#genesis 16

[followinginhissteps]

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

The Story about Hagar and Ishmael

1-3 Abram and Sarai lived in that Canaan country, and after they were there for 10 years, they still had no kids. Sarai had a woman from Egypt working for her, called Hagar. She was Sarai’s slave. That means Sarai owned Hagar, and Hagar had to do everything that Sarai told her to do.

Sarai was sad because she had no kids, but she got an idea about how to get a baby for herself. So she said to Abram, “God has stopped me from having my own kids. But listen. I want you to sleep with Hagar, like she is your wife. You see, she belongs to me, so if she has a baby, that baby will really belong to me.” So Abram did that, just like Sarai said.

4 He slept with Hagar like she was his wife. Then Hagar found out that she was going to have a baby, so she started rubbishing Sarai all the time, because Sarai didn’t have any kids. 5 So Sarai said to Abram, “I blame you for this trouble. I gave Hagar to you, and now she is going to have a baby, and she is rubbishing me all the time. I reckon God knows that I am right, and you are wrong.”

6 But Abram said to Sarai, “Hagar belongs to you. You are her boss, so do whatever you want with her.” Then Sarai started to treat Hagar in a really bad way. So Hagar left Abram and Sarai’s camp and ran away.

7 Hagar started walking through the desert, along the road that went to a town called Shur, near Egypt. She sat down next to a water-hole there in the desert. God’s angel messenger went to her there. 8 He said, “Hagar, you belong to Sarai, so why are you sitting out here in the desert? Where are you going?”

Hagar said, “I’m running away from my boss, Sarai. She is too hard on me.”

9 God’s angel messenger said to her, “Don’t do that. Go back to your boss, and do what she says.” 10 And the angel also said, “God is going to give you a really big family. You will have a son, and later on lots of people will be born into his family, and they will be a real big family, so that nobody will be able to count all those people.” 11 The angel said, “You are going to have a baby boy, and you will name him Ishmael, because that name means God listens. You see, God listened to you. He heard about your trouble, and he will help you. 12 And Ishmael, your son, he will live like a wild donkey. He will go anywhere he wants to, and he will fight against everybody, and everybody will fight against him. He will not live close to his relatives.”

13 Then Hagar said to herself, “I have seen the God that sees me, and he looks after me.” So she gave God a name, she called him the God that sees me. 14 So that’s why people call that water-hole the water-hole that belongs to the one that is alive and sees me. That water-hole is between a place called Kadesh and a place called Bered.

15 Soon after that, Hagar had a baby boy, and Abram named him Ishmael. 16 Abram was 86 years old at the time when Ishmael was born. — Genesis 16 | Plain English Version (PEV) Plain English Version Bible © 2021 Wycliffe Bible Translators Australia. Cross References: Genesis 3:9; Genesis 11:30; Genesis 12:4; Genesis 12:16; Genesis 13:16; Genesis 14:7; Genesis 17:20; Genesis 17:25; Genesis 19:31; Genesis 20:1; Genesis 21:9; Genesis 21:17; Genesis 21:19; Genesis 25:12; Genesis 25:18; Genesis 29:32; Genesis 30:3-4; Genesis 31:53; Genesis 32:30; Genesis 37:25; Exodus 5:21; Exodus 24:11; Joshua 9:25; 1 Kings 19:9; Galatians 4:22

The LORD Has Listened

[a-queer-seminarian]

A Queer Look at Hagar's Story

A short reflection on this Sunday's lectionary text, Genesis 21:8-21

Name changes occur throughout scripture, but there is only one instance in which a human being directly names God!

That person is Hagar — the woman enslaved and then cast off by God’s own chosen people, yet who recognizes God's solidarity with her in a way that resonates with many marginalized folk, including queer & trans people of faith.

