Genesis reads as if it were the saga of an actual family: Abraham the grand old man, Isaac the favourite son, Jacob the smart grandson, Joseph the brilliant great-grandon, the wives, the brothers... And some think such a story is what the book is about. Others have suggested it is really a tribal history dressed up as a family epic, and that these much-loved characters and the rest of the cast - Lot, Laban, Hagar, Ishmael, Esau, Joseph's brothers and so on - are really just personifications of tribal groups and nations. Still others think there may be a bit of truth in both views and no need to be too inflexible about it: Abraham sounds more like a real person than a tribe, which is not to say he might not have been followed about by a fair-sized group of people including his family and "staff" (a.k.a. servants back then), but within this narrative framework there are some anecdotes that do smack of tribal legends.
Take today's passage: surely it is most easily read by assuming it contains a mix of different story dimensions and invites us to understand it on a variety of levels rather than just one.
There is one moment in particular in this story that I personally find one of the most touching in all of Genesis, and which does not, at that point at least, bring to mind tribal origins but rather raw human drama. After some trouble in Abraham's household, Sarah's servant and Abraham's surrogate wife Hagar has been kicked out together with her little boy. (How little? Never mind, that's a detail we'll come to later. Just enjoy the story.) They have gone off into the wilderness, just the two of them, in the blazing heat, and their supply of water has run out. Her beloved child is in danger of getting dehydrated, he is going to die and there is nothing she can do about it. Finally she gives up hope; there is nothing to be done, it is the end. Hagar lovingly places the boy under a bush. Even though it might give a little shade, it won't save his life. She kisses her beloved child farewell and walks away. Where is she going, why is she leaving him alone? Because the thought in the crazed, grief-stricken mother's mind is: If there is nothing else I can do to keep my baby alive, I cannot bear to watch him die. So... (21:16, KJV) wattélekh wattéshev lah minnéged harxeq kimTaxawe qéshet ki am'ra al er'e b'mot hayyáled wattéshev minnéged wattissa et qolah wattevq 'And she went, and sat her down over against him a good way off, as it were a bowshot: for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And she sat over against him, and lift up her voice, and wept.' The mother weeps in desperation - wattéshev minnéged wattissa et qolah wattevq - and we all weep with her, for who would not be moved by this terrible scene? The tale unfolding, at this point at least, is not of tribal history, it is of human pathos.
Curiously this, one of the most movingly human passages in all of Genesis (though not the only one, that is true) and one of its literary wonders, is not told of one of the Israelite patriarchs or matriarchs but concerns, rather, the part of the family that was cast out, the other branch, not di undzere but di andere. But the story is not told for the purpose of gloating, nor is it told in such a way as to encourage any such thought; quite the contrary, our heart goes out to Hagar and we too grieve for Ishmael. In case you haven't read the whole story yet, SPOILER ALERT: he doesn't die under that bush, for God also cared about him and sent an angel to Hagar to tell her not to give up hope. Her son was destined to be the father of many nations. Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well nearby, and they were saved. As the lad grew up, God kept him in his sights. He carried on living in the desert, became a great bowsman, and when he grew up he married a woman from Egypt, like his mother.
That is where this particular passage about Hagar and her son ends, but we know a little more from another passage we've already read (ch. 16). As a matter of fact, the story told there and the one we are reading now have enough in common to make it almost certain that, in origin, we once again here have two versions of one story, no doubt elaborated somewhat differently in variant traditions but with a common core. In the first story, Hagar also goes into the wilderness but her son hasn't been born yet. In that story, an angel also appears to Hagar, but tells her to go back to Sarah and to give birth to the child she is already expecting (unless we adopt the theory expounded in CB, p. 231, that verses 16:9-10 were invented by the editor who put Genesis together so that both versions might be inserted into a single narrative thread). On that occasion too, the angel foretells Ishmael's future (16:12, JPS): w'hu yihye pére adam yado vakkol w'yad kol bo w'‛al pne khol exaw yishkon 'He shall be a wild ass of a man; / His hand against everyone, / And everyone's hand against him; / He shall dwell alongside of all his kinsmen." The meaning of that prediction is a little uncertain, but that need not concern us now. Scholars believe that J was the source of the chapter 16 episode and that the passage we are now reading was largely the work of E (like the preceding passage).
An interesting point worth noting about this story is that in the E version we are now reading, Ishmael is never mentioned by name. He is referred to as ben haama 'the slave woman's son' (v. 13), ben hagar hammitzrit 'Hagar the Egyptian woman's son' (v. 9), ben ha'ama hazzot 'this slave woman's son' (v. 10), b'nah 'her son' (v. 10), hanná‛ar 'the lad' (vv. 12, 17-20) or hayyéled 'the boy' (vv. 14, 15, 16), but his name is not once mentioned, which suggests that the name of Ishmael was not part of the variant of the tradition from which this version came. Now as a matter of fact, the name Ishmael hardly appears in the other story either, but for a rather different reason: in that story he hasn't been born yet! It is only at the very end of that story that an angel appears to Hagar and foretells (16:11, JPS): hinnakh hara w'yoladt ben w'qarat sh'mo yishma‛el ki shama‛ YHWH el ‛onyekh 'Behold you are with child / And shall bear a son; / You shall call him Ishmael, / For the LORD has paid heed to your suffering.'
