By my count, up to this point in Genesis, we've heard the name 'Abram' forty-five times. The name Sarai? Six times. But now is her time in the spotlight. When first we heard that “the name of Abram's wife was Sarai,” the very next line let us know that “she had no child” (Genesis 11:29-30). When the two married somewhere near Ur, neither expected that they'd not be expecting. But a year went by, two years, and Sarai wasn't pregnant. Then Terah had them pack their bags for Harran; but when they got there, still Sarai didn't conceive with Abram. Ah, but then Abram got that stunning call, with a promise that in Canaan he'd at last be blessed (Genesis 12:2-3). God kept talking there to Abram: his seed this, his seed that; Abram must have wondered if there were a hidden meaning. Only once Abram cracked open his despairing heart did a ray of clarifying light fall therein: “One from your own innards, he will be your heir” (Genesis 15:4). And time marched on. Here we are, “after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan” (Genesis 16:3), “and Sarai, wife of Abram, had not birthed for him” (Genesis 16:1). “Sarai was barren” (Genesis 11:30), suffering from primary infertility.
That's a heavy burden for anyone to bear – and common, with about one in seven American couples these days struggling to conceive. The stress of coping with infertility has been known to bring “depression, anger, mood swings, anxiety, guilt, and isolation.”1 It's a safe bet that Sarai has gotten on a first-name basis with all six woes. “The barren womb” is “never satisfied” (Proverbs 30:15-16). She's also no doubt caught glimpses through these years of her husband Abram's anguish, even if he's tried to hide it for her sake (Genesis 15:2). And if infertility is a troubling burden naturally to anybody, it was all the more so in Sarai's world. Although in reality men and women are equally likely to contribute to fertility issues,2 in her world the default assumption was that childlessness was a woman's issue and negated her value. In the ancient world, “infertile marriages ended in divorce” all the time, a prospect which “was devastating for the woman.”3
And in her case, much more was at stake. Sarai's surely heard Abram recount his encounters with his God, so Sarai knows Abram's seed will get the land of Canaan, multiply like the dust, and inherit a future by the terms of a solemn covenant (Genesis 12:7; 13:15-16; 15:13-14). And Sarai knows that this seed, once it's a great nation, has the responsibility to mediate divine blessing to all families of the earth (Genesis 12:2-3). Sarai has an inkling that the fate of the world rests on Abram's seed. So maybe Sarai wonders: Is she in the way of the world's salvation?
Hard-pressed by weights natural, cultural, and covenantal, Sarai has probably long been vexed; maybe she's tried out some of the many medical solutions of the ancient cultures, not that they could've been effective in the slightest.4 But now Sarai is, if we do our math, apparently seventy-five years old. Now, the Bible attributes big lives to our Genesis friends, and we can argue about whether the ages are always literal or not; but biblically, Sarai is now 59% of the way through her natural life (Genesis 23:1), and so now she's hit menopause.5 She's a smart woman; she knows her body. So she declares: “The LORD has restrained me from bearing” (Genesis 16:2). As she sees things, God chose never to open the locked door, and now the chance is gone.6
All this time, it occurs to her, a question has gone unspoken. Abram now knows, since God swore on God's life, that the coming heir must be Abram's biological child (Genesis 15:4). But there's been zero mention of who the mother is to be.7 They've surely always assumed it'd be Abram's life-long wife, but Sarai now sees reason, in the absence of a specific promise to her, whether she fits into that blurry little spot on the covenant. But Sarai is a determined woman; if she can't get through the locked door, she'll throw bricks through the window.
