13 August 2022 draft-bible
1. slave. Hebrew šifḥa. There is no need to soften terms relating to slavery with euphemisms like ‘handmaid’ or ‘servant’. So also in verse 2.
2. Egyptian woman. This is one word in Hebrew, but it is grammatically marked as feminine.
2. kept me from having children. Perhaps clearer than restrained me from bearing.
2. go in to. A standard biblical euphemism for sexual relations.
3. Perhaps. Hebrew ʾulay. ‘It may be that’ seems an unnecessarily long translation for a single simple word.
3. I have been mistreated because of you. The Hebrew expression probably should not be translated literally into English: ‘the mistreatment of me is upon you’. The word ḥamasi (‘the mistreatment of me’) is translated in the ASV as ‘My wrong’, which might be difficult for a reader to understand. ‘My wrong’ sounds almost as if Sarai is admitting to some kind of wrondoing herself, which is by no means the case here. The WEB reading ‘This wrong’ sounds simply as if something has been done wrong in general, while ḥamasi speaks specifically to the personal mistreatment of Sarai.
5. she despised me. Literally, ‘I was despised in her eyes’.
6. slave. As in verse 6.
7. an angel of Yahweh. For the translation ‘an angel’, as opposed to ‘the angel’, see S. A. Meier, “Angel of Yahweh”, in DDD2.
10. counted is perhaps a bit smoother than numbered.
12. he willl be a wild donkey of a man. This is, literally, what the Hebrew says. In the ASV, we read “as a wild ass”, and in the WEB, “like a wild donkey”. The addition of ‘like’ or ‘as’, I suppose, alerts the reader to the fact that Ishmael will not literally transform into a donkey, but I think we can do without this and trust the reader to figure this out unaided.
12. everyone. Hebrew kol. No word for ‘man’ appears here.
12. opposed. Or ‘opposite’, in the sense of ‘across from’, ‘facing’.
13. Have I also here seen after the one who sees me? This verse is very difficult to understand in the Hebrew. One theory is that the word ‘live’ has somehow dropped out of the verse, and that Hagar is expressing her wonder at surviving an encounter with Yahweh. This is how the word ‘live’ finds its way into the WEB. In favor of the WEB’s theory, notice that the name of the well given immediately after (Beer Lahai Roi) does contain the verb ‘to live’.
14. Beer Lahai Roi. The WEB’s notes explain the name as meaning “well of the one who lives and sees me”. This is more or less identical to the interpretation given in the Vulgate. However, a variety interpretations of the place name have been proposed, as it is difficult, and in some interpretations the place is not in fact named for the etiology that Genesis assigned to it. See Henry O. Thompson, “Beer-Lahai-Roi”, in the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary.
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