Biblion Bible Commentary
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God has made me laugh
Genesis 21:1-7
1 Yahweh visited Sarah as he had said, and Yahweh did to Sarah as he had spoken. · WEB
After twenty-five years the promise arrives on schedule, and the woman who laughed in disbelief laughs again for another reason.
Yahweh visited Sarah as he had said, and Yahweh did to Sarah as he had spoken. The verse says the same thing twice in two different ways, and then the next verse says it a third time: at the set time of which God had spoken to him. Three clauses in two verses insisting that what happened is exactly what was promised.
The repetition is the point. Twenty-five years have passed since Haran. There have been restatements of the promise at Shechem, under the stars, at the covenant between the pieces, at the giving of the new names, and under the oaks of Mamre. There has been a plan involving Hagar, and a son who was not the one, and two occasions on which the mother of the promise ended up in another man's household. And when it finally happens, the narrator's only concern is to establish that it happened as spoken and when spoken.
The facts are set down in the flattest possible terms: Sarah conceived and bore a son, Abraham named him Isaac, circumcised him on the eighth day as God had commanded him, and was a hundred years old. Four verses, no wonder, no crowd, no comment. The most anticipated birth in the book is reported like a register entry.
The emotion is all in what Sarah says, and both of her sentences repay attention.
God has made me laugh. Everyone who hears will laugh with me. The name Isaac means he laughs, and it was given by God a year earlier Genesis 17:19, when Abraham had laughed at the arithmetic. Sarah had laughed too, behind a tent door, and denied it because she was afraid Genesis 18:15. Now she takes the word back and uses it herself, and the meaning has changed entirely — the same laughter, first of disbelief, then of embarrassment, now of joy. She also says that others will laugh with her rather than at her, which is the anxiety of a woman who has been childless in a world where that was a public shame.
Her second sentence is a question with an answer built into it: Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Nobody would have said it. That is exactly the point, and she knows it — the impossibility she laughed at is the thing she is now nursing.
And the boy's name will say it for the rest of his life. Every time anyone in that household called him, they said the word for laughter, and the joke had been on all of them.
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