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Genesis

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Hagar and the Birth of Ishmael

Chapter 16

1 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had not given birth to any children, but she had an Egyptian servant named Hagar. 2 So Sarai said to Abram, “Since the Lord has prevented me from having children, please sleep with my servant. Perhaps I can have a family by her.”⁠ Abram did what Sarai told him.⁠ 3 So after Abram had lived in Canaan for ten years, Sarai, Abram’s wife, gave Hagar, her Egyptian servant, to her husband⁠ to be his wife.⁠ 4 He slept with Hagar, and she became pregnant. Once Hagar realized she was pregnant, she despised Sarai. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “You have brought this wrong on me! I gave my servant into your embrace, but when she realized that she was pregnant, she despised me. May the Lord judge between you and me!” 6 Abram said to Sarai, “Since your servant is under your authority, do to her what is right in your eyes22.”⁠ Then Sarai treated Hagar harshly, so she ran away from Sarai.⁠ 7 The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring of water in the wilderness—the spring that is along the road to Shur.⁠ 8 He said, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”⁠ She replied, “I’m running away from my mistress, Sarai.” 9 Then the angel of the Lord said to her, “Return to your mistress and submit to her authority. 10 I will greatly multiply your descendants,” the angel of the Lord added, “so that they will be too numerous to count.”⁠ 11 Then the angel of the Lord said to her, “You are now pregnant and are about to give birth to a son. You are to name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard your painful groans.⁠ 12 He will be a wild donkey of a man. He will be hostile to everyone, and everyone will be hostile to him. He will live away from his brothers.” 13 So Hagar named the Lord who spoke to her, “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “Here I have seen one who sees me!”⁠ 14 That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi. (It is located between Kadesh and Bered.) 15 So Hagar gave birth to Abram’s son, whom Abram named Ishmael.⁠ 16 (Now Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar gave birth to Ishmael.)

Texts in conversation

Compare Genesis 16:6 and Exodus 1:11

Hebrew Bible

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Summary

Genesis 16 describes Sarai oppressing Hagar with the same language used for Pharaoh’s oppression of Israel in Exodus. This ironically puts Sarai in the role of Pharaoh, turning the matriarch into a figure of oppression while Hagar represents Israel.

Passages

Genesis 16:6

Hebrew Bible
5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “You have brought this wrong on me! I gave my servant into your embrace, but when she realized that she was pregnant, she despised me. May the Lord judge between you and me!” 6 Abram said to Sarai, “Since your servant is under your authority, do to her what is right in your eyes22.” Then Sarai treated Hagar harshly, so she ran away from Sarai. 7 The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring of water in the wilderness—the spring that is along the road to Shur.
750–400 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Genesis

Exodus 1:11

Hebrew Bible
10 Come, let’s deal wisely with them. Otherwise they will continue to multiply, and if a war breaks out, they will ally themselves with our enemies and fight against us and leave the country.” 11 So they put foremen over the Israelites to oppress them with hard labor. As a result they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. 12 But the more the Egyptians oppressed them, the more they multiplied and spread. As a result the Egyptians loathed the Israelites,
750–400 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Exodus

References

"... When Abram removes himself from the fray, Sarai takes her anger out on Hagar. Sarai brutalizes Hagar. The standard translations do not capture the physical violence that is represented by this verb, ’-n-h. In fact, Sarai’s oppression of Hagar in Genesis 16:6 is the same as Egypt’s oppression of Israel in Exodus 1:11, ultimately leading to God’s liberating intervention. This is one of a series of inverted parallels between the stories of Hagar’s sojourn with Sarai and Abram and Israel’s sojourn in Egypt ..."
Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2017), 42.
"... The affliction of the Israelites by their Egyptian slave owners touched … the transcendental part of their being, their dignity, their persons. It represented a degradation of the human being, a seizure as it were of the divine image in the person ... Therefore, the oppression or exploitation [conveyed by ענה] is accompanied by human degradation and humiliation. It is precisely this oppression reaching to the innermost self that moves the God of the Hebrews ... furthermore, ענה is the same verb used to describe Shechem’s rape of Dinah (Genesis 34:2), Ammon’s rape of Tamar (2 Samuel 13:22), and the rape of the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19:24). By using the Hebrew verb ענה, the text paints a graphic picture of Sarah’s deliberate, brutal, and violent oppression of Hagar ..."
A. Rebecca Basdeo Hill and Lee R. Martin, “Seeing and Hearing Hagar: An Affective Reading of Genesis 16,” IDS 58.1 (2024): 1–7.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Genesis 16:6 and Exodus 1:11

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