Biblion Bible Commentary
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Hagar, and the God who sees
Genesis 16:1-16
1 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had a servant, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar. · WEB
A reasonable plan to help God keep his promise produces misery for everyone, and the one person nobody consults is the one God goes after.
Ten years in the land, and no child. Sarai's proposal is practical and was legally ordinary in that world — a barren wife could give her servant to her husband and count the child as her own. It may be that I will obtain children by her.
What the narrator does with it is quietly devastating: Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. The phrase is the one God used in the garden when he told the man because you have listened to your wife's voice Genesis 3:17. It occurs at exactly two points in these chapters, and both times a man goes along with a shortcut around something God had said.
And Abram says nothing. No objection is recorded, no question about the promise, and no prayer. The man who argued with God about an heir two chapters ago accepts a human solution without a word.
The consequences arrive at once and fall on everyone. Hagar conceives and her mistress was despised in her eyes. Sarai turns on Abram — This wrong is your fault, which is true and is also the complaint of a woman blaming him for a plan she proposed. Abram's answer is the worst thing he says in Genesis: your maid is in your hand. Do to her whatever is good in your eyes. He hands a pregnant woman carrying his child back to the person who resents her, and steps out of it entirely. Sarai deals harshly with her, and she runs.
The story's turn is that God goes after the slave. Not the patriarch, not his wife — the Egyptian servant girl, pregnant and alone on the road to Shur, heading back toward Egypt.
The angel's opening is a question, and it treats her as a person with a history and a destination: Hagar, Sarai's servant, where did you come from? Where are you going? She answers the first half honestly and cannot answer the second.
What she is told is hard and generous at once. She is to go back and submit — which returns her to a difficult house rather than rescuing her from it — and she is given a promise in the exact words used to Abram: I will greatly multiply your offspring, that they will not be counted for multitude. A slave receives the promise of innumerable descendants. And her son is named before his birth, Ishmael, because Yahweh has heard your affliction. Whatever else she has been told, she now knows God heard her, and the name will say so every time anyone calls the boy.
The description of him is unsentimental — a wild donkey of a man, his hand against every man — and it is a forecast of a free and untamable people rather than an insult.
Then the sentence the passage is remembered for. She called the name of Yahweh who spoke to her, "You are a God who sees."
She is the only person in Scripture who gives God a name. Not Abram, not Sarai, not Noah — an Egyptian slave, alone by a spring in the desert, names God for what she has just discovered about him. Everyone in her life had used her and none had looked at her, and the name she chooses is that he is one who sees.
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