Hagar and the God Who Sees

A young mother sits under the hot sky, a bowshot away from her son. The water skin is empty. She cannot bear to watch what happens next. So she turns her face away, and she weeps. And somebody hears.

God had promised Abram that his family would become a great nation. But ten years have passed in Canaan, and Abram and Sarai still have no child. Sarai has a servant, an Egyptian woman named Hagar. And Sarai has a plan. “The Lord has kept me from having children,” she tells Abram. “Take my servant as a wife. Perhaps I can have a family through her.” It was a known custom in that world. Abram agrees. Hagar is not asked. At least, the story never tells us that she was.

Hagar becomes pregnant. And something shifts in the household. Genesis says Hagar began to look down on Sarai. Sarai turns on Abram. “This wrong is your fault!” Abram steps back. “Your servant is in your hands. Do what you think is best.” So Sarai treats Hagar harshly, so harshly that Hagar runs. Pregnant and alone, she heads south into the wilderness, on the road toward Shur, the road that leads back to Egypt.

Beside a spring in the desert, the angel of the Lord finds her. And he calls her by name. “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?” “I am running away from my mistress Sarai,” she says. The angel tells her to go back. And then he gives her a promise of her own. “I will multiply your descendants so that they cannot be counted. You will have a son, and you will call him Ishmael.” Ishmael means God hears. “Because the Lord has heard your misery.” Hagar does something remarkable. She gives the Lord a name. “You are the God who sees me.” So the spring was called the well of the Living One who sees me. Hagar goes back, and she gives birth to a son. Abram is eighty-six years old, and he names the boy Ishmael.

Years pass. At last Sarah, as she is now called, has a son of her own, Isaac. When Isaac is weaned, Abraham throws a great feast. And Sarah sees Ishmael laughing. The Hebrew word can mean mocking, or simply playing, and readers have long debated which. Either way, Sarah has had enough. “Send away this slave woman and her son.” Abraham is deeply troubled. Ishmael is his son too. But God tells him, “Do as Sarah says. Your family line will come through Isaac. But I will make Ishmael into a nation as well, because he is your child.” Early the next morning Abraham gives Hagar bread and a skin of water, sets it on her shoulder, and sends her away with the boy. They wander in the wilderness of Beersheba.

Then the water runs out. Hagar lays her son in the shade of a bush and goes and sits down a little way off. “I cannot watch the boy die,” she says, and she sobs. And God hears the voice of the boy. The angel of God calls to Hagar from heaven. “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid. God has heard the boy crying, there where he is. Get up. Lift him up and hold him by the hand, for I will make him a great nation.” Then God opens her eyes, and she sees a well of water. She fills the skin, and she gives her son a drink.

And God was with the boy as he grew up. Ishmael lived in the wilderness of Paran and became a skilled archer, and his mother found him a wife from her own country, Egypt.

Sarai’s plan sounds strange to us, but it was not unusual in her world. Law collections from ancient Mesopotamia, including the famous Laws of Hammurabi, describe a wife giving her female slave to her husband so that the children born would count as the wife’s own. Those laws even foresee trouble when the slave, having borne children, claims equal standing with her mistress. Later in Genesis, Rachel and Leah do the same thing with their servants. So the tension in Abram’s tent was a tension many households knew.

Hagar’s story is told in Genesis chapter sixteen, and chapter twenty-one, verses eight to twenty-one. She was a servant, a foreigner, sent away twice. But God found her by a spring, heard her son, and opened her eyes to a well. So here is something to think about. When you feel unseen, what would it mean to know that God sees you?