Genesis 16 and 21 · Women of Scripture · Featured Study
Hagar
Camille Corot, Hagar in the Wilderness (1835), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
THE ARTWORKCorot paints the moment after the water runs out: Hagar stands with her arms lifted, her face turned up rather than down at the child, caught between despair and a cry for help. Ishmael sits low in the frame at her feet, and the wilderness around them is wide, bright, and empty of any other help. The painting holds the scene exactly where Genesis 21 leaves it: a mother with nowhere left to look but up.
A Slave Woman in the Wilderness, Twice
Genesis 16 and 21, told plainly
Sarai is barren, and gives her Egyptian slave Hagar to Abram as a secondary wife, so that she might build a family through her. Hagar conceives, and once she sees herself pregnant, she looks on her mistress with contempt. Sarai deals harshly with her, and Hagar runs, into the wilderness, on the road toward Egypt.
And he slept with Hagar, and she conceived. But when Hagar realized that she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress.Neither woman is spared: the text reports the contempt and the harsh dealing without taking a side.
There, by a spring on the way to Shur, someone finds her. Scripture has never used this phrase before this verse: the angel of the LORD. He does not appear first to Abraham, or to Sarai. He appears first to a runaway slave woman with nobody watching.
THE FIRST TO NAME GOD
The angel tells her to return and submit to Sarai, and promises to multiply her descendants beyond counting. He names her son before his birth: Ishmael, God hears, because the LORD has heard her affliction.
The angel of the LORD proceeded: “Behold, you have conceived and will bear a son. And you shall name him Ishmael, for the LORD has heard your cry of affliction.God hears is not a slogan here: it is the name given to a child before he is born, to a mother nobody else was listening to.
And Hagar answers by naming him back. She is the first person in the Bible, man or woman, recorded giving God a name.
So Hagar gave this name to the LORD who had spoken to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “Here I have seen the One who sees me!”El Roi: the God who sees me. Sarah never names God. Abraham never names God. Hagar does.
The well is remembered afterward as Beer-lahai-roi, the well of the Living One who sees me. Hagar returns and bears Ishmael.
Fourteen years later, Isaac is born and weaned. At the feast, Sarah sees Ishmael mocking and demands Abraham cast out the slave woman and her son. Abraham is grieved, but God tells him to listen to Sarah, and repeats the promise that Ishmael too will become a nation, because he is Abraham's own offspring.
But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed about the boy and your maidservant. Listen to everything that Sarah tells you, for through Isaac your offspring will be reckoned. But I will also make a nation of the slave woman’s son, because he is your offspring.”God tells Abraham to listen to Sarah, and in the same breath keeps His promise to Ishmael.
Abraham sends Hagar away with bread and a skin of water. In the wilderness of Beersheba the water runs out. She puts the child under a bush and sits apart, so that she will not see him die, and weeps.
Then God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, “What is wrong, Hagar? Do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he lies.Ishmael's name made literal a second time: God hears the voice of the boy.
An angel calls to her from heaven, repeats the nation-promise, and opens her eyes to see a well of water. God is with the boy as he grows up in the wilderness of Paran, and Hagar is not named again in the Old Testament.
Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.The second wilderness ends the same way the first one did: her eyes opened to water she could not see before.
What the Text Actually Says
against the way the story is usually told
SHE IS NOT THE VILLAIN
Both Sarai's plan and Hagar's contempt are reported without heavy editorializing, the same craft Genesis uses across its family narratives. Popular retelling flattens Hagar into a scheming rival; the text instead gives her the most direct personal encounter with God in the whole book of Genesis outside of Abraham himself.
NO ONE ELSE IN SCRIPTURE NAMES GOD
Not a minor figure in the theology of the scene: no one else in the Bible, man or woman, is recorded naming God. Sarah does not. Abraham does not. Hagar does.
HOW OLD WAS ISHMAEL IN GENESIS 21
Abraham was 86 when Ishmael was born and 100 when Isaac was born, a fourteen-year gap; Isaac was then weaned before the expulsion, an event ancient practice usually placed around age two or three. That puts Ishmael at roughly sixteen or seventeen, not an infant. The image of a baby carried in Hagar's arms is common in art and retelling; the numbers in the text argue otherwise, a genuine tension worth naming rather than silently resolving.
