Biblion Bible Commentary
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The bottle of water in the wilderness
Genesis 21:8-21
8 The child grew and was weaned. Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. · WEB
A household divides painfully, God tells Abraham to do the thing he cannot bear, and then goes into the desert after the ones sent away.
The weaning feast is the occasion, and what Sarah sees at it sets everything off. The word describing Ishmael is a form of the same root as Isaac's name — he is laughing, or making sport, and the English translations divide on how much malice to read into it.
Her demand is brutal and is expressed as a legal matter: Cast out this servant and her son! For the son of this servant will not be heir with my son, Isaac. It is about inheritance. Ishmael is about sixteen and has been the only son for those years.
Abraham's reaction is given one line and it is the most sympathetic sentence about him in the chapter: The thing was very grievous in Abraham's sight on account of his son. Not on account of Hagar, and not on account of the awkwardness — on account of the boy. Whatever else is true of him, he loved Ishmael, and he had asked God to let him be the one Genesis 17:18.
God's answer is the third time in these chapters that a man is told to listen to his wife's voice, and it is the only time God commands it. The reason given is the covenant line — your offspring will be named through Isaac — and it comes with something for the other son in the same breath: I will also make a nation of the son of the servant, because he is your child.
So the sending away is not an abandonment on God's part, and the passage takes care to show it. Abraham obeys early in the morning, with bread and a container of water, and the scene that follows is one of the hardest in Genesis.
The water runs out. Hagar puts the boy under a shrub, walks a bowshot away and sits down, for she said, "Don't let me see the death of the child." And she weeps. A mother places her son in what shade there is, moves far enough not to watch, and cries.
Then a sentence that redirects the whole scene: God heard the voice of the boy. Not hers — his. She is weeping and the text does not say God heard her weeping; it says he heard the boy, and says it twice, where he is. And the boy's name means God hears, which was given to Hagar by an angel at a spring in the desert years before Genesis 16:11. The name given at her first flight is honored at her second.
The rescue is almost ordinary: God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. The well was there. What she lacked was sight, and the help she is given is to see what was already within reach.
And the closing verses are quietly generous. God was with the boy, and he grew. The phrase used of Joseph in Egypt is used of the son who was sent away, and he lives, marries, and becomes the nation he was promised. Genesis does not follow him further, and the last thing it says about him in this chapter is that God was with him.
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