Back in Genesis 16, Hagar is forced to conceive a child with Abraham — her bodily autonomy denied — and then suffers abuse at Sarah's hand so painful that she prefers almost-certain death in the wilderness. While waiting to die, God comes to her, nourishes her, encourages her with the promise of a better future. For a time, Hagar must return to her oppressors.

This is a hard message, but It may resonate with queer and trans people who make the hard choice to find what safety they can while in the closet, or who choose to remain in relationship with family or faith communities that have caused them harm.

It also isn't the end of Hagar’s story: when the time is right, God leads her out — as told in this week’s text in Genesis 21.

Sarah continues to abuse Hagar, with Abraham as a passive bystander and enabler. In a society where only one of Abraham's sons can inherit his wealth and blessing, Sarah sees Hagar's son Ishmael as a threat to her son Isaac, simply by existing! In our own day and age, this myth of scarcity persists, causing us to hoard resources and compete needlessly.

Sarah cannot stand to see Hagar's child playing with her own son — as if they were equals! As if a slave boy should be having a moment of fun! She reads something sinister into the play — not unlike how some people today read sinister things into queer play, into drag queens and gender expansive youth.

Having convinced herself that Hagar and her son are a threat, Sarah gets Abraham to cast them out.

But again, God is with the outcast; God comes again to Hagar, who in Genesis 16 had given God the name El Roi — "God sees me.” This God is the god of her oppressors, yet Hagar recognizes that this god is her God as well! This god is a God who sees the suffering of the lowest of society, and responds.

God sees queer and trans people, too. God is our God, too — those who hate us do not have a monopoly on the Divine!

And God walks with us through every struggle, fueling us to fight the good fight and promising blessings to come.

___

Questions for reflection:

When have you witnessed God coming to the Hagars in our midst?

When has your community behaved like Abraham & Sarah, hoarding God's love as if there were not blessing enough to go around?

Can you imagine a world in which Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar meet again? What would Hagar need to feel safe to meet with her former abusers? What would Sarah & Abraham need to do to make things right?

___

Further Reading

Queer-specific resources:

Article: Out in Scripture's commentary for Proper 7 of year A, "Claiming God's Promise in the Midst of Exile" — connecting Hagar to supportive parents of LGBT children

Podcast episode: "Hagar and the Caravan" — connecting Hagar's story to that of Latin American trans women se"eking asylum

Essay: "Intersex Foremother and Forefather" — ancient texts suggesting that Abraham and Sarah were intersex

Other resources:

Sermon: "No Good Patriarchs: Solidarity with Hagar" — Exploring the messiness of how one person can embody both oppressor & oppressed, and how "good" people buy into unjust systems

Article: "Jesus and Hagar: the Form of a Slave" — Wil Gafney's connection between Hagar and Mary the mother of Jesus, through a womanist lens

Affirmation of Faith: "God of Hagar, Ishmael, Sarah, Abraham — God of oppressor and oppressed"

Essay: "Hagar and Sarah: Was Reconciliation Ever a Possibility?" — Exploring various writers' visions of what a meeting between these two women could look like

Video: Teaching children the story of Hagar, with an interfaith focus

Essay: connecting Hagar and Ishamel to the Genesis 22 story of Abraham nearly sacrificing Isaac

[quotesfromscripture]

God hears and honors the slave

The angel of the LORD found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. And he said, “Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” She said, “I am running away from my mistress Sarai.” 

The angel of the LORD said to her, “Return to your mistress, and submit to her.” The angel of the LORD also said to her, “I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.” And the angel of the LORD said to her, “Now you have conceived and shall bear a son; you shall call him Ishmael, for the LORD has given heed to your affliction.” 

- Genesis 16:7-11 NRSV (1989)

[blessedarethebinarybreakers]

Hagar and the Caravan - the Abrahamic God sides with the oppressed

Episode 24 of Blessed Are the Binary Breakers is up! 

​Avery brings the story of Hagar - a figure shared by the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions - into conversation with the story of Charlotte and other trans women who were part of a caravan of asylum seekers in 2018.

