Last Sunday, we heard a tragic story showcasing the weaknesses of Abram and his wife Sarai in their turn to works of the flesh (in this case, assisted reproduction via traditional surrogacy) in a bid to seize the promised gifts of God. Today, though, isn't the day for their story. Flip over what we heard last week, and there's another tale to tell. This forgotten character is “an Egyptianess” (Genesis 16:1). She grew up believing in the ways of the Egyptians, grew up striving to act in accord with ma'at. She worshipped at the shrines of the gods. When her grandparents died, maybe they were able to afford coffins painted with spells to aid them in their voyage through the underworld. She hoped that their kas were judged favorably, and that the same would one day be true of her. By the time she was a young woman, she'd lost her freedom somehow; and then came the day she was taken and given, transferred into the service of an Asiatic foreigner with whom Egypt's king wanted good relations. And when these Asiatics were evicted from the land for their duplicity, she and others carried along with them (Genesis 12:16-20).
From that moment on, for the Asiatic woman Sarai, “for her there was a maidservant” in this Egyptian girl; she became functionally “a personal assistant.”1 She waited on Sarai as she watched the Asiatic chiefs divide their flocks and scatter across the land (Genesis 13:8-12). She watched the Asiatic chieftain Abram, Sarai's husband, move their camp and build an altar to his God, the LORD (Genesis 13:18). She served Sarai as Abram and the non-Egyptian servants rode off into a battle, and came back successful but empty-handed (Genesis 14:14-24). She was called often to Sarai's tent; sometimes, on her rounds, she saw Abram acting strangely, like standing at night counting stars or like batting vultures away from slabs of raw meat all day (Genesis 15). And so went the Egyptian girl's life, for at least three years, as she heard of the profound relationship Abram was cultivating with his God and of the unrealistic hopes and dreams it stoked in him. The Egyptian girl carried on as his wife's maidservant – “and her name,” we're now told after years have passed, “was Hagar” (Genesis 16:1).
So, at least, says the narrator. To listen to Abram and Sarai talk, you'd never know it. Go ahead, read every last word that comes out of their mouths; they never call Hagar by name, as a person.2 “Behold, please,” says mistress to master one day, “the LORD has withheld me from bearing; go, please, into my maidservant – maybe I'll be built up from her” (Genesis 16:2). It isn't Hagar's idea. But when the master and mistress agree, Hagar has no voice and no choice. Sarai “took Hagar the Egyptianess, her maidservant..., and she gave her to Abram her husband as a wife” (Genesis 16:3). At least it's a role of greater prestige, lifting Hagar up even as it uses her. “He went in to Hagar” – not a night she greatly relished – but, as a result, “she conceived” (Genesis 16:4).
I wonder how many weeks went by before she knew she had conceