Historically, as we saw in chapter 5, it had a fateful afterlife. Paul, in the epistle to the Romans, performs a second reversal, arguing that it is the younger religion, Christianity, that has replaced the elder, Judaism, as heir to the covenant. In Islam the story was turned around yet again, in a different way, saying that it was Ishmael who was chosen, not Isaac. He, after all, was the first of Abraham’s children to be circumcised and carry the sign of the covenant. Muslims accused Jews of falsifying the biblical text, rewriting it to make Isaac the hero. Once these faiths had taken the decision to see themselves as heirs of the Abrahamic covenant, re-reading was inevitable. One might call it the revenge of the rejected.
But all this is on the surface. If we now peel away the layers of this complex and subtle text, we will discover another story altogether. We will discover how the rabbis heard discordant notes in the narrative, and realised that it is conveying a different and surprising message. Only a superficial reading yields the conclusion: Isaac chosen, Ishmael rejected. In fact, at this strategic point, the first generational succession in the Abrahamic covenant, the Hebrew Bible contains not only a narrative but also a counter-narrative.
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The first thing to note is the extraordinary length to which the text goes to insist that Ishmael will be blessed by God. This is stated four times, the first and last to Hagar, the second and third to Abraham himself.1 The first occurs when Hagar, still pregnant, flees into the desert:
Then the angel of the Lord said to her, ‘Return to your mistress and submit to her authority.’ The angel added, ‘I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count.’ (Gen. 16:9–10)
This repeats to Hagar the promise God made to Abraham, that his children would be too numerous to count (Gen. 15:5). The handmaid will be blessed just as Abraham, the ‘knight of faith’, will be.
On the second occasion God speaks to Abraham:
‘As for Ishmael, I have heard you. I have blessed him and will make him fruitful and will multiply him exceedingly. He will be the father of twelve rulers, and I will make him into a great nation.’ (Gen. 17:20)
Again the language is suggestive. The promise of ‘twelve rulers’ reminds us of Jacob’s twelve sons, each of whom becomes a tribe. The phrase ‘a great nation’ echoes God’s promise to Abraham (12:2), as does the doubled ‘greatly, greatly’ (17:2, 6). Abraham is being promised by God that, although Isaac will continue the covenant, Ishmael will, in worldly terms, be no less great, perhaps greater. Certainly he will have a share in Abraham’s blessing.
The third occurs when Sarah proposes sending Hagar and Ishmael away. God says to Abraham:
‘Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that descendants will bear your name. I will make the son of the maidservant into a nation also, because he is your offspring.’ (Gen. 21:12–13)
God recognises that Ishmael remains Abraham’s son and will be blessed accordingly. The text makes a fine distinction between biological and ascribed identity. Ishmael, says God to Abraham, ‘is your offspring’, while Isaac will be ‘called your offspring’. The former promises worldly greatness, the latter covenantal responsibility.
The final scene recapitulates the setting of the first. Once again we are in the desert, with Hagar running out of water. Her son Ishmael is about to die:
God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar and said to her, ‘What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the cry of the boy where he is. Help the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation’…God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. (Gen. 21:17–20)2
Note first that God does not reject Hagar. He hears and heeds her distress. He saves her and Ishmael from death. Next, he repeats to Hagar what he had already said to Abraham, that Ishmael will become ‘a great nation’. Third, note the name the child bears. Ishmael means ‘God has heard’, the name the angel had commanded Hagar to give him, ‘for God has heard of your misery’ (16:11). It turns out that what we have here is not a simple drama of choice and rejection at all. Isaac has been chosen for a specific destiny, but Ishmael has not been rejected – at least not by God.
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Next, we note the characterisation of the key figures, especially Abraham and Sarah. No reader can fail to sense the harsh light in which Sarah is portrayed in her relationship with Hagar and Ishmael. Having proposed the idea of Hagar sleeping with Abraham, she later blames Abraham: ‘You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering’ (16:5). There is nothing in the narrative to suggest this was in fact the case. To the contrary, Abraham seems caught helplessly in the tension between the two women.