That's why we hear, as this story opens, that “Sarai had a maidservant, an Egyptian, and her name was Hagar” (Genesis 16:1). It's not hard to piece together how she got there. Four chapters earlier, there was a famine, and Abram took Sarai on the run for Egypt (Genesis 12:10). Imagining danger from lustful Egyptian men and their lethal jealousies, Abram talked Sarai into passing herself off as his little sister for his protection (Genesis 12:11-13). A harrowing dalliance with Pharaoh himself, staved off only by the hand of God, led to Sarai's safe return but also the deportation of the pair (Genesis 12:15-20). Yet Pharaoh didn't take back his gifts to Abram, which had included “slaves and maidservants” (Genesis 12:16). Now we get to meet one.8 And the repeated note that Hagar is Egyptian “was that we might refer back to that incident” that brought them together.9 Hagar's Egyptian eyes are a constant reminder. How did Sarai really feel about Abram's plan and its outcome? Hurt, betrayed, used, exploited? Has she forgiven? Or is resentment lurking still in the shadows?
That we don't know, but we do know that Egypt was proverbial for its fertile soil, a reference point for other places that were “well-watered... like the land of Egypt” (Genesis 13:10). It was Egypt's fertile soil that solved their last problem; now Sarai sees Hagar as a portable patch of fertile Egyptian soil,10 which suggests “an easy solution to Sarai's dilemma.”11 Sarai suggests “surrogate motherhood” as the plan.12 Hagar's living womb, a surrogate for Sarai's dead one, will be her brick through the window. “Go in to my maidservant,” she decrees (Genesis 16:2). Abram must inseminate Hagar the old-fashioned way, who, if all goes well, will conceive a child who, while biologically Abram's and Hagar's, will be legally Sarai's. Thus, as Eve was “built” out of the raw matter of Adam's side, Sarai hopes “maybe I'll be built up from her” (Genesis 16:2).13 This procedure of traditional surrogacy “may be the oldest form of assisted reproduction” known to man – or to woman.14
To Sarai, and to Abram too, it all makes perfect sense. The laws they knew often had stipulations where if a man's wife didn't provide him with children, he was entitled to take a secondary wife.15 Archaeologists have dug up Middle Eastern marriage contracts that outright stipulate that if a wife didn't bear her husband a son in a certain number of years, then it was her responsibility to get a slave girl to do the job, and the slave girl's son would count as the son of the first-ranked wife.16 In their culture, this was normal, understandable, ordinary, to use a maidservant as a surrogate; it's almost surprising it's taken them this long to try it.17 And some readers stop with that observation: it was accepted custom, so that's that. But I can't help but wonder: Was this a good idea? Was this a good plan? It might be normal, it might be effective, it might even be the only thing they can do. But does that justify it morally? Does this surrogacy scheme pass ethical muster? Is it wise, is it godly?
The very fact that Sarai's proposed tool is an Egyptian woman – a person, not a thing, though Sarai's forgotten that – should make us pay close attention to how this story compares with the one from four chapters back.18 Then, the problem was an infertile land, and Abram found an Egyptian solution; now, the problem is an infertile body, and Abram's wife finds an Egyptian solution. On the border of Egypt was the first place we heard Abram speak to Sarai; now is the first time we hear Sarai speak to Abram. Both even open with the same words, “Behold, please,” though where Abram invites Sarah to behold her own beauty, Sarai invites Abram to behold her barrenness. In each story, “behold, please,” is followed by a problem and a plan of action. Abram's plan involved obscuring the nature of his relationship to Sarai – and isn't that ultimately what Sarai's plan would do, obscure her wifehood and Abram's husbandhood (Genesis 12:11-13; 16:2)?
