Genesis21chapter 21

Genesis 21:1-2

The LORD visited Sarah as he had said, and the verse says it twice over, as he had said and as he had spoken. It stands immediately after the closing line of chapter 20, where the LORD had shut up every womb in Abimelech's house on Sarah's account, so the chapter that opens a womb follows the chapter that closed them. Her barrenness was reported back at 11:30, one verse before the promise of descendants at 12:2, which is how Genesis introduces the promise, with the obstacle already standing in front of it. Rebekah will wait twenty years and Rachel longer, and each time the son who carries the line comes out of a womb that was shut.

Genesis 21:3-5

Abraham calls him Isaac, the name God had given the child at 17:19 before there was a child, and it means he laughs. Both parents had laughed at the promise first, Abraham falling on his face at 17:17 and Sarah behind the tent door at 18:12, so the boy carries their doubt as his name for life. He is circumcised on the eighth day exactly as required at 17:12, the first child in Scripture born inside the covenant to receive its sign. Abraham is a hundred, twenty-five years on from leaving Haran at seventy-five, and the set time God had named at 17:21 arrives on the day it was named.

Genesis 21:6-8

Sarah laughed once inside the tent and then denied it, and here she laughs out loud and calls everyone to laugh with her, the same word turned around. Her question, who would have said unto Abraham that Sarah should have given children suck, answers itself, since God had said it and she had heard him say it. The chapter then moves in a single line from the weaning feast to the trouble, because the celebration in verse 8 is the occasion for what Sarah sees in verse 9.

Genesis 21:9-10

Hagar is called the Egyptian here, and the older writers tie her place in the household back to Abram's descent into Egypt in chapter 12, where he came away with servants as well as cattle. What Ishmael was doing is given in one word, mocking, which Paul at Galatians 4:29 calls persecution and Adam Clarke reads as ridicule, warning that guesses past that point are useless. Sarah's demand is about inheritance rather than temper, that the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, and it puts the elder son out and leaves the younger in. Paul takes these two sons at Galatians 4:22 to 4:31 and says he is speaking an allegory of two covenants, which is his own word for what he is doing with them.

Genesis 21:11-13

The grief is over Ishmael, named here only as his son, and God does not argue Abraham out of the grief but tells him to do it anyway. Hearken unto her voice is the second time Abraham hearkens to Sarah's voice, and the first was 16:2, which is where Ishmael came from. In Isaac shall thy seed be called is the clause Paul quotes at Romans 9:7 and Hebrews quotes at 11:18, and it belongs to the pattern running from Abel over Cain to Ephraim over Manasseh, where the line does not descend by natural right. Ishmael is not discarded in the ruling, since verse 13 promises him a nation of his own for his father's sake.

Genesis 21:14-16

Abraham rose up early in the morning, which is the exact phrase used again at 22:3 when he sets out with Isaac for Moriah. He gives up a son twice, both times at first light and both times without a recorded word, and both times the son is kept alive by a voice out of heaven and a provision he had not seen. Hagar walks until the water is spent, puts the boy under a shrub and sits a bowshot away, saying let me not see the death of the child. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read Ishmael as a lad of about seventeen and note that Arab chiefs sent sons out at that age with a few days' provisions.

Genesis 21:17-19

The text says God heard the lad, though it was the mother who was weeping, and the boy's name means God hears, which the angel had given her at 16:11. This is the second time Hagar meets God in a wilderness and the second time a well is attached to the meeting, since 16:14 named the first place Beer-lahai-roi. The well in verse 19 was already there before her eyes were opened, so what changed was her sight and not the ground.

Genesis 21:20-21

God was with the lad is said of Ishmael in the same words Genesis later uses of Isaac at 26:28 and of Joseph at 39:2, and it is said of the son who was sent away. He grows into an archer in the wilderness of Paran, living at the distance his mother had measured out in bowshots. Hagar takes him a wife out of the land of Egypt, so the line put outside the promise goes home to her own country. The separation does not end the two brothers, because Isaac and Ishmael stand together at their father's grave at 25:9.

Genesis 21:22-24

Abimelech comes with his captain Phichol and opens with his reason, God is with thee in all that thou doest, which is what an outsider could see from the road. This is the king who had to rebuke Abraham in chapter 20 for calling Sarah his sister, so his request that Abraham swear not to deal falsely with him has a history standing behind it. A king of this name and a captain of this name come to Isaac at 26:26 with the same observation and the same proposal, and Isaac makes the same treaty at the same place. Abraham's entire answer is two words, I will swear.

Genesis 21:25-27

Abraham reproves the king before he swears rather than after, so the treaty is made with the grievance on the table. Abimelech answers that he had not heard of it until that day, and he does not defend the servants who seized the well. Water is the standing quarrel between this family and this people, and the Philistines fill Abraham's wells with earth after his death and fight Isaac over three more at 26:15 to 26:22.

Genesis 21:28-31

These seven ewe lambs are the first lambs the Bible names, and they buy a well and stand as a witness rather than going on an altar. The first lamb for a burnt offering comes one chapter later, in Isaac's question on the way up the mountain, where is the lamb. Jerome gives both readings of the name Beersheba, the well of the seven for the lambs and the well of the oath for the swearing, and says the Hebrew word carries each. Abraham pays for a well he had dug himself, in a land already promised to him, which is what his holding in that land amounts to.

Genesis 21:32-33

The covenant is made and the Philistines go home, and Abraham stays and plants a tamarisk, which is a tree for a man who expects to be somewhere a long while. He calls there on the name of the LORD, the everlasting God, a title for God that Genesis uses here and nowhere before it, in the chapter where the promised son finally arrives. Beersheba becomes the family's southern ground, and Isaac swears his own oath there at 26:33 while Jacob stops to sacrifice there at 46:1 on his way down into Egypt.

Genesis 21:34

The chapter ends on the word sojourned, in the very country the preceding verses had just secured for him by treaty. Everything he holds in the land of promise he has paid for, a well here for seven lambs and a burial cave at Machpelah for four hundred shekels in chapter 23, and Jacob will buy a parcel at Shechem for a hundred pieces at 33:19. Hebrews 11:13 reads the whole of it as men who died without receiving the promises and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. Gill notes that the Jewish writers reckon these many days at twenty-six years.