​This episode continues the theme of solidarity from June's earlier bonus episode. It highlights the urgency of recognizing how intersections of gender and race impact trans persons of color. It’s a reminder for all who experience some form of marginalization that we must not allow our shared enemies to divide and conquer us -- that we must stop oppressing one another in the hopes of advancing a little bit ourselves. It explores the stories we share, the struggles we share, the goals we share.

Click here for the episode transcript as well as links to where you can listen.

[a-queer-seminarian]

A father had two sons—Isaac and Ishmael—if either is sacrificed, then both are. Today some of the children of Isaac and Ishmael can find themselves at odds or at war, as the Middle East shows us. Yet these two sons reunite at Abraham’s death, and together they bury him. Ishmael’s hand was to be against his brother’s [see Genesis 16:12], but Ishmael here proves the prediction wrong. If Ishmael and Isaac can reconcile, perhaps their children can do the same."

Jewish Scholar Amy Jill Levine in Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (2014)

[a-queer-seminarian]

Hagar and Sarah - was reconciliation ever a possibility?

Sarah inflicts horrific abuse on Hagar (see Genesis 16 and 21): enslavement, rape and forced impregnation, beatings, and finally, banishment into the desert. It seems impossible that their story could ever have ended with renewed relationship and solidarity. As Jewish Cuban-American anthropologist Ruth Behar puts it in “Sarah and Hagar: The Heel-prints upon Their Faces,”

“The story of Sarah and Hagar is a story about women wronging women. It is a story so sad, so shameful, so sorrowful, that to own up to it is to admit that feminism has its origins in terrible violence and terrible lack of compassion between women.”

And yet, people across centuries have imagined what reconciliation between these two women could have been like. I’m compiling some of those visions here.

Many of them rely upon Sarah recognizing that she and Hagar share much suffering: Sarah too is used as property by men in their patriarchal world; Sarah too may have experienced rape when Pharaoh takes her from Abram in Egypt (see Wil Gafney’s Womanist Midrash); Sarah and Hagar alike are valued for their fertility and little else. If only Sarah had realized that patriarchy is what sets her above and against her fellow woman! If only she could have seen Hagar as a sister in solidarity, rather than a slave to abuse and cast away!

“Only at the end, When I witnessed my young son screaming under his father's knife, Only then Did I realize our common suffering.”

- Lynn Gottlieb

[image description: a painting of two women with curly brown hair and brown skin embracing; the one being held has a blue shawl with “Sarah and Hagar” written in Hebrew on it, while the one embracing her has a bright blue dress. A dove with an olive branch hovers behind them.]

“Sarah and Hagar” by Jewish artist Hilary Sylvester, who says: “Sarah the mother of the Jewish People and Hagar the mother of the Arab people finally find reconciliation through Mashiach.”

___________

Hagar’s and Sarah’s conflict & the Israel / Palestine conflict

In the article “Reconciling Hagar and Sarah: Feminist Midrash and National Conflict,” Noam Zion explains,

“In Jewish and Muslim interpretation, Hagar and Sarah represent the matriarchs of Abraham’s blessed heirs, the Arabs and the Jews. In classical sources, the break between the two women is never mended, but feminist readers of the Bible, Jewish and Muslim, have used midrash-style poetry to rewrite the ending of their story. Part of this endeavor is the hope of rewriting the contemporary conflict and reconciling between their putative descendants.”

...On a covenantal level, this story has an all’s well that ends well conclusion. God’s promises to Abraham and to each of the matriarchs will be fulfilled, as Isaac and Ishmael will each become great nations. But what about the interpersonal level? Is there ever a happy ending to the familial and, thus, national conflict?”

They continue with examples of reconciliation between various members of the story:

Reconciling Ishmael and Isaac: “The Torah itself implies a reconciliation of sorts between the brothers. First, after Abraham’s death, Ishmael returns “home” to encounter his brother once more at their father’s funeral: ‘His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah’” (Genesis 25:9).