Abram, of course, thought his plan was quite crafty: he could outsmart the men of Egypt and leverage their lust to his advantage, all without really surrendering what mattered to him. But Abram hadn't foreseen all the real-life consequences of his choice. When Egypt's king entered the picture, Sarai was just 'the woman' taken into the house of Pharaoh (Genesis 12:15). Sarai thinks her plan very crafty: she can leverage Hagar's Egyptian fertility to her advantage, all without really surrendering what matters to her. But we have to wonder if Sarai's realy foreseen the real-life consequences of her choice after all (Genesis 16:4-5). And the deepest irony is that in Egypt, Sarai was objectified as a thing to be gazed on and owned; hence she was taken, without a voice, and we still haven't resolved how she feels about that. But now she's objectifying Hagar, treating her as a pawn or even a commodity, giving her no voice or choice whether to share her body with the 85-year-old patriarch.19 Sarai is just “repeating the treatment she received at her husband's hands in Egypt,”20 and maybe subconsciously giving Abram “measure-for-measure payback” for having put her in a precarious position then.21
That doesn't look good, but it gets worse. Take away the names, and picture a story where a woman takes and gives something to her man and the man hearkens to the voice of his wife. All those words show up in this passage; they also show up in the Garden. There, the woman took fruit from the forbidden tree, and she offered it to the man (Genesis 3:6), and God charged him with it: “You have hearkened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree” (Genesis 3:17). Now, “Sarai the woman of Abram took” a woman, “and she gave her to Abram her man” (Genesis 16:3), for “Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai” (Genesis 16:2). That can be no coincidence; Sarai and Abram are reenacting the tragedy of Eden.22 Adam tasted the fruit that wasn't his; Abram “went in to Hagar” (Genesis 16:4). His motivation wasn't lust, but to please and appease his wife and assent to her goals.23 So “he went in to Hagar, and she conceived” promptly (Genesis 16:4).
Abram's ploy in Egypt led Egypt's princes setting eyes on Sarai (Genesis 12:14), and after Adam tasted the fruit “then the eyes of both were opened” (Genesis 3:7). The result of this reenactment is that “when Hagar saw that she had conceived, her mistress was lessened in her eyes” (Genesis 16:4). This sparked a fall and a fallout, “a breakdown in the expected relationship dynamics,”24 for which Sarai curses at Abram (Genesis 16:5). Like Eve and Adam (Genesis 3:9-13), now Sarai and Abram play the blame game (Genesis 16:5-6). But we should have seen trouble coming from the story's start, a sentence beginning in Sarai's name and ending in Hagar's, catching Abram literarily between his two women (Genesis 16:1).25 Where Sarai describes her action as having given “my maidservant into your lap” (Genesis 16:5), the narrator describes her giving Hagar “to Abram her husband as a wife” (Genesis 16:3). Now there's a third person in this marriage. Sarai hadn't foreseen Abram's courteous care for Hagar for the sake of his unborn child in her womb. Now she wonders if she's altered their relational dynamic forever.26 In Sarai's eyes, Hagar “had now become her rival wife.”27
As if that weren't enough, “when she saw that she had conceived, I was lessened in her eyes” (Genesis 16:5). Hagar, now functionally a wife of Abram, is no longer looking up at Sarai with reverent fear; she's barely seeing Sarai at all, and when she does, Sarai feels like Hagar is looking down on her, boasting over her as completion to incompletion and as the new to the old. Sarai thinks that Hagar thinks she can stake a claim to be at least Sarai's equal, if not now her social superior in the household. Ancient laws from the time noted how a servant girl who bore her master's children might aspire to equal status with her mistress,28 and sages ranked “a maidservant when she displaces her mistress” on their list of the most intolerable things (Proverbs 30:23). And maybe Hagar now even thinks that, when the baby is born, she can refuse to surrender parental rights to Sarai.29
Now, since Abram had his own tent and Sarai and Hagar each had theirs, Abram could be totally oblivious to all the drama playing out behind his back.30 It's not for nothing that one Jewish philosopher quips that Abram was “clearly inept in the matter of women, wives, and marriage” – a perfect sitcom husband, leaving Sarai to roll her eyes and nag like a sitcom wife.31 This story is a cautionary tale for husbands and wives not to let things fester behind closed doors, and instead to strive for sound communication, for confession, for forgiveness.32 But Abram and Sarai hadn't yet learned that lesson, and from the harshness of Sarai's words to him now, it's obvious there's a long-stewing grievance rendered rancid with age – how Sarai forsook her roots to join Abram's journey, how Sarai risked her purity to save Abram's bacon, how she'd put up with his thoughtlessness, how she'd now swallowed her pride and abased herself in giving him Hagar, and how Abram hadn't safeguarded her status but instead enabled Hagar's seeming threats to Sarai's position and dignity.33 It's little wonder she charges Abram with guilt for the 'violence' or 'savagery' meted out by Hagar's judgmental Egyptian eyes, which have brought back on her the memory also of Egyptian eyes undressing her in an unsafe foreign land.34 If she's being unfair, well, this whole episode is a toxic byproduct of Abram's past missteps, the delayed consequences of the faithlessness without which Hagar wouldn't have been with them to begin with.35
So now Sarai is fed up. She wants Abram to step in as the man of action he's been for others but never for her, and to make his loyalties plain and clear. She wants belated reparations for what he'd talked her into doing for him in Egypt. She wants him to put Hagar back in her place and to fix the situation.36 And she closes her tirade by appealing over her husband's head: “May the LORD judge between you and me!” (Genesis 16:5). Of course, Sarai might regret those words. In Genesis 3, the LORD did judge the situation – that's why Sarai could find herself with so much agony in the quest to conceive in the first place (Genesis 3:16)!