The Hebrew text uses a significant word to describe Sarah’s treatment of Hagar. She ‘afflicted’ her. The Hebrew verb is the same as will later be used to describe the Egyptians: they ‘afflicted’ the Israelites (Exod. 1:11–12). It also appears in Deuteronomy in the text of remembrance to be recited by the Israelites on bringing firstfruits to the Temple (‘The Egyptians ill-treated and afflicted us…and God saw our affliction, toil and oppression’, Deut. 26:6–7). Hagar was herself an Egyptian (Gen. 16:3). There is a subtle hint here that to some degree the experience of the Israelites at the hands of the Egyptians will mirror the Egyptian Hagar’s experience at the hands of Sarah. This too is surprising, and qualifies the simple stereotype: Israelites good, Egyptians bad.
Later, when Sarah insists that Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael away, she becomes dismissive: ‘Send this slave woman away with her son, for this slave woman’s son shall not be an heir with my son Isaac’ (Gen. 21:10). Not only does she not dignify either mother or child by calling them by name; her language has changed since the earlier scene. Then she called Hagar a ‘maid’ (shifchah). Now she has become ‘a slave’ (amah).
The most enigmatic feature of the text is what exactly provoked Sarah’s anger at the feast for Isaac’s weaning. The text states that she saw Ishmael metzachek, translated above as ‘mocking’, but which literally means ‘laughing’. The verb z-ch-k is a recurring motif in the story of Abraham and Sarah. It appears seven times in the narrative,3 and in the Pentateuch the sevenfold repetition of a word is always significant. It signals a keyword around which the text is thematised.4 Abraham ‘laughs’ when he hears the news that he and Sarah will have a son (17:17). So does Sarah (18:12), for which she is rebuked by God. The name Isaac itself means ‘he will laugh’. When he is born, Sarah says, ‘God has given me laughter, and everyone who hears this will laugh for me’ (21:6). It has a whole range of senses, from joy to disbelief to disdain. In a later chapter it even has sexual undertones, ‘acting familiarly’ (26:8). At this point the text is deliberately ambiguous, leaving it to us, the readers, to decide whether Sarah is right to take offence (Ishmael is mocking) or wrong (he is sharing in the general celebration).
The portrait of Sarah in these scenes is so unsympathetic that the thirteenth-century Spanish commentator Nahmanides writes about the first episode in which Sarah mistreats Hagar, causing her to flee:
Our mother [Sarah] transgressed by this affliction, and Abraham did likewise by permitting her to do so. And so God heard her [Hagar’s] affliction and gave her a son who would be ‘a wild donkey of a man’, to afflict the seed of Abraham and Sarah with all kinds of affliction.5
This is a most unusual comment in two respects. First, the medieval Jewish commentators – Nahmanides among them – were loath to criticise the patriarchs and matriarchs, and almost always interpreted the text to cast them in the best possible light. This criticism is therefore exceptional. Even more so is the implication he draws from it. He is saying that Sarah’s mistreatment of Hagar was a reason why Sarah’s children would one day be persecuted by the descendants of Hagar, that is, by the people of Islam.
Spanish Jewry had suffered from Islamic persecution, especially after the rise of the Almohads in the twelfth century. This had forced the family of Nahmanides’ great predeces
sor, Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) to flee from Cordoba in 1148, wandering for several years before settling in Fostat, Egypt. Jews, like Muslims themselves, identified Ishmael as the precursor of Islam. Nahmanides’ comment is thus pointedly self-critical. Do not believe, he is telling his Jewish readers, that we are entirely without blame.
The portrayal of Abraham is more complex. It was not he but Sarah who proposed having a child by Hagar. Yet once Ishmael is born, he is attached to him. He is acutely distressed when God first tells him that his mission will be continued by Isaac, not Ishmael: ‘Abraham said to God, If only Ishmael might live in Your presence!’ (Gen. 17:18). Later, when Sarah insists that he send the boy away, we read, ‘The matter distressed Abraham greatly because of his son’ (21:11). Abraham accedes to Sarah’s request, the first time of his own accord, the second at God’s insistence: ‘In all that Sarah says to you, listen to her voice’ (21:12). Yet the love between father and son is unmistakable. As we will soon see, this theme was taken much further by rabbinic Midrash.
