(BA) Notes on Genesis 16

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This chapter narrates the birth of Ishmael. Abram's wife, Sarai, is unable to have children, and so she suggests that Abram give her a child by impregnating her Egyptian slave Hagar. He cooperates, Hagar becomes pregnant, and bad feelings ensue between Sarai and Hagar. Hagar runs away and encounters an angel (or Yahweh himself?) who gives her a prophecy concerning her future child. Hagar returns and gives birth to Ishmael.

Ishmael is intended as to be understood as the progenitor of the Ishmaelites, a nomadic group of people who in the author's view are somehow partly related to both the Israelites and the Egyptians. Ishmael(ites) are according to this chapter destined to become hostile, but interestingly the origin of this hostility is their mistreatment by Abraham. There is something sympathic in this portrayal.

There is a sort of tragic comedy to the chapter. Despite the assurances in Genesis 15 that Abram will have an heir, his wife Sarai is worried about the lack of an heir and cooks up a plot for Abram to give her a child by using her slave Hagar as a surrogate. Abram dutifully follows his wife's instructions, and then deals with her fury after he winds up impregnating Hagar. The story thus follows the general biblical pattern that polygamy is seen as leading dramatic family conflict.

A careful reading can discern three different versions of the story of Hagar and Ishmael: two in this chapter and one in Genesis 21. For more information on how this triplet of a story can be analyzed, see Skinner's commentary on Genesis and the appendix in Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible?

(16:1) "she had". Note that Sarai was capable of owning (human) property independently of Abram.

(16:1) "a slave". This is not the only story in the Hebrew Bible in which an infertile woman seeks to have a child by using a slave as a substitute. Compare the births of Jacob's sons by Bilhah and Zilpah.

This chapter will go on to describe how Abram and Sarai sexually exploit and then abandon their pregnant Egyptian slave, and it is noteworthy that in this chapter God's sympathy seems to be with the Egyptian who is being oppressed, although God also sanctions her expulsion. It strikes me as interesting that this happens in the chapter after God, in veiled language, predicts that Egyptians will enslave Abram's descendants. It seems almost like a sort of poetic reversal.

I would imagine that this is just a coincidence, except that the same thing seems to appear in the story of Joseph, the last major cycle of stories leading up to the enslavement in Egypt. Joseph is sold as a slave to Egyptians, then reduces the Egyptians to slavery (made explicit in 47:25), and then after his death the Egyptians reduce the Israelites to slavery. Likewise, Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery in Egypt, and then they move to Egypt where their descendants become slaves. Four hundred years later they are liberated, travel to Canaan, and enslave the survivors among the indigenous peoples. The reversal of fortunes around slavery seems to be a repeated motif in the Hebrew Bible.

(16:1) "Hagar". In terms of the ethnic logic of Genesis, Hagar is the forebearer of various nomadic peoples. Her name may also be related to the "Hagrites" of 1 Chronicles 5:10; 27:31; Psalm 83:6 (Driver). Notice that in the first verse, the Hagrites are placed appropriately east of Gilead, reminiscent of "east of his brethren", while in the last two references the Hagrites are mentioned near Ishmaelites.

(16:2) "Yahweh has prevented". In the logic of the Hebrew Bible, a couple's inability to have children is routinely attributed to the "barenness" of the wife, and believed to have been controlled by the will of God.

(16:2) "go to bed with". Literally, "go in to", an idiom which does not translate perfectly into English. What is clear is that it is a euphemism for sexual relations. Alter claims that it is -- with one deliberate exception -- only used in cases where it describes the first sexual encounter between a particular man and woman.

(16:2) "I will obtain children". Literally, "I will be built". According to Driver, the underlying metaphor here is that a family is like a house, so Sarah's will be built by Hagar.

(16:3) Notice how verse three restates some material already given, and notice how if verse three is removed the narrative continues uninterrupted without it. This is one hint that has lead Driver, Friedman (Who Wrote the Bible?, appendix) and others to read verse three as being from a different source that the material in verses 2 and 4.

(16:3) "ten years". This is another of the chronological notes which built a continuous series of events through Genesis. As Abram was seventy-five when he came to Canaan, this makes him now eighty-five years old.

(16:5) "My wrong be upon you!". "My wrong" meaning, "the wrong that has been done to me". Sarai is holding Abram responsible for Hagar's contempt for her. NJPS reads "be upon you" as "is your fault". On the other hand, Dillmann read is as meaning, "the wrong done me, may it come upon thee."

(16:7) "an angel of Yahweh". On this phrase, see Meier. Compare verse 13 -- "Yahweh, who spoke to her".

(16:7) "Shur". A region or location mentioned only six times in the Hebrew Bible, but there is enough in the references to say that it is the name of a wilderness or wilderness location between the south of Canaan and Egypt. The location is ideal symbolically for someone to have a child half of Hebrew stock and half Egyptian.

(16:11) "Ishmael". The name can be read in Hebrew as meaning, "El hears", or "May El hear!" (cf. Driver, ASV marginal note).

(16:12) "wild ass among men". The KJV has only "wild man", which is unfortunate because the Hebrew prʾ is a wild ass, not a general adjective meaning "wild".

(16:12) "opposite". Hebrew ʿl pny. The ASV marginal notes suggests that we might instead read, "to the east of". The RV reads "in the presence of". Dillman sees hostility in the term, and in Job 1:11 (Dillmann, Driver). In terms of the internal logic of Genesis that uses people to stand in for people groups, this means that the Ishmaelites would "dwell opposite" or "east of" or "in opposition to" the peoples to whom they are related.

(16:13) "You are a God who Sees". The ASV marginal notes suggests that we might instead read, "You, God, see me" (ASV notes: Thou God seest me). The Revised Version's margin reads El Roi as "God of seeing", which Driver says is only possible with recourse to emendation of the vowels.

(16:14) "Beer Lahai Roi". The ASV notes read this as "The well of the living one who sees me". The name of the well seems strange given the story immediately preceding -- why the mention of a "living one"? Driver passes on a theory by Wellhausen, that originally in verse 13 Hagar asked, "Have I even seen [God, and lived] after [my] seeing" "with allusion to the belief (xxxii. 30) that no one could 'see God and live.' If this restoration be accepted, 'a God of seeing' must be interpreted in the sense of 'a God who is seen'; and the name of the well will mean 'He that seeth me liveth.'

(16:14) "Bered". This location is not mentioned elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (Dillmann). The location has not been conclusively identified (see Gary Herion, "Bered", in the Anchor Bible Dictionary).

Driver divided the sources as follows: P for 1a, J for 1b-2, P for 3, J for 4-14, P for 15-16.

ASV. The American Standard Version of the Bible, as printed in 1901 by Thomas Nelson and Sons.

Dillmann, A. (1897). Genesis: Critically and Exegetically Expounded. Translated from the last edition by Wm. B. Stevenson. Volume II: Genesis 12-50.

Driver, S. R. (1916 [1904]). The Book of Genesis with Introduction and Notes. Tenth Edition.

Meier, S. A. "Angel of Yahweh". In Toorn, Becking, and van der Horst (1999), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible. Second Extensively Revised Edition.

NJPS. The New Jewish Publication Society Bible, as found at Tagged Tanakh (1 May 2020).

RV. The Revised Version of the Bible, as printed in Driver.

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