Hagar & Isaac, Empathy & Solidarity
Sarah saw the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham playing. She said to Abraham, “Cast out that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.” The matter distressed Abraham greatly, for it concerned a son of his. But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed over the boy or your slave; whatever Sarah tells you, do as she says, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be continued for you. As for the son of the slave-woman, I will make a nation of him, too, for he is your seed.”
Early next morning Abraham took some bread and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He placed them over her shoulder, together with the child, and sent her away. And she wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water was gone from the skin, she left the child under one of the bushes, and went and sat down at a distance, a bowshot away; for she thought, “Let me not look on as the child dies.” And sitting thus afar, she burst into tears.
God heard the cry of the boy, and an angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heeded the cry of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him by the hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water, and let the boy drink. God was with the boy and he grew up; he dwelt in the wilderness and became a bowman. He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.
Genesis 21:9–21
Hagar’s story begins a few chapters earlier in Genesis. Abram and Sarai had set out from their home because God promised to make of them “a great nation,” but, aging rapidly and with an increasing household but no heirs, Sarai hands over her maidservant, Hagar, to Abram. “Consort with my maid,” Sarai said, “perhaps I shall have a son through her.” (Genesis 16:2) When Hagar became pregnant, Sarai then complained that she was “lowered in her esteem,” so Abram authorized Sarai to treat Hagar “as you think right.” Harshly. So harshly, she ran away, but an angel found her, communicated a promise from God that echoed the language of God’s covenant with Abram, and convinced her to “Go back to your mistress, and submit to her harsh treatment.” (Genesis 16:9) She returned and bore Ishmael, Abram’s first child (at age 86) whom he raised and, when it became a condition of the covenant, circumcised. Hagar and Ishmael fade into the background for a few chapters as Abram and Sarai get the new names Abraham and Sarah and welcome mysterious visitors who first prophesy Sarah’s imminent pregnancy (which she found to be quite funny) and then went on to survey the corruption in Sodom and Gomorrah. At the prospect of the eradication of those cities, Abraham, with a new gumption and an accusatory tone, questioned God’s plan, saying, “Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?” Abraham convinced God to spare the towns if he could find five innocent men (haggled down from fifty). He couldn’t. God destroyed the towns, sparing only Abraham’s kin (including Lot, whose wife turned to salt and whose daughters got him drunk and raped him — seriously, Genesis 19 is a disturbing episode in sacred narrative). When Sarah has a child (Isaac, whose name is a Hebrew cognate for laughter), the text tells us that Abraham is 100 and Ishmael, circumcised a year earlier, is 14. And then the text turns to Hagar’s eviction.
I was introduced to the story of Hagar through a course on feminist theology, specifically through the theologian Dolores S. Williams, who pioneered womanist theology, which intends “for black women’s experience to provide the lens through which we view sources, to provide the issues that form the content of our theology and to help us formulate the questions we ask about God’s relation to black American life and to the world in general.” (Williams, 29) For Williams and others doing the work of liberation theology, most sources for theological reflection had been identified by and for people seeking to sustain oppressive structures, but in Sisters in the Wilderness, she identifies the ways that we can see the experiences of black women reflected in the story of Hagar.
Hagar’s heritage was African as was black women’s. Hagar was a slave. Black American women had emerged from a slave heritage and still lived in light of it. Hagar was brutalized by her slave owner, the Hebrew woman Sarah. The slave narratives of African-American women and some of the narratives of contemporary day-workers tell of the brutal or cruel treatment black women have received from the wives of slave masters and from contemporary white female employers. Hagar had no control over her body. It belonged to her slave owner, whose husband, Abraham, ravished Hagar. A child Ishmael was born; mother and child were eventually cast out of Abraham’s and Sarah’s home without resources for survival. The bodies of African-American slave women were owned by their masters. Time after time they were raped by their owners and bore children whom the masters seldom claimed — children who were slaves — children and their mothers whom slave-master fathers often cast out by selling them to other slaveholders. Hagar resisted the brutalities of slavery by running away. Black American women have a long resistant history that includes running away from slavery in the antebellum era. Like Hagar and her child Ishmael, African-American female slaves and their children, after slavery, were expelled from the homes of many slave holders and given no resources fo survival. Hagar, like many women throughout African-American women’s history, was a single parent. But she had serious personal and salvific encounters with God — encounters which aided Hagar in the survival struggle of herself and her son. Over and over again, black women in the churches have testified about their serious personal and salvific encounters with God, encounters that helped them and their families survive…
A very superficial reading of Genesis 16:1–16 and 21:9–21 in the Hebrew testament revealed that Hagar’s predicament involved slavery, poverty, ethnicity, sexual and economic exploitation, surrogacy, rape domestic violence, homelessness, motherhood, single-parenting and radical encounters with God…
God’s response to Hagar’s story in the Hebrew testament is not liberation. Rather, God participates in Hagar’s and her child’s survival on two occasions…when Hagar and her child were finally cast out of the home of their oppressors and were not given proper resources for survival, God provided Hagar with a resource. God gave her new vision to see survival resources where she had seen none before. Liberation in the Hagar stories is not given by God; it finds its source in human initiative.” (Williams, 20–22)
Williams sparked my own reflection on where and how I saw myself and my experiences reflected in Hagar’s story, and my focus fell on Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is the one in the story who holds explicit power: he has amassed a large household; he wields influence on his world; he wields influence on his God, whom he challenges repeatedly to make good on God’s end of the covenant deal and whom he accuses of injustice in the face of rampant destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; when his wife can’t bear a child, he takes another woman as surrogate. But when Sarah seeks to subjugate and harm Hagar and later seeks to banish his child and her mother, Abraham steps aside after he hears God affirm that the covenant would continue with Isaac, not Ishmael. He abandons his firstborn son and reinforces Isaac’s privilege.
