GENESIS COMMENTARY

 

GENESIS 16:1-6       (Sarah gives her maid Hagar to Abraham)

16:1:1-2      Abraham must have told Sarah that he had been promised an heir through his own seed (15:4).   By then Sarah was way past normal child-bearing, and she blamed her failure to produce an heir to the LORD’s intervention.  But there was a custom that allowed a woman to give her serving maid to her husband, and as the child was born she received the baby into her lap, and it was counted as her own.  Sarah’s maid was a slave girl she may have bought in Egypt (12:10). 

16:3-4   By then Abraham was 85 (after ten years in Canaan, 12:4).  So far the inability to have a child could be a genetic deficiency in either Abraham or in Sarai.   But when Hagar was obviously pregnant, she must have made some remark about Abraham being virile enough, but Sarai was a barren old woman.

16:5-6   When Sarah complained about this insulting remark,  Abraham told her the Egyptian slave-woman was in her power.   Abraham had Ishmael as his heir; so Sarah could do what she wanted.   We don’t know what Sarah did to deal so harshly with Hagar, but it made her decide to run away back to her home in Egypt.

 

GENESIS 16:7-16    (Hagar Returns to her Mistress, and bears Ishmael)

16:7-8    Here the angel of the LORD must have been a name for the Son of God himself (16:13, as in 22:11, 14-15; Exodus 3:2, 6).    He found her in the wilderness half  way back to her home in Egypt (16:3).   As in the case of Adam (3:9) and  Cain (4:9,10), the questions the LORD asked were not to gain information but to help the person face the situation.

16:9   If Hagar had gone on her way the baby in her womb would have been born in Egypt, but she was told to go back to Sarai and submit to her mistress. 

16:10-12   To encourage her,  Hagar was promised an innumerable offspring, as had been promised to Abraham  (see 15:5).   The child must be called Ishmael (God hears) as a reminder of her prayer being heard.   The name “wild ass of a man” is not as rude as it sounds.  Arabs viewed the wild asses of the desert as having great stamina, courage,  and speed.   And Ishmael would certainly have to fight like them to establish his tribe as the founder of  the Arab people (see BOOKS, Ishmael the Arab). 

16:13   Having experienced the fact that God (el is a shorter form of eloah, elohim) had seen and found her as a fugitive pregnant slave, she addressed the LORD as elroi (the God who sees).  But even more astonishing was that she had seen the Lord God alive before her and she had not been immediately destroyed.   The LORD was similarly seen face to face by Abraham(17:1; 18:1, 22), Isaac (26:2, 24) and Jacob (32:30).   The New Testament will explain that “no one has ever seen God (the Father).  It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart who has made him known (John 1:18).