God called Hagar by name, the only character in the story to do so, and Hagar responds, naming God El Roi, “God of my seeing,” which can mean both “the God I have seen” and “the God who sees me.” … [Hagar] leaves her mark upon how people remember God.[8]
I want to believe, I have to believe that Hagar went back, not because she gave up, or because she was so used to doing what she was told, but because in the solitude of the wilderness, she saw something like promise, something like hope. In a way, I want to believe that in that wilderness moment, Hagar doesn’t go back, but forward into the promise. She gives birth to Abram’s firstborn son, Ishmael.
The story continues with today’s reading, after God told Abraham that he would have a son from Sarah. The story continues after 90-year-old Sarah laughed incredulously at a birth announcement she overheard from the entrance of the tent and soon laughed with unbridled joy at the birth of Isaac. The story continues with a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned, but the happy scene quickly deteriorates from celebration to envy and eviction.
“Cast out this slave woman with her son,” Sarah says to Abraham with cold clarity, “for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” She does not speak their names, in her thoughts there’s room for only one name, Isaac. Renita Weems writes,
For a black woman, the story of Hagar is a haunting one. Even if it is not our individual story, it is a story we have read in our mothers’ eyes those afternoons when we greeted them at the front door after a day of hard work as a domestic. And if not our mothers’ story, then it is certainly our grandmothers’ story. For black women, Hagar’s story is peculiarly familiar. It is as if we know it by heart…
She continues,
At some time in our lives, whether we are black or white, we are all Hagar’s daughters. When our backs are up against a wall, when we feel abandoned, abused, betrayed and banished; when we find ourselves in need of another woman’s help… we, like Hagar, are in need of a woman who will ‘sister’ us, not exploit us.[9]
In the first act of Hagar’s story, she runs away from oppression. In the second act, she is cast out by her wealthy husband and left to try and keep his child alive by herself. It’s a devastating story, and a powerful one that shines its light on the devastations we commit against each other’s dignity as God’s beloved. Phyllis Trible wrote many years ago, in her classic, Texts of Terror,
Kept in her place, the slave woman is the innocent victim of use, abuse and rejection. As a symbol of the oppressed, Hagar becomes many things to many people. Most especially, all sorts of rejected women find their stories in her. She is the faithful maid exploited, the black woman used by the male and abused by the female of the ruling class, the surrogate mother, the resident alien without legal recourse, the other woman, the runaway youth, the religious fleeing from affliction, the pregnant young woman alone, the expelled wife, the divorced mother with child, the shopping bag lady carrying bread and water, the homeless woman, the indigent relying upon handouts from the power structures, the welfare mother, and the self-effacing female whose own identity shrinks in service to others.[10]
I love how Renita Weems uses ‘sister’ as a verb that hints not only at caring action and loving commitment, but also at shared resistance against whatever prevents human beings from seeing each other as siblings in the struggle.
In just a few minutes, we will hear from some of the youth who just returned from an immersion trip to Tucson. They went to the border to learn. What forces drive persons and families to flee their homes? What, or who, casts them out like refuse? What small steps can we take toward breaking those patterns of oppression? And where is God in all of this? Their desire to learn, their desire to create and live in beloved community, gives me hope.
One last observation. When the water in the skin was gone, Hagar sat and wept, and waited for her child to die. In that gut-wrenching moment, God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. The life-giving water was already there, and now she saw it. The God Hagar named El Roi, “God of my seeing,” is the God who opens eyes. In the wilderness, in the parched places of our days and of our world, may God open our eyes.
[1] Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Hagar, My Other, My Self,” Reading the Women of the Bible (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 225-226.
[2] Genesis 12:2; 15:5
[3] Genesis 16:2
[4] Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Sarah and Hagar,” in: Talking about Genesis: a resource guide, Public Affairs Television (New York: Main Street Books, 1996), 95.
[5] Lore Segal, “The Story of Sarah and Hagar,” in: Genesis: As it is written, ed. by David Rosenberg (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 134.
[6] Deuteronomy 26:6
[7] Deuteronomy 23:15-16 NRSV
[8] Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Hagar, My Other, My Self,” Reading the Women of the Bible (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 231.
[9] Talking about Genesis: a resource guide, Public Affairs Television (New York: Main Street Books, 1996), 98.
[10] Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 28.