This isn’t the last time Abraham fails his child. In the next chapter, Abraham nearly sacrifices Isaac on a mountainside, diabolically far away from home and out of sight of their traveling companions. Sarah is left at home, apparently unaware of Abraham’s itinerary. The text is dense and dramatic — the action slows as Abraham instructs his child to carry firewood, the instrument of his own death, as Abraham binds his son, as Abraham picks up a knife to kill his son, stopping only when an angel intervenes with a curious twist of language: “I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from me.” When Abraham looks up, like Hagar, he is given new vision to see a ram, a more fitting sacrifice for a burnt offering.
Christians refer to this story as the Testing of Abraham and interpret it as a heroic demonstration of radical faith, but Jews know it as the Akedah, the binding, which shifts our focus to Isaac. Look at the story through Isaac’s eyes: his elderly father has already banished his older brother, and then he is brought on a journey to make a sacrifice in a remote location, designated by God and only communicated to Abraham; somehow his father coaxes Isaac to be bound, to lay on the impromptu altar his father created; he lay helpless as his father lifted a knife and stopped, only short of plunging it into him. After they return to Beer-sheba, Genesis recounts no further interaction with Sarah — the next we hear of her, she is dead at age 127. We never see Abraham and Isaac interact again. I can’t help but see Isaac as deeply traumatized, as caught in the conflict between his obligation to honor his father and tormented by the abuse at his hands. That trauma, that pain and horror that he inflicted on his own son, is evidence enough that, if this was a test, Abraham failed.
For me, the Akedah is not a story of Abraham’s faith in God or about God at all: it is a cautionary tale. When the angel intervenes and says to Abraham, “I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from me,” there’s an opening, a gap in the text. The angel is speaking, the angel that has been speaking to Abraham throughout the story — the angel knows that Abraham fears God because Abraham did not withhold his son from the angel. The text provides a sidestep to questions of theodicy and God’s actions here, for which this story is typically mined. Instead, the text, like so much sacred scripture, points to our own blindness, our own delusions and constructs that justify and motivate our actions. Anyone who has been on the end of a verbal, emotional, or physical attack motivated by religious faith knows the absurdity of the use of faith to justify aggression. Whether it’s a traumatic encounter like the abuse of a parent or a comical juxtaposition like Mandy Moore’s character in “Saved!” who chucks a Bible at the classmate she ostensibly wants to save, hurling the words with it, “I am filled with Christ’s love!”
When Abraham was given new vision, it was too little, too late. Because of this, the stories of Abraham paint less the portrait of a hero and more the skeleton of a frightened old man, a Lear who grasps for control and strangles his children. Abraham ends a tragic figure, whereas when Hagar was blinded by her suffering and grief, ready to let her child and herself wilt in the desert, an angel gave her new vision, and she restored her life and her child’s. As Williams wrote, “Liberation in the Hagar stories is not given by God; it finds its source in human initiative.” The tragedy, then, is our own.The Abrahams and Sarahs of the world, the owners, the masters who for all their talents and success and impact have enabled the degradation of human dignity.
While I can’t claim to see the world through Hagar’s eyes, I can see it through Isaac’s: I was born and raised with safety and security. I had and have access to options, to choices over which I had control, a sure mark of privilege. But I also grew up bound like Isaac — my binding was the proverbial “closet,” and I have known the vitriol of religiously motivated hatred and violence. I have been spit on; things have been thrown at me; I was pushed and threatened; I have been driven to desperate measures, blinded by my own pain and isolation. When I performed with the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus in Poland, I experienced death threats and witnessed protesters, driven by their faith and cultural allegiances, hurl cruel and vile accusations at me. For many years, I left part of myself at the door on the way into work for fear of being fired or bringing shame and pressure to my school. I hesitated to identify my sexual orientation. I deepened my voice and, while I never strived to be “str8,” I kept a close check on my mannerisms and gestures. I still feel unsafe when I’m “the only one” in a room, but like Isaac, I survived and I could walk away. When I feel unsafe, I can leave. When I felt a crisis of conscience working in Catholic schools, I could find another job. While under threat in Wroclaw, a ring of armed Polish police accompanied us to the concert hall and protected us.
I don’t claim that any of this is equivalent to what other people suffer, and I don’t intend to compete for the title of “suffered the most” or “most woke.” Instead, my “Isaac experience” is a resource for empathy and a motivator to stand in solidarity. It’s not a motive to speak for Hagar but a reminder to listen to her, to make room for her, to protect her. It’s a source of strength that I can share, with a hope that she’ll reciprocate with her own strength when I am facing other oppressions. It’s a reminder that my experience, my worldview, is incomplete, limited in so many ways, and any search for truth and justice and meaning in my life relies on earning a new vision, on communicating with empathy, and on demonstrating my solidarity.
References to Delores S. Williams are from Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993/2013).
References to Genesis are from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985).
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