So both these stories are really about Hagar, the lowly servant of Sarah, who will be the mother of a great people thanks to the fact that her son, who almost died (or might not even have been born), survived through a divine intervention. That boy was the son of Abraham, and it is intimated that Abraham's concern and solicitude for his firstborn (apparently much to his wife Sarah's annoyance) weighed on God's decision to protect Ishmael.
Come to think of it, the parallel (along with the differences, obviously) between this schema and the story of the "sacrifice of Isaac", which we shall be coming to shortly (ch. 22), is also striking. Hagar loves nothing more than her son Ishmael; Abraham loves nothing more than his son Isaac. Both find themselves with their beloved sons in an inhospitable place (Hagar in the wilderness, Abraham on a mountain), in a situation where the boy comes very close to death. Then an angel appears, speaks words of hope and foretells greatness for the boy and his offspring, and points to the remedy for their immediate problem (in Hagar's case, a well with water; in Abraham's, a ram caught in the thicket). They give thanks to God and name the place where this has happened. In 16:14, Hagar names the well b'er laxay ro'i (perhaps meaning 'Well Of The Living One Who Sees Me', cf. EF). In 22:14, Abraham names the place where he almost sacrificed Isaac YHWH yir'e, i.e. 'YHWH Sees'. Even the names are similar! Even though both stories focus on the fate of the sons (and they are both Abraham's sons), dramatically these are really chiefly stories about the figures of Hagar and Abraham, respectively, and about God's protection of them, sending angels to avert catastrophe with the same message in both cases: "Don't give up!"
Literalists must contend with some difficulties of chronology surrounding this passage, which clearly depicts little Ismael as a baby at the time of the action (try depositing a thirsty adolescent under a bush in the middle of the wilderness), and yet he was thirteen already when he was circumcised (17:25), and that was well before the glint in old Abraham's eye (or rather, the courteous smile when he looked up and greeted three travellers who predicted Isaac's birth a year thence, a remark which made Sarah laugh, remember). We are assured by those with patience to do the sums that if you take all the age indications into account (remember that Abraham was 100 when Isaac was born), that makes Ishmael sixteen years old at the time. How did old Abraham have the strength to get the lad onto poor Hagar's back (see v. 14)?? Here CB has a point when he tries to take a sensible approach: "If we had to take Genesis as a continuous narrative there would be a contradiction, but all difficulty disappears when we realize that the statements as to the age of the patriarch belong to a different story."
21:1
The two halves of this verse form an obvious parallellism, a BH poetic device:
waYHWH paqad et sara ka'asher amar
wayá‛as YHWH l'sara ka'asher dibber
'Now YHWH took account of Sara as he had said,
YHWH dealt with Sara as he had spoken' (EF)
wYHWH paqad et sara
The meaning of the verb p-q-d is a complicated matter. CHALOT gives the following glosses just for the qal form: 'to miss (someone), make a search, have a look, hunt up, seek out, take care of, long for, call up, muster, entrust, commission, appoint, call (someone) to account, avenge, put (something) away, list by name', all in addition to the meaning obviously intended here which occurs when the verb's subject is God: 'to take care of, take up the cause of.' This clause is translated in KJV 'And the LORD visited Sarah', which is copied by some subsequent translation; this obviously must have been taken from the Vulg. which has visitavit, which in turn I assume was based on the LXX which says epeskepsato, which I suspect might have originally been intended in a different sense from that misread into it by all these subsequent renderings. EAS has 'Yahweh now took note of Sarah', and JPS is similar. I suppose the idea is that God said to himself something along the lines of: "Right, time to do something about poor old Sarah." So he did.
ka'asher amar... ka'asher dibber
(JPS) 'as He had promised', 'as He had spoken' because in 17:16 (JPS) God said to Abraham w'gam natátti mimménna l'kha ben 'I will give you a son by her' (i.e. by Sarah).
21:2 lammo‛ed asher dibber oto elohim
(JPS) 'at the set time of which God had spoken' refers of course to (17:21) lammo‛ed hazze basshana ha'axéret 'at this season next year', (18:10) ka‛et xayya 'next year' and (18:14) lammo‛ed ashuv elékha ka‛et xayya ul'sara ven 'I will return to you at the same season next year, and Sarah shall have a son' (all translations JPS).
21:4 ka'asher tziwwa oto elohim
I.e. exactly as God had commanded Abraham in 17:12 (JPS): uven sh'monat yamim yimmol lakhem kol zakhar 'every male among you shall be circumcised at the age of eight days'.
