Contemplating Sarai and Hagar – Did They Warn Us?

I think the story of Avram’s women in the Book of Genesis was warning us, and we have yet to pay attention to any of it.

I’ve written before that I have long felt that Sarai and Hagar should have ditched Abe (with alimony, of course), and raised their children together.  Now let’s take this farther.

Sarai was getting up there in years, and had not yet had any children.  Back in those days, a lack of fertility was always considered the woman’s fault.  (If my late friend Joe Charny were here, he would mention his uncle Charles Charny, who was a physician noted for putting forth the groundbreaking notion that sometimes men are the infertile individuals.  Women’s rights advocates appreciated Uncle Charlie, but that was in the twentieth century.  Let’s get back to 3,751 years ago.)

In Genesis 16, Sarai seems to be fairly well frustrated.  She tells her hubby Avram, then 86 years old, that “the Lord has kept me from bearing.”  She placed the responsibility directly on God!  Since she knew that Avram was meant to go forth and begin a nation, the frustration must have been pretty heavy.  So Sarai took a notion to make her maid a surrogate.  She suggested, “perhaps I shall have a son through her.”

Note that she said “a son.”  And she meant the son to be her own!  Girls were not considered sufficient to carry forth family legacy:  imagine how much more frustrated Sarai might have been had she actually gotten pregnant and it turned out to be a girl!  Meanwhile, either way, she expected the surrogate’s baby to be hers, as an extension of being Abe’s.

Abe was a good husband (you may roll your eyes), and “heeded” Sarai’s request:  Sarai gave him her maid, Hagar – the story notes she was an Egyptian – as a concubine.  Hagar conceived, and the Book tells us that when Hagar realized her condition, Sarai was lowered in Hagar’s esteem.  The omniscient narrator doesn’t say how Hagar conveyed that to Sarai, but Sarai knew and went right ahead and accused Abe of this wronging.

She said to her husband, “The wrong done me is your fault!  I myself put my maid in your bosom; now that she sees she is pregnant, I am lowered in her esteem.  The Lord decide between you and me!”

What on earth did she mean by that?  “The Lord decide between you and me!”  Sounds like divorcing words to me.  Maybe she was saying, “Both of us won’t be starting this religion, it’s you or me, Bub!  We shall ask God which!”

It is fairly easy to understand Sarai’s exasperation with a gloating maidservant.  Sarai could not have known how she would feel once the deed had been done.  She was doing this for Abe!   She could not have known how Hagar would feel, either.  There were no self-help books back then, no Jewish Fertility Foundation, and no psychiatrists.  Here was Sarai, all frustrated and unpregnant, and apparently suffering even more than before.  And her surrogate was not conforming to a helpful role.

Does Abe comfort her?  Does he say, “Now that we know my parts are working, let’s keep trying for our own child”?  No.  Does he ask God what to do?  No.  Does he reaffirm his love for her?  No.  Does he even whisper to her, “She wasn’t even as much fun as you are, and there is more where that came from”?  No.  Abe dumps it all right back on Sarai.  He says, “Your maid is in your hands.  Deal with her as you think right.”  Maybe Abe was washing his hands of responsibility for Hagar?  How cold would that be, to both women!?!

Then, the story says, Sarai treated Hagar harshly, and Hagar ran away.

Now (finally) comes an angel, finding Hagar by a spring in the wilderness.  Hagar tells the angel she is running away, but the angel says that Hagar must go back to Sarai and submit to her harshness.

Again, we ask why?  But we get no direct answer.  (The angel hasn’t visited us.)  But we are about to learn that any official surrogacy for Sarai will be completely out the window.

The angel tells Hagar, “I will greatly increase your offspring, and they shall be too many to count.”  The angel says that she should call the boy Ishmael because God listened to Hagar’s suffering, and that “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.”

I am focusing on this part the most.

Hagar went back.  She knew that this boy was going to be unruly, physically aggressive, sturdy, and strong.  And we know that Hagar didn’t keep things to herself.  The Book says that Abe named the boy Ishmael, so Hagar had told him something.  They knew, and now we also know it.

We were warned back then!  Think about it.  Now that the tiny country of Israel is surrounded by dozens of Arab-majority countries, maybe we can look back at this paragraph and realize its importance.  Bear with me.

In the very next section, thirteen years have passed and God tells Avram that Sarai is to become pregnant with a son, and that they will be changing their names to Abraham and Sarah.  God describes great nations that will issue forth from Sarah.  (One wonders why God waited ninety years to say this, and why he was telling Abe instead of Sarai, who had been living with the unrelinquishing surrogate.)

Think about this all.  We Israelites are presumably the protagonists in this story.  But what I am reading is this warning that we never did heed, and a setting of ourselves as runners-up.  First, Sarai in her frustration did things she may have regretted.  (We get no specific indication of regret other than her blaming Abe for causing her hurt feelings, but we do understand that she was fairly well sensitive about matters.)  Then we realize that our people are the result of the child of Abe’s seconds, so to speak, if you will forgive the implicit crassness, which itself would serve to humiliate Sarai, and by extension possibly us.

Sarai can never live up to what she wants, especially after all that Abe has already done to her!  (We won’t even mention God punishing her for laughing at the notion of having a child at her age.)

Of course, later on Abe will be willing to kill Sarah’s only son Isaac without even questioning God about it.  After that, Isaac disappeared from the story line (probably went to live with Hagar and Ishmael, as we know the brothers will be together graveside years later to bury Abe).  Sarah pretty much succumbed to heart failure after all of this trauma.  How on earth did she withstand it all for as long as she did?  And with someone writing it all down for posterity!

I know we revere Sarah as a matriarch, but I think I would revere her more had she stood up against all of this torture.  And even more had she done better by Hagar.  With Hagar.

Siblings are siblings, even if they are surrogates or half-siblings.  Where was the love?  Where is the love now?  Or at least the understanding?

To reiterate, future generations would derive from Hagar and Sarah both, from the offspring of Abe.

So again I say that the women ought to have started the nation(s) by themselves, one family with two brothers thirteen years apart, and two strong women at the helm.  One family filled with love rather than dysfunction.  They could have done this!

The women succumbed to the pressures, and in 3700 years what have the men accomplished?  We were warned:  we are still at war.  What are we learning now?