ISHMAEL IS NOT DISOWNED
God explicitly blesses him, hears him, and promises a nation from him, twice, even while the covenant line runs through Isaac. The text holds both without contradiction.
The True Context
the custom, the names, and the pattern behind the scene
A barren wife giving her own slave to her husband, so that a child would be legally reckoned as the wife's own, was a known and legally regulated arrangement in the ancient Near East. Provisions covering exactly this arrangement, and the status of the slave woman and her offspring afterward, appear in Near Eastern legal materials from the second millennium BC, the Code of Hammurabi among them. The custom itself is not in serious dispute.
One honest caveat belongs beside it. Mid-twentieth-century scholarship, E. A. Speiser prominently, argued a close, precisely dated parallel between these customs and tablets from the Mesopotamian city of Nuzi, using the parallel to date the patriarchal narratives to a specific era. That precise dating argument has been challenged since the 1970s, notably by Thomas L. Thompson and John Van Seters, who showed the underlying customs were broadly attested across many centuries of ancient Near Eastern law, not narrowly Nuzi-specific. The practice Genesis 16 describes is well attested; using it to fix an exact date for Abraham is contested.
The names carry the theology. Ishmael, from shama, to hear, and El, God. El Roi, from ra'ah, to see. Beer-lahai-roi, the well of the Living One who sees me. The narrative's two turning points, the angel finding her by a spring in chapter 16 and the angel opening her eyes to a well in chapter 21, both happen at a water source in the wilderness: the same danger-and-sustenance-in-the-desert convention that runs through Hebrew narrative's recurring type-scenes, here given to a woman with no husband beside her and no family watching.
The pattern is its own study: see Type-Scene, on the well-in-the-wilderness convention Genesis returns to more than once.
What the Text Refuses to Tell Us
the silences are not gaps to be filled
Hagar disappears from the Old Testament narrative after Genesis 21:21, and the text is quiet about most of what came before and after the two scenes it does record. What Scripture leaves unsaid, this page leaves unsaid.
How did Hagar become Sarai's slave?
Genesis 16:1 simply calls her an Egyptian. Commentators, Wesley among them, guess she was among the gifts Pharaoh gave Abram back in Genesis 12:16. The text never makes that connection itself, and it should be held as inference, not fact.
What was she thinking and feeling?
Her interior life beyond the actions and words the text records, that she looked with contempt, that she wept in the wilderness, is not given further reflection. The text tells us what she did and what she said, and stops there.
What happened to her after Genesis 21?
She gets her son a wife from Egypt, her own country, and is not named again in the Old Testament. The only later biblical mention of her by name is Paul's, in Galatians.
Was she ever reconciled with Sarah, or with Abraham?
Scripture does not say. Genesis 25:9 has Isaac and Ishmael together at Abraham's burial, but nothing is said about Hagar herself, before or after the expulsion.
Where This Points
the paradigm text, and Paul's use of her later
Genesis 16:7-13 is not one example among many of the angel of the LORD appearing in Scripture. It is the opening and paradigm text for the whole identity-and-distinction question that runs through the Old Testament: a figure sent by God, yet named, worshipped, and spoken of as God. What the text secures without dispute is this: whoever this figure is, he finds a runaway slave woman in the wilderness before he finds anyone else in Scripture, and she is the one who names him.
THE IDENTITY QUESTION: THE POSITIONS, AND WHO HOLDS THEM
The pre-incarnate Son
Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian (second and third century)
The oldest Christian reading of the angel of the LORD across the Old Testament: a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ Himself.
A created angel
Augustine, City of God 16.29
Real dissent and caution from a serious reader: the figure is a created angel who speaks and acts as God's own envoy, not a person of the Godhead.
The second Yahweh figure
Michael Heiser, The Unseen Realm (Lexham Press, 2015)
Reads the text through the Old Testament's own Second Temple categories rather than importing later dogmatic ones. Relevant specifically because Genesis 16:7-13 is the paradigm text for this argument, not a peripheral example.