Reconciling Abraham and Hagar: “In the biblical text, Hagar...is never mentioned after the story of the expulsion, leaving his breach with Hagar unresolved. In another example of midrashic rewriting of the narrative, some rabbis identify Keturah, whom Abraham marries after Sarah’s death (Genesis 25:1), with Hagar. (In the biblical text, the two are not identical.) ...Thus Abraham renews his responsibility and his affection for Hagar as soon as Sarah, who could not stand her, is buried.”

Reconciling Hagar and Sarah: “The one character who is never reconciled with either of the offended parties, in either the biblical text or the midrash, is Sarah. ...For these reasons, some contemporary feminist readers and poets have felt an urgent need to add a new episode to the narrative to bring the two women together.

Further, these feminist poets wish to reimagine the relationship between the nations born of these matriarchs in a period of ongoing violent conflict between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East and the fragile beginnings of a new religious and ethnic dialogue between American Muslims and American Jews in North America.”

___________

Common Suffering: Sarah Repents

In the opening to her poem “Achti,” Arabic for “My Sister,” Jewish Renewal rabbi Lynn Gottlieb suggests that Hagar is not a name but a derogatory epithet, and imagines Sarah’s regret:

I am pained I did not call you By the name your mother gave you. I cast you aside, Cursed you with my barrenness and rage, Called you “stranger”/ Ha-ger, As if it were a sin to be from another place.

Noam Zion says of the poem, “For Gottlieb, Sarah’s sin derives in part from her blindness to the patriarchal system that pressures wives to be fertile and generates an inhumane competition between women, breaking down their solidarity. Sarah admits to having tried to steal Hagar’s womb, as if another woman, her womb and her child, could be property.”

They used me to steal your womb, Claim your child, As if I owned your body and your labor

“Having offered an original interpretation of Hagar’s name, Gottlieb does the same with “Sarah.” Etymologically, her name is connected to “ruler” (שַׂר, sar), but Gottlieb’s midrash connects it to “see-far” (שׁוּר, shur). Thus Sarah ought to become, by virtue of her name, the far-seeing woman, the prophetess. ...Yet she realizes to her chagrin that Hagar sees visions of God, while God has stopped communicating with the woman meant to be a prophetess:”

I, whom they call “See Far Woman” / Sarah, Could not witness my own blindness. But you, my sister, You beheld angels, Made miracles in the desert, Received divine blessings from a god, Who stopped talking to me.

”Using the midrash on Sarah’s name, Gottlieb has Sarah contrast her own moral blindness with Hagar’s power of vision in having seen God. By contrast, Sarah never speaks to God or sees him. What she does witness, however, is the near death of her son Isaac:”

Only at the end, When I witnessed my young son screaming under his father's knife, Only then Did I realize our common suffering.

“...Gottlieb says Sarah’s trauma, seeing her son almost slaughtered by her husband, led her to repent. When Sarah is herself shunted aside and her son taken—without consulting her—to be sacrificed by the same Abraham and the same God who drove Ishmael away and exposed him to death, Sarah then discovers herself as an unwitting collaborator of patriarchy who betrayed her sisterly duties to Hagar by actively expelling a helpless woman and child into a life-threatening situation. Now that she has suffered, she develops an empathy with Hagar based on their common motherhood.

...She concludes her poem in the form of a ritual self-accusation, a vidui, the traditional confession characteristic of Yom Kippur, which follows soon after Rosh Hashanah, and is part of the same festival complex:”

Forgive me, Achti For the sin of neglect For the sin of abuse For the sin of arrogance Forgive me, Achti, For the sin of not knowing your name.