Ultimately, the surrogacy scheme Sarai concocted to implement through Hagar has proven a bit of a boondoggle.37 Sarai acted from a heartfelt desperation that cries out for a compassionate eye, and it worked in the sense that there now exists a magnificently precious unborn child who will be born as an effect of her plan (Genesis 16:15). But the experience has been acid thrown in the face of their marital health; in the end, it will lower Sarai down rather than build her up (Genesis 16:16); and through this ordeal, “the entire household loses.”38 Sarai's plan was “neither necessary nor correct..., not what God willed,”39 but it remains for Abram and Sarai to see what the LORD will judge.
Whatever excuses we might try making for Abram and Sarai, what they've done doesn't at all match a Christian vision of marriage. Building on the Edenic proclamation of humanity as the image of God, Jesus spoke of man and wife as “no longer two but one flesh” (Mark 10:8), while Paul adds that “no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the Church” (Ephesians 5:29). A Christian mentality developed that the marriage union is consummated in an act where husband and wife make “a total and mutual exchange of persons” which activates their unity as one flesh and includes their offering of their fertility to each other; it both unites the couple and invites new life, because it's an earthly mirror of God “who is both one and life-giving.”40 In this mystery, the man and woman acknowledge each other as made in God's image with an irreducible dignity, and at the same time they affirm the equal human dignity of any child whose life the Lord will give as a gift to crown their marital act. And from that vision, from these principles, Christians listened as the Holy Spirit showed the Church how to honor love, honor marriage, and honor life.
But over the past century, that listening has been in free-fall. The churches began to compromise the Christian mentality with a new vision, one that suggested couples could unite as one flesh while actively refusing to offer their fertility, could keep sex's unifying aspect without its procreative dimension. That competing contraceptive mentality is what Planned Parenthood was founded to advance, and in 1965 the Supreme Court (in Griswold v. Connecticut) ripped away the barriers between that mentality and the law, laying precedent for all later decisions redefining marriage and enshrining an alleged right to abort children in the womb. Yet thanks to those first steps of compromise a century ago, many churches took little notice of the foundational change in vision; we certainly didn't. But the few who did notice still warn that a marital act contracepted, rendered deliberately sterile, “undermines the integrity of the gift of self” so that the couple are effectively “lying to each other with their bodies” and, whatever their best intentions may be, “inevitably treat one another as objects to be used rather than as persons to be loved and mysteries to be contemplated.”41
But there's a third vision that's emerged with even less notice, posing (under its guise of pronatalism) as the opposite of the contraceptive vision and making a persuasive plea from a heart of compassion for those burdened not by fertility but by infertility. We now have hopes Sarai couldn't dream of. A modern Sarai, consulting the doctors of today, could make use of our shiny new assisted reproductive technologies. She could have Abram's sperm and her own egg, or sperm or egg cells from a third-party donor, combined in a laboratory through in vitro fertilization; and a few of the resulting embryos, after being screened for health through preimplantation genetic testing, could then be implanted in either the modern Sarai's own womb or that of a gestational surrogate (a modern Hagar). The process seems as if it must work reasonably well, since over a million IVF-conceived babies have been born so far just in this country.42 And it sounds so pro-life that the current president has issued an executive order celebrating it and promising to “ensure reliable access to IVF treatment.”43 (And no wonder, when his wealthiest friend is an enthusiastic user of IVF for producing a multitude of sons with a number of women.)