Evangelical caution
Andrew S. Malone, Knowing Jesus in the Old Testament? (IVP/Apollos, 2015)
Cautions against assuming a christophany without a specific New Testament warrant, the standard evangelical caution beside the christophany reading.
None of these is adjudicated here. The page names the positions and their holders and leaves a slot for Marcus, matching the site's practice everywhere the christophany question surfaces.
In Galatians 4:21-31, Paul reads Hagar and Sarah as an allegory of two covenants. Hagar corresponds to Mount Sinai and to Jerusalem as it now is, bearing children into slavery; Sarah corresponds to the promise, and to the Jerusalem above, the free mother of all believers.
These things serve as illustrations, for the women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children into slavery: This is Hagar.Paul's own reading of the two women, offered as an argument about covenants.
Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.Believers, like Isaac, are children of promise: the argument's conclusion, and Paul quotes Genesis 21:10 to make it.
This is Paul's own inspired redemptive-historical argument about covenants, not a verdict on Hagar as a person, and not a claim that she herself was rejected by God. Genesis has already answered that question in her favor: this is the woman God heard, saw, and kept alive twice in a wilderness. Paul is arguing law against promise using the positions the two women occupy in the family story; he is not editorializing about which woman was the better one. MannaFest honors both truths at once, exactly as the text does: Hagar is one whom God saw, heard, and kept, and Paul's covenant argument stands on its own ground, not read as a disparagement of her.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown work through Paul's allegory phrase by phrase in their notes on Galatians 4:24-25, including the observation that the name Hagar itself was, by ancient tradition, the Arabic name for Sinai.
The Voices
the roster, relevance-gated
Thou God seest me
Wesley names the theology of the moment directly: a memorial name Hagar will carry for the rest of her life.
This should be with her, his name forever, and this his memorial, by which she will know him, and remember him while she lives, Thou God seest me... when we have brought ourselves into distress by our own folly, yet God has not forsaken us.
John Wesley· Notes on the Old Testament (1765), on Genesis 16:13
Sighs and groans in the ears of the God of mercy
On the second wilderness, Wesley catches what is not said out loud: no prayer is recorded, only the boy's distress, and God hears it anyway.
We read not of a word be said; but his sighs and groans, cried loud in the ears of the God of mercy.
John Wesley· Notes on the Old Testament (1765), on Genesis 21:17
A grateful recognition
JFB read the naming of the well as Hagar's own act of worship, not merely a place marker.
the name given to this well was a grateful recognition of God's gracious appearance in the hour of Hagar's distress.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Genesis 16:14
No roster voice, Missler, Prince, or others, surfaced this session with a specific, citable treatment of Hagar herself. Per the relevance gate, no such voice is added here without a real citation.
Read the Great Books
the works that have carried this teaching: go further than this page
Notes on the Old Testament
John Wesley · 1765
Wesley is the reason this page can say what El Roi meant to Hagar herself: a name she would carry for the rest of her life.
READ IT FREE AT CCELCommentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown · 1871
JFB works both scenes, Genesis 16 and Galatians 4, phrase by phrase, and supplies the note this page relies on for the well's naming.
READ IT FREE AT CCELThe Unseen Realm
Michael Heiser · 2015
The paradigm text for Heiser's argument on the angel of the LORD's identity sits right here, in Genesis 16.
In print: find it wherever books are sold.
Knowing Jesus in the Old Testament?
Andrew S. Malone · 2015
The standard evangelical caution against assuming a christophany without a specific New Testament warrant.
In print: find it wherever books are sold.
The God Who Sees
So Hagar gave this name to the LORD who had spoken to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “Here I have seen the One who sees me!”Her own words, and the first name for God recorded on human lips in all of Scripture.
An Egyptian slave, given away, despised, dealt with harshly, and sent into the wilderness twice, is the one Scripture chooses to show us the angel of the LORD first, and the one who answers him with a name. God heard Ishmael, and God saw Hagar, twice, in two wildernesses, and kept them both alive.
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