“In the spirit of her poem, Gottlieb takes it upon herself, through the character of Sarah “our mother,” to confess what—in her political and moral opinion as a left-wing liberal—are the sins of the Jewish people in their “abuse,” expulsion and depersonalization of Palestinian refugees which Sarah’s command to Abraham to expel Hagar and son Ishmael foreshadows.“

___________

Sarah Seeks Hagar

Eleanor Wilner has a long poem called “Sarah’s Choice.” In it, Sarah tells her son Isaac that she is going to go find Hagar and Ishmael “whom I cast out, drunk on pride,” and invites Isaac to come with her. He asks her how he should great Ishmael:

“As you greet yourself,” she said, “when you bend over the well to draw water and see your image, not knowing it reversed. You must know your brother now, or you will see your own face looking back the day you’re at each other’s throats.

In Reading Genesis: Beginnings, Kissileff writes, “The poem closes with the chilling foresight, emphasized by the pauses in the final line, that brings us back to the Bible as we know it:

“But what will happen if we go?” the boy Isaac asked. “I don’t know,” Sarah said, “But it is written        what will happen            if you stay?”

“What will happen, of course, is that Isaac’s own father will attempt to sacrifice him -- and that the future history of his people will be one of unending conflict with his ‘brother.’ Whenever I read this poem, I catch my breath at the last line. ...”

__________

Hagar writes to Sarah

“Hagar Writes a Cathartic as an Exercise Suggested by her Therapist,” by Syrian American poet, novelist, and professor, Mohja Kahf:

Dear Sarah, life made us enemies But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if we both ditched the old man? He could have visitation rights with the boys alternate weekends and holidays. Yeah, especially the Feast of the Sacrifice— everybody has forgotten anyway that it began with me abandoned in the desert watching my baby dehydrate for days— I dared God to let us die.

Anyway, you and I, we’d set up house, raise the kids, start a catering business, maybe. You have brains. So do I. We could travel. There are places to see besides Ur and this nowheresville desert with its tribes of hooligans

No. Your lips always thin when you disapprove, like the mother I can hardly remember from before I wound up in your house. I was barely more than a girl. You are the one Who brought me there from Egypt. You used to laugh back then. In those days, You could bear to look at me.

Oh, Sarah, you need years of therapy Can’t you admit that what he did to me was cruel? Admit it – for just one second It won’t make you hate him forever just long enough to know the world won’t fall apart. Long enough to pity him, yourself, me Laugh, Sarah, laugh Imagine God, the Possibility. Sincerely Love, Hagar

[a-queer-seminarian]

[image description: two yellow squares. The first has two photos: one is a painting of Hagar and Ishmael, the other a photo of a woman with brown skin and curly hair. Text reads "Hagar & the Caravan: the Abrahamic God sides with the oppressed" and "Blessed Are the Binary Breakers, a multifaith podcast of trans stories." Next square has this quote, “A good four thousand years, not to mention an entire ocean, separate these women – Hagar the Egyptian in a foreign land, fleeing enslavement and abuse. Latina trans women fleeing the violence of poverty and transmisogyny. But their pain and struggle, hope and faith are a cord stretching between their stories that all the miles and all the millennia cannot sever.” / end id]

___________

HAGAR AND THE CARAVAN

Episode 24 of Blessed Are the Binary Breakers is up! If you heard/read my sermon from the other week about Hagar, you may recognize some of the content -- but while my sermon brought Hagar's story in conversation with today's movement for Black lives, this podcast episode brings her story into conversation with Latina trans women.

See here for the episode transcript as well as links to where you can listen: blessedarethebinarybreakers.com/podcast-archive

___________

​Avery brings the story of Hagar - a figure shared by the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions - into conversation with the story of Charlotte and other trans women who were part of a caravan of asylum seekers in 2018.

​This episode continues the theme of solidarity from June's earlier bonus episode. It highlights the urgency of recognizing how intersections of gender and race impact trans persons of color. It’s a reminder for all who experience some form of marginalization that we must not allow our shared enemies to divide and conquer us -- that we must stop oppressing one another in the hopes of advancing a little bit ourselves. It explores the stories we share, the struggles we share, the goals we share.