But this third vision actually isn't so far from the second one. For if the second vision wanted union without procreation, this mentality wants procreation that doesn't proceed from the act that unites man and woman as one flesh, displacing “the way indicated by nature” with “artificial methods of procreation.”44 Even this vision's defenders may freely admit that “our medical technologies have outstripped our cultural understandings” of life and pregnancy and parenthood,45 and notoriously the United States has fewer regulations on assisted reproduction than any other advanced nation on the planet.46 Procreation thereby becomes production, a personal project whereby a Sarai can build herself up using the agency and maybe the matter of others (Genesis 16:2).
In Sarai's day, surrogacy was enabled by slavery. Today, it's more often enabled by the power of the dollar, as commercial surrogacy,47 but Hagar would probably have nodded sadly to one bioethicist's warning that “surrogacy contracts create the conditions for abuse,”48 and to one feminist scholar's objection that the surrogate's “labor is alienated, because she must suppress her emotional ties with her own child... She is degraded, because her independent ethical perspective is... demoted to the status of a cash sum. She is exploited, because her emotional needs and vulnerabilities are not treated as characteristics which call for consideration, but as factors which may be manipulated” for the advantage of others like Sarai and Abram.49 Case in point, various custody battles between surrogates and intended parents, or legal cases of intended parents suing to coerce surrogates into abortions when circumstances change.50
Just like Sarai with Hagar, modern assisted reproduction always “introduces a third person... into the intimacy of marital life,” whether that's a surrogate, a sperm or egg donor, or a lab technician.51 One modern philosopher sees here that in these methods, “the man and woman no longer procreate through the act that is proper to them as man and woman,” and so the intended parents “assume a secondary and inferior role in the procreation of their own children,” effacing their own human dignity.52 No wonder another ethicist's reflections on Genesis led him to conclude that “concubinage and surrogacy are incompatible with marriage rightly understood.”53
Even some secular experts recognize that everyone involved in a child's coming-to-be thereby acquires some non-transferrable obligations of relationship to that child, and that includes sperm and egg donors, surrogates, even the lab techs – obligations which are never honored in these processes as realistically carried out.54 And those who uphold the original Christian vision urge that a child has an even deeper right to be conceived as a fruit of parents' love expressed maritally, and that every child conceived otherwise has been deprived of something he or she had a right to.55 Instead, these processes treat “the child as a product, the result of a project they have undertaken,”56 “like an object of market exchange, something manufactured, sold, and bought.”57 That's a betrayal of each child's “equal personal dignity” by which he or she exists for his or her own sake, not to please his or her manufacturers or sellers or buyers.58
This new vision, as much as the contraceptive mentality it pretends to oppose, feeds on a philosophy of “the freedom of the unencumbered self... for whom relationships are... always instrumental” in “enabling the projects of the will” without concern for “the natural functioning of the organism” of the human body, and its winsome appeals to compassion feed a massive industry that kills more 'excess' embryos than abortion each year (via 'selective reduction') and has another million children lingering in the limbo of the freezer.59 One Lutheran ethicist remarks that once we've separated unity from procreation in marriage and made reproduction no longer the natural outcome of marital love, then “we enter a world in which it is hard not to think of children,” all children, “as products we produce to satisfy our desires,” and “a society that allows itself to begin to think of children this way is one that, over time, may find it difficult to affirm the equal dignity of all of its members. For, after all, some of them exist to satisfy the desires of others.”60 And that is not a pretty picture; it is not a good world we're making.
That's the thing with Hagars new and old, in this sense: they're “fraught with ethical and psychological problems.”61 We need to look at the problems of our day with a Christian vision, not one of its familiar competitors. We need to be ready to say yes to options the world finds unthinkable and no to options the world deems obvious.62 And that means we need a thoughtful faith, a faith that reflects and thinks clearly and doesn't blindly endorse custom in the way that Abram and Sarai did in facing their burden of infertility.
But even had their custom not been unethical (and it was), the root of Sarai's wrong would still have been this: she acted as though God's promise needed her plan, her help, her works. Judging that God had withheld children from her womb, Sarai sought to circumvent the roadblock God had placed; judging that God's promise was imperiled by God's non-provision, Sarai sought to supplement God's work with her own “human resourcefulness”; judging that God's work was waylaid on the road, Sarai sought to hasten it by seizing God's initiative and making things happen her way.63 She and Abram “do not wait for God to fulfill the promise,” but strive “to manufacture an heir” for themselves.64
St. Paul asked the Galatians, who were tempted by a false gospel, whether, “having begun in the Spirit, now in the flesh will you be made complete?” (Galatians 3:3). He wants to know whether they think that their efforts in the flesh, their wit and skill and strength, are what's required to bring God's promises and purposes to pass. Do we expect that, on the foundation of a supernatural faith, we must build with the blocks of nature a fleshly Babel?65 Is it nature that perfects grace, and not the other way around?
That's what the Galatians implied, and it's what Sarai and Abram are here assuming and enacting. Sarai, with her husband meekly following her lead, is trying to perfect faith by a project of flesh rather than yielding to the work of the Spirit.66 The result is a “spiritual disaster” for them, as we can already tell and as the sequels will tend to show.67 Now, in their case, it's one God allowed for a prophetic purpose. The Apostle shows us that “allegorically, these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar” (Galatians 4:24). Hagar's role foreshadows the Old Testament itself. As Sarai tried to solve her plight through the flesh, so Hagar boasts over Sarai in her pregnant flesh, much as the nations were all too often demeaned in Sinai eyes that “boast according to the flesh” and its works of the Law (Romans 2:17-20; 1 Corinthians 11:8). Sinai was bearing fleshly children for slavery because the people became so impatient for the promise that, with Sarai-style initiative, they supplied their own golden calf (Exodus 32:1), and so much of the Law was “added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made” (Galatians 3:19). Hagar shows us that the Old Testament, for all its youth and beauty and vigor and fertility, would not be able to complete what Abram's faith had begun; the Spirit would have to do a new thing.
We know that a new creation has come, because Christ has been born, not to Sarai's handmaid, but to the Lord's – Mary, whose supernatural fertility in virginity was just as initially perplexing to Joseph as Sarai's barrenness in marriage was vexing to Abram. In Christ, those who share the burden of Abram and Sarai can recognize that burden no longer as just a burden but as a cross; and, even as they pursue legitimate medical options for healing, they can raise their cross up with the cross of Christ, embracing it and turning it to profound spiritual good for the sake of others.68 For the bigger catastrophe is not the infertility of the body but the infertility of the soul, a soul that bears no spiritual offspring for its Heavenly Bridegroom. And when we find our souls barren, we have to know that there are no surrogates who can bear for us. There are no techniques by which we can outsource our need for holiness. We must cry out, treating ourselves with salutary spiritual disciplines, and knowing that the flesh can avail nothing here, but the Spirit of God alone can set our longed-for Hagars aside and make us spiritually fertile and fruitful in and for Christ. May he so take away all barrenness of soul from us. Amen.
1 Ioannis E. Messinis, Christina I. Messini, George Anifandis, and Alexandros Daponte, “Infertility,” in Johannes Bitzer and Tahir A. Mahmoud, eds., Textbook of Contraception, Sexual and Reproductive Health (Cambridge University Press, 2024), 253.
2 Ioannis E. Messinis, et al., “Infertility,” in Johannes Bitzer and Tahir A. Mahmoud, eds., Textbook of Contraception, Sexual and Reproductive Health (Cambridge University Press, 2024), 250.
3 Candida S. Moss and Joel S. Baden, Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness (Princeton University Press, 2015), 32, 38.
4 Candida S. Moss and Joel S. Baden, Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness (Princeton University Press, 2015), 63.
5 Augustine of Hippo, Answer to Julian III.11 §22, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/24:351; Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 249-250.
6 Candida S. Moss and Joel S. Baden, Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness (Princeton University Press, 2015), 63.
7 Augustine of Hippo, Answer to Faustus the Manichean 22.32, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/20:320; Stephen K. Ray, Genesis: A Bible Study Guide and Commentary (Ignatius Press, 2023), 157.
8 John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 261.
9 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 38.3, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:357.
10 Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 94.
11 Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 163.
12 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 252.
13 Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 150.
14 Mary Ann Mason and Tom Ekman, Babies of Technology: Assisted Reproduction and the Rights of the Child (Yale University Press, 2017), 133.
15 Laws of Lipit-Ishtar 27-28 and Laws of Hammurabi 144-146, in Writings from the Ancient World 6:31-32, 108-109.
16 Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17 (Eerdmans, 1990), 444; Shaul Bar, Daily Life of the Patriarchs: The Way It Was (Peter Lang, 2015), 40-41.
17 David W. Cotter, Genesis (Liturgical Press, 2003), 103.
18 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 277-278; Joseph McDonald, Searching for Sarah in the Second Temple Era: Images in the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, the Genesis Apocryphon, and the Antiquities (T&T Clark, 2020), 52-53; John C. Lennox, Friend of God: The Inspiration of Abraham in an Age of Doubt (SPCK, 2024), 157-158.
19 Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17 (Eerdmans, 1990), 446; Joseph McDonald, Searching for Sarah in the Second Temple Era: Images in the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, the Genesis Apocryphon, and the Antiquities (T&T Clark, 2020), 54.
20 John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 263.
21 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 278.
22 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 252; James McKeown, Genesis (Eerdmans, 2008), 95; Seth D. Postell, Adam as Israel: Genesis 1-3 as the Introduction to the Torah and Tanakh (Pickwick Publications, 2011); Tremper Longman III, Genesis (Zondervan, 2016), 211; Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 150; John C. Lennox, Friend of God: The Inspiration of Abraham in an Age of Doubt (SPCK, 2024), 158.
23 Didymus the Blind, Commentary on Genesis 16:1-2, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 132:210; John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 38.5, in Fathers of the Church; A New Translation 82:359; Augustine of Hippo, Answer to Faustus the Manichean 22.31, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/20:320.
24 Janice P. De-Whyte, “'I Will Be Built Up Through Her': Surrogacy and Adoption in the Hebrew Bible,” in Ekaterina E. Kozlova and Cat Quine, eds., Adoption in the Hebrew Bible (T&T Clark, 2024), 37.
25 James McKeown, Genesis (Eerdmans, 2008), 95.
26 Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 97.
27 Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis 13.2, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 91:155.
28 Laws of Hammurabi 146, in Writings from the Ancient World 6:109.
29 James Chukwuma Okoye, Genesis 12-50: A Narrative-Theological Commentary (Cascade Books, 2020), 84.
30 Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 251.
31 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 265.
32 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 38.22, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:371-372.
33 Targum Neofiti Genesis 16:5, in Aramaic Bible 1A:98-99; John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 38.13, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:365.
34 Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 178; Joseph McDonald, Searching for Sarah in the Second Temple Era: Images in the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, the Genesis Apocryphon, and the Antiquities (T&T Clark, 2020), 56.
35 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 279 n.19.
36 Terence E. Fretheim, Abraham: Trials of Family and Faith (Fortress Press, 2024; reprint of University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 96; John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 264.
37 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 279.
38 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 256.
39 David W. Cotter, Genesis (Liturgical Press, 2003), 102.
40 Nicanor Pier Georgio Austriaco, Biomedicine and Beatitude: An Introduction to Catholic Bioethics (Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 76-77.