21:6 tz'xoq ‛asa li elohim kol hasshoméa‛ yitzxaq li
The usual superabundance of excuses for using the verb root tz-x-q surround any mention of the birth of Isaac (yitzxaq). See (once more) my comments on name games. I'm not sure if we can go so far as to read shoméa‛ as a veiled jab at yishma‛el; it does seem a bit of a coincidence...
21:7 mi millel l'avraham
EAS points out that the verb m-l-l 'say, declare' is only used in poetry. One is reminded of the traditional Chanukah song: mi yemallel g'vurot yisra'el, otan mi yimne. This is the only occurrence of the verb in the whole Torah; it occurs in just four verses in other parts of the Tanakh.
21:9 m'tzaxeq (and following verses)
The piel of tz-x-q, used here, means 'to joke, play, amuse oneself, etc.' (CHALOT). The JPS translation of the verse is thus: 'Sarah saw the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham playing.' So also the LXX (idousa de Sarra ton huion Agar tês Aiguptias... paizonta) and the Vulg. (cumque vidisset... ludentem). That is, m'tzaxeq means 'playing'. It does not, apparently, mean 'mocking' as in the KJV and translations that follow suit, or RV with se burlaba; it doesn't even mean 'laughing', an apparent attempt to "compromise" while still leaving the door open to negative interpretations of what Sarah saw Ishmael do in this scene (ESV, EF). The LXX adds ...meta Isaak tou huiou autês 'with her son Isaac', which confirms that the translators were clearly thinking of them playing, not acting nastily, but it looks like an addition. Thus, modern commentators seem to agree that the unwarranted interpretation of m'tzaxeq as 'mocking' distorts the text and should be removed. Speiser thinks this insinuation was borne of a desire to put Sarah in a better light by giving her a cause for grievance, but the real narrative seems to have the intention of making the situation far more subtle: Ishmael has not wronged Isaac but Sarah is troubled by seeing him play (by the side of her own son, we may probably assume) because she is anxious to reaffirm the difference in status between them. And she makes herself perfectly clear when she speaks to Abraham about it (v. 10, JPS): she says garesh ha'ama hazzot w'et b'nah ki lo yirash ben ha'ama hazzot ‛im b'ni ‛im yitzxaq 'Cast out that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.' That was the problem; it wasn't about "Ishmael mocking"; let's be clear. Now morally, we may well think that that perhaps does not put Sarah in the most flattering of lights. But in terms of life it is believable, and in terms of character it turns Sarah into a real, three-dimensional character, no longer a cartoon figure in a Victorian children's story. No wonder Abraham is unhappy about Sarah's attitude (v. 11), but what can he do? He is caught in the middle and hesitant about how to handle this growing feud between two headstrong women - which in turn makes him a little more rounded as a literary creation too! In the end, it is God who steps in, has a word with Abraham and puts his divine foot down, and the deal he offers Abraham (vv. 12-13) is this: don't worry about Ishmael, do as Sarah says because after all Isaac is the one who's going to inherit the business, but I'll make sure (since I'm God) that Ishmael doesn't get such a raw deal, he'll do alright for himself too - I promise. And we readers of Genesis are the winners here because we gain a far superior piece of literature by it than the shoddy moralizing pamphlet that is the product of changing playing to mocking.
21:11 ‛al odot b'no
The complex preposition ‛al odot means 'on account of'; it occurs twice more in Gen. (21:25, 26:32).
21:14 sam ‛al shikhmah
EAS points out that we should not think of shikhmah as literally 'her shoulder', but rather think of her carrying these things on her back. The word translates 'back' when applied to animals, so this is perfectly reasonable.
21:17 wayyishma‛ elohim
Literally 'God heard', this is understood in the sense of 'God heeded' but is also, without any doubt, a nod towards the name game for yishma‛el interpreted to mean 'God hears.'
hanná‛ar
The meaning of ná‛ar is 'lad', but what age range can it cover? A very wide one, it seems. For the benefit of anyone still pulling their hair out over the vexed question of how old Ishmael could have been in this story, CB points out that in Exodus the term will be used of Moses at the age of three months (Exod. 2:6, JPS): wattiftax wattir'éhu et hayyéled w'hinne ná‛ar bokhe 'When she opened it, she saw that it was a child, a boy crying.'
21:20 rove qashat
This is obscure in the H, but is usually assumed to mean that he became a skilled bowman. Perhaps a subtle textual irony might have been inserted here: he was to grow up to be a bowman, and back in v. 16, where a variety of ways were available to describe Hagar choosing a place to sit at some distance from her baby, the phrase chosen was harxeq kimTaxawi qéshet 'a bow-shot away.' Let us take note: the text of Genesis, while based on popular oral tradition, is nonetheless exquisitely constructed; these little things do not happen by chance.
21:20 wayyéshev b'midbar paran
Paran was the area to the west of Edom (south of Canaan).
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