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What of the emotional tonality of the Hagar-Ishmael episodes?6 One feature is particularly noticeable. In general, the Hebrew Bible is highly reticent in telling us about people’s emotional states. We do not know, for example, what Noah’s reaction was when he heard that all life was about to be destroyed by a flood, or Abraham’s feelings when told to leave his land, birthplace and father’s house. By contrast, both scenes involving Hagar are etched with drama. The first paints a vivid scene of Hagar alone in the desert, close to despair, then comforted by an angel. The second is unmatched for its emotional intensity.
To understand the significance of this, we have to realise that Genesis 21, the sending away of Ishmael, is a parallel passage to Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac. In both, Abraham undergoes a trial involving the potential loss of a son. Ishmael and Isaac, the two children, are both only dimly aware of what is happening. In both, they are about to die until heaven intervenes, in the first case by providing a well of water, in the second, a ram to be offered as a sacrifice in Isaac’s place. The similarities serve to highlight the differences.
The story of the binding of Isaac is notable for its complete absence of emotion. God commands, Abraham obeys, Isaac joins him on the journey, Abraham prepares the altar, binds his son and lifts his knife, then an angel says, ‘Stop.’ Throughout the ordeal Abraham says nothing to God except for one word at the beginning and the end: hineni, ‘Here I am’ (22:1, 11).
By contrast, the episode involving Hagar and Ishmael is saturated with emotion. Hagar weeps: ‘Then she went off and sat down nearby, about a bow-shot away, for she said to herself, “Let me not see the child die.” As she sat, she lifted up her voice and wept’ (21:16). Ishmael weeps: ‘God heard the boy crying’ (21:17). There is a pathos here that is rare in biblical prose. There can be no doubt that the narrative is written to enlist our sympathy in a way it does not in the case of Isaac. We identify with Hagar and Ishmael; we are awed by Abraham and Isaac. The latter is a religious drama, the former a human one, and its very humanity gives it power.
None of this is as we would expect. Ostensibly the hero of the story is Isaac. He is the chosen. But our sympathies are not drawn to Isaac, nor, in these episodes at least, to Sarah. Isaac has been singled out to carry the covenantal destiny. God has said so repeatedly. But we are left in no doubt that Abraham is attached to Ishmael, that our sympathies are drawn to him and Hagar, that Ishmael will be blessed, that God hears his tears and is ‘with him’ as he grows up. It is not that Ishmael is evil that disqualifies him from being heir to the covenant. The only term that might cast him in a negative light – that he was ‘laughing’ while Sarah was celebrating – is, as we saw, ambiguous.
Why then was Ishmael not chosen? The answer suggested by the text is instructive. It is because, like Esau in the next generation, he has physical strength and cunning. He is ‘a wild donkey of a man, his hand against every man, and every man’s hand against him’ (16:12). Eventually he becomes ‘an archer’ (21:20).
We now begin to sense the subtlety of the biblical narrative. This is not the world of myth with its simple plots and two-dimensional characters. In myth, Ishmael would be a tragic hero, strong, resourceful, combative but defeated by implacable fate. Abraham would have sent him away, fearing that he would one day become a threat. Ishmael might return unexpectedly, killing Abraham not realising that he is his father, and we would then have a biblical version of Oedipus.
Instead – and this is fundamental to understanding Genesis – what we have is a subversion of myth, a consistent frustration of narrative expectation. God’s promise does not come true in the way we expect. Abraham’s fortunes are not suddenly transformed. Promised children, he remains childless. Eventually given a son, he is told by God that this is not the son. Abraham – unlike Laius, Oedipus’ father – does not want to send Ishmael away. He does so against his will. The only vivid image we are given of Ishmael is not as a man of strength, the epic hero, but as a child, abandoned and about to die.
