Genesis16chapter 16

Genesis 16:1-2

Sarai's barrenness is announced back in chapter 11, before the call and the promise of a great nation ever reach Abram, so Genesis sets the obstacle in front of the promise. The same wait falls on Rebekah for twenty years in chapter 25 and on Rachel in chapters 29 and 30. Hagar is an Egyptian, and the last time Genesis spoke of menservants and maidservants was when Pharaoh loaded them on Abram at the end of chapter 12. Then comes the line that Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai, which is the wording of the charge God laid against Adam in chapter 3.

Genesis 16:3-4

The writer stops to count the years, ten of them in the land since the promise, which is his way of saying how long the waiting had run. Sarai took Hagar and gave her to her husband, and took and gave to her husband are the verbs Genesis used of Eve handing over the fruit. The plan works at once and the household turns over just as fast, since Hagar conceives and her mistress is despised in her eyes.

Genesis 16:5-6

Sarai lays the wrong on Abram for a plan she made herself and calls on the LORD to judge between them. Abram hands her back her authority over Hagar and stands out of the quarrel, and Sarai deals hardly with her. The verb behind dealt hardly is the one God had used a chapter earlier, when he told Abram his seed would be afflicted in a land that was not theirs. Here an Egyptian is afflicted inside Abram's household until she flees into the wilderness, which is the road Israel will walk in the other direction.

Genesis 16:7-8

This is the first appearance of the angel of the LORD in Scripture, and it comes to a runaway Egyptian slave rather than to the man holding the covenant. Jerome notes that the way to Shur runs through the desert toward Egypt, so she is heading home. He calls her Hagar, Sarai's maid, naming both who she is and what she ran from, then asks where she has come from and where she is going. She answers the first question and says nothing to the second.

Genesis 16:9-10

The first word is the hard one, since she is sent back under the hand that afflicted her, and the promise arrives only after the command. What follows is Abram's own promise put into her hands, seed multiplied beyond numbering, close to the wording God used with Abram in chapters 13 and 15. Clarke points out that the speaker promises this on his own authority, as God rather than as a messenger reporting him.

Genesis 16:11-12

This is the first birth announcement of its form in Scripture, and the same shape returns to Samson's mother in Judges 13 and to Mary in Luke 1. Ishmael means God hears, given because the LORD had heard her affliction, and God hears the boy again in the wilderness in chapter 21. Clarke reads the words behind wild man as a wild ass of a man, untamed and impatient of restraint, whose hand is against every man. Chapter 25 closes his life with the same phrase used here, that he dwelt in the presence of all his brethren.

Genesis 16:13-14

Hagar is the first person in Scripture recorded giving God a name, Thou God seest me, and she is a foreign slave with no covenant of her own. The angel had spoken as God in the first person and she answers by calling him the LORD, which is why Clarke reads the figure as Christ appearing before his birth, while other readers take him as a created messenger carrying God's own words. The well keeps the name Beer-lahai-roi, the well of the Living One who sees me, and Isaac later lives beside it, coming from it in chapter 24 and dwelling there in chapter 25.

Genesis 16:15-16

She went back, and the only report of it is the birth of the child in Abram's house. Abram calls the boy Ishmael, a name he was never given, so the words spoken at the spring reached him from her. He is eighty-six here and ninety-nine when God speaks again in chapter 17, and Genesis leaves those thirteen years silent. When God does speak, the son already born gives way to a son not yet conceived, the order the book keeps from Abel over Cain to Ephraim over Manasseh, and Paul reads the two mothers as two covenants in Galatians 4.