41 Nicanor Pier Georgio Austriaco, Biomedicine and Beatitude: An Introduction to Catholic Bioethics (Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 80-83. See also Alexander R. Pruss, One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), chapter 7.
42 O. Carter Snead, What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press, 2022), 188.
43 Donald Trump, executive order “Expanding Access to In Vitro Fertilization,” 18 February 2025. <https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/expanding-access-to-in-vitro-fertilization/>.
44 Richard Berquist, From Human Dignity to Natural Law: An Introduction (Catholic University of America Press, 2019), 146. See also Alexander R. Pruss, One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 392-398.
45 Heather Jacobson, Labor of Love: Gestational Surrogacy and the Work of Making Babies (Rutgers University Press, 2016), 12.
46 Mary Ann Mason and Tom Ekman, Babies of Technology: Assisted Reproduction and the Rights of the Child (Yale University Press, 2017), 155
47 Heather Jacobson, Labor of Love: Gestational Surrogacy and the Work of Making Babies (Rutgers University Press, 2016), 2.
48 Bernard G. Prusak, Parental Obligations and Bioethics: The Duties of a Creator (Routledge, 2013), 81.
49 Elizabeth S. Anderson, “Is Women's Labor a Commodity?” Philosophy & Public Affairs 19/1 (Winter 1990): 87.
50 O. Carter Snead, What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press, 2022), 209-210.
51 Nicanor Pier Georgio Austriaco, Biomedicine and Beatitude: An Introduction to Catholic Bioethics (Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 102.
52 Richard Berquist, From Human Dignity to Natural Law: An Introduction (Catholic University of America Press, 2019), 147.
53 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 281.
54 Bernard G. Prusak, Parental Obligations and Bioethics: The Duties of a Creator (Routledge, 2013), 66-72. Compare to Alexander R. Pruss, One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 381-384.
55 Nicanor Pier Georgio Austriaco, Biomedicine and Beatitude: An Introduction to Catholic Bioethics (Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 102. On children as the fruit of marriage, see also Alexander R. Pruss, One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 413-415.
56 Gilbert C. Meilaender, Not by Nature but by Grace: Forming Families Through Adoption (University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 82. See also Alexander R. Pruss, One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 398-408, on the difference between 'making/breeding' humans and having children.
57 Nicanor Pier Georgio Austriaco, Biomedicine and Beatitude: An Introduction to Catholic Bioethics (Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 99. Alexander R. Pruss, One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 408-413, adds an argument that artificial means of reproduction efface the inherent gift-nature of a child, and that this effacement is a crass substitution of expectation for hope which hinders our cherishing of mystery and our growth in humility. He later adds that, since human procreation is a near-divine action, it is intensely fraught with temptations to idolatry, which only the humility of relying on God-created methods, i.e., natural reproduction, can combat (415-417).
58 Richard Berquist, From Human Dignity to Natural Law: An Introduction (Catholic University of America Press, 2019), 147-148.
59 O. Carter Snead, What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press, 2022), 188-190, 202, 212-213, 219-220.
60 Gilbert C. Meilaender, Not by Nature but by Grace: Forming Families Through Adoption (University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 71, 82.
61 John C. Lennox, Friend of God: The Inspiration of Abraham in an Age of Doubt (SPCK, 2024), 159.
62 John C. Lennox, Friend of God: The Inspiration of Abraham in an Age of Doubt (SPCK, 2024), 167-168.
63 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 281; Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 251.
64 Tremper Longman III, Genesis (Zondervan, 2016), 211.
65 John C. Lennox, Friend of God: The Inspiration of Abraham in an Age of Doubt (SPCK, 2024), 163-164.
66 Patrick Henry Reardon, Creation and the Patriarchal Histories: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Genesis (Conciliar Press, 2008), 75.
67 R. R. Reno, Genesis (Brazos Press, 2010), 166.
68 Nicanor Pier Georgio Austriaco, Biomedicine and Beatitude: An Introduction to Catholic Bioethics (Catholic University of America- Press, 2012), 107.
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