The Story of Hagar (Pt. 1)
On Otherness and Resemblance
Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian slave whose name was Hagar, and Sarai said to Abram, “You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my slave; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife. He went in to Hagar, and she conceived, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. Then Sarai said to Abram, “May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my slave to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me!” But Abram said to Sarai, “Your slave is in your power; do to her as you please.” Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she ran away from her (Genesis 16:1-6 NRSVUE).
At the very beginning of Abram’s story in the book of Genesis, God gives a command to Abram out of the blue while he and his wife Sarai were living in Haran (modern-day Turkey). “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:1-3 NRSVUE). Having grown up in a family of worshipers of other gods (see Joshua 24:2) and perhaps unfamiliar with this new divinity, Abram was chosen to be an instrument of blessing to all families of the earth. His obedience involved the pain of leaving his country, his family, and his home.
As Abram and Sarai (and all the members of their household) journeyed “by stages to the Negeb” (Genesis 12:9), they experienced a famine that forced them to seek refuge in Egypt—which is perhaps where Sarai acquired Hagar, an enslaved Egyptian woman. (Egypt is consistently associated with both refuge and slavery throughout the biblical text.) Immediately preceding the first mention of Hagar, God speaks to Abram again, this time appearing in a vision. God makes and ritually seals a promise that Abram will have a biological heir, and that his descendants will inherit a large swath of land in the Near East: “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites” (Genesis 15:18-21).
The text repeatedly notes that Hagar belongs to Sarai, not to Abram. Sarai’s importance in the narrative (and perhaps even in her own eyes) owes to her marriage to Abram, through whom God has promised that all the families of the earth will be blessed; Hagar, as an enslaved woman, is of no importance. But Sarai forcibly draws Hagar into the story by giving her to Abram “as a wife” in order to produce a child whom Abram and Sarai would then claim as their own (v. 3). Hagar had no choice in the matter. She was used as a means to the end of a biological heir; her own story–her desires, hopes, longings—were irrelevant to the couple, disregarded. In modern parlance, we call this “rape”; Abram raped Hagar, and Sarai was complicit.
So it is no wonder that when Hagar becomes pregnant—when it is clear that she has begun to carry Abram’s child in her womb—she looks at Sarai “with contempt” (v. 4). The dynamics of the relationship triangle have dramatically shifted. Precisely through being exploited by Sarai, she was now obtained a measure of importance—and become a rival. She is now not merely a slave, but the bearer of an heir, and it behooved Sarai to treat her more gently than perhaps she had previously treated her before if she wanted a healthy child. Sarai was more than willing to take advantage a young Egyptian woman, but the moment her role as a mother gave her a sense of dignity, it became a threat, a painful reminder of her own barrenness. Now that Hagar, as a mother of the unborn heir, would need to be treated with special tenderness, Sarai perhaps saw all the tenderness she had never experienced.
Hagar was given by Sarai to Abram “as a wife,” but now the resemblance between the two women (or between the motherhood of the one and the longing for motherhood of the other) was too much for Sarai to bear; there could be no shared experience, no solidarity between mistress and slave.
Sarai chooses not to confront Hagar, and confronts Abram instead, cursing him as if she was without blame for the situation in which she had found herself: “May the wrong done to me be on you” (v. 5)! Abram responds simply, matter-of-factly, seemingly unbothered: “Your slave is in your power; do to her as you please” (v. 6). Abuse is implied, whether verbal or physical. Sarai then treats Hagar “harshly,” with such an intensity that Hagar evidently thinks it better to chance survival in the unforgiving wilderness (and potentially even worse treatment if she is caught fleeing her mistress) than to remain in the relative safety and security of the camp (v. 6).
And so the story so far involves three home-leavings: the first, Abram leaving his home in obedience to God and in anticipation of a promise, the second, Hagar leaving her home in Egypt against her will to be enslaved by Sarai, and the third, Hagar leaving what had become her home (however dysfunctional) in order to escape slavery and abuse, seemingly with no expectation of divine aid. Viewing these three home-leavings side-by-side, we start to see the resemblance between Hagar and Abram, too: Abram had left his country, his family, his home—even his former religious tradition. He knew the pain of leaving a community behind, even in his case it was voluntary.
Both Abram and Sarai were unwilling to see themselves in Hagar, and this enabled their dehumanizating treatment of her. In what ways do we too refuse to see ourselves in the other, and so mistreat them?