More significantly still, the conflicts in the story are not what they are in myth – between the personal and the impersonal, human aspiration and blind fate, hubris and nemesis. Instead, the conflict is within the minds of the protagonists. Sarah is torn between her desire for a child and her envy of the pregnant Hagar. Abraham is torn between his love of Ishmael and his obedience to God. As Jack Miles puts it, ‘Tanakh [the Hebrew Bible] is more like Hamlet than it is like Oedipus Rex’.7
Myth belongs to a universe bounded by nature. The gods live within, not beyond, the world. What counts in myth is strength, power, force. What makes myth tragic is its realisation that nature ultimately defeats the strongest. We are dwarfed in its presence, undone by its caprice. The choice of Isaac instead of Ishmael has many dimensions, but they all share one feature: they are a refusal to let nature have the final word.
Sarah, like other biblical heroines – Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah and others – is unable naturally to have children. She is infertile, ninety years old and post-menopausal: ‘Sarah had stopped having the periods of women’ (18:11). Nor is destiny conferred by fatherhood as it was in the ancient world, but by motherhood: Ishmael is Abraham’s child but not Sarah’s. It is the latter point – anticipating later Jewish law that Jewish identity is matrilineal, not patrilineal – that is crucial. Most fundamentally, Isaac has none of the attributes of a mythic hero. Unlike Ishmael, he is not strong, physical, at home in the fields and forests. The same contrast will later be played out by Esau and Jacob. Throughout the narrative Isaac remains a shadowy figure, passive rather than active, done-to rather than doing. If, in myth, character is proved in heroic action, Isaac is the non-hero, the figure of quiet obedience who exemplifies Milton’s line, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’8
Intimated here is one of the most striking themes of the Pentateuch. God chooses those who cannot do naturally what others take for granted. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, all promised the land of Canaan/Israel, own none of it and have to beg or pay to bury their dead, pitch their tent or draw water from wells they themselves have dug. Moses, bearer of the divine word, is the man who says, ‘I am not a man of words…I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue’ (Exod. 4:10). Israel is the people whose achievements are transparently God-given. What for others is natural, for Israel is the result of divine intervention. Israel must be weak if it is to be strong, for its strength must come from heaven so that it can never say, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have achieved this wealth for me’ (Deut. 8:17). It is Ishmael’s natural strength that disqualifies him.
Yet Ishmael is not vilified. That is the masterstroke of the narrative. Despite the fact that Abraham, Sarah and Isaac are the heroes of the story as a whole, in the two crucial scenes in the desert our imaginative sympathies are with Hagar and her child. That is what gives the story its counter-intuitive depth.
There is a moral reason for this and it is fundamental. We saw in chapter 2 that viole
nce begins in the in-group/out-group dichotomy. I identify with my side, and am suspicious of the other side. In situations of stress, sympathy for the other side can come to seem like a kind of betrayal. It is this that the Ishmael story is challenging. At the first critical juncture for the covenantal family – the birth of its first children – we feel for Sarah and Isaac. She is the first Jewish mother, and he the first Jewish child. But we also feel for Hagar and Ishmael. We enter their world, see through their eyes, empathise with their emotions. That is how the narrative is written, to enlist our sympathy. We weep with them, feeling their outcast state. As does God. For it is he who hears their tears, comforts them, saves them from death and gives them his blessing. Ishmael means ‘he whom God has heard’.
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Nor is this the end of the story. After the close of the biblical canon, reflection on Israel’s destiny passed from the prophets to the sages, and from revelation to interpretation – the genre known as Midrash through which the sages filled in the many gaps in biblical narrative.9 In the case of Abraham, they noticed several tantalising clues, which eventually led them to piece together an extraordinary sequel to the story. The first clue appears in the announcement of the death of Abraham:
Then Abraham took his last breath and died at a good old age, old and full of years; and he was gathered to his people. His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah near Mamre, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite. (Gen. 25:8–9)
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