Father Abraham

 

Genesis 21:8-21

June 21, 2026

 

The child grew and was weaned, and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, "Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac." The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, "Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring." So Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.

When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot, for she said, "Do not let me look on the death of the child." And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. And God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, "What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your 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 gave the boy a drink.

God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

*************************

 

            There’s some background to today’s reading from Genesis.  Last week we heard about the birth of Isaac to Sarah and Abraham when he was a hundred years old, and the passage for this morning refers to that.  However, this episode involves two other people affected by Isaac’s birth.  They are Sarah’s slave-woman Hagar and Hagar’s young son Ishmael.

            Now, after Abram and Sarai had left their settled life in Haran on the strength of God’s promise that he would make them the ancestors of a great nation that would fill the land God showed them, there came a time when it became clear that nothing was happening for them in the obstetrics department.  Sarah was no longer of child-bearing age.  After considerable agonizing over the prospects, she developed a plan and convinced Abraham to go with it.  He fathered a child with her maid, Hagar, with the understanding that if she had a son (as she did), he would be treated as Abraham’s legitimate heir.

            There’s a whole lot here that is questionable, but in that setting, where polygamy was accepted, this at least meant there was some level of consent involved.  But it also raised the issue afterward of the relative status of Sarah and Hagar, one the acknowledged wife and the other the mother of his child.  After the birth of Ishmael, Hagar began to get “uppity”.  Looking ahead, it was becoming clear that there would be an eventual conflict when either Abraham or Sarah died – remember, they are both north of eighty at this point.  How would Isaac be protected?  And hadn’t God’s miraculous intervention to bring about his birth shown that Isaac, not Ishmael, was the chosen one? 

            I want to put in a good word here for monogamy and for marital fidelity.  I want to put in a good word for adoption.  I want to put in a good word for not ending up in these situations to begin with.  Don’t think they don’t happen.  Slavery, whether in the ancient world or in the U.S., made these matters more complicated.  Thomas Jefferson is by now mostly acknowledged to have had a longtime extramarital arrangement with a black woman named Sally Hemmings – who may have been his deceased wife’s half-sister by her father.  Even without slavery, in our own day you might know Lyle Lovett’s song “Friend of the Devil” that has the words,

“I’ve got a wife in Chino, and one in Cherokee.

The first one says she has my child, but it don’t look like me.”

 

            So, getting back to the Bible, you can see Sarai’s worries were not totally unreasonable.  Her solution, though, was unjust to Ishmael and possibly punitive to Hagar who had not really had a choice in any of this to begin with.

"Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac."  [Genesis 21:10]

Abraham was caught in the middle. (And, yes, it was as much his fault as anyone else’s.)

“The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son.” [Genesis 21:11]

Notice the wording here: “his son.” Which son was that?  No matter which path he took, he would endanger a son.

“But God said to Abraham, ‘Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.’" [Genesis 21:12-13]

But what about Hagar?

            How can her story not rip your heart out? Abraham tried to salve his conscience a little bit by sending her off with some bread and water.  That’s pretty meagre child support, and ran out quickly. 

“Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot, for she said, ‘Do not let me look on the death of the child.’ And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept.” [Genesis 21:14-16]

God intervened.  God extended the promises made to Abraham to her and to Ishmael, though they would play out in a different way.  Isaac and his own descendants would still inherit the blessing, but Ishmael was also under God’s care.

            Part of that care, I believe, is that once they were grown up neither Isaac nor Ishmael let the enmity between their mothers define their relationship to their father or to one another.  That doesn’t always happen.  Relationships among half-siblings can be complicated, and you can count on it that Isaac and Ishmael her different versions of the same events as they grew up.  But there seems to have been communication between them and some sort of understanding and respect.  Genesis 25:8-10 says:

“Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people.  His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, east of Mamre, the field that Abraham purchased from the Hittites.  There Abraham was buried, with his wife Sarah.”

That last bit must have been hard on Ishmael.  Where was his own mother buried?  We don’t know – but it was not with his father.

            These are emotionally complicated matters, and one thing that we see is that they don’t all resolve easily and that they leave us with the awareness to be careful about putting anybody on a pedestal or tearing them down too quickly.  Our lives may send ripples across generations. That’s true in both good and bad ways.  There are times that God steps in and helps the helpless but it’s on us not to create those situations.  There are more lessons in this incident than I’ve touched on, and that’s one of the wonders of these accounts.

            The Bible has much more to tell us about Abraham’s life, and the life of his family, and we’ll be looking at that in upcoming weeks but, that said, this piece of it is probably enough to think about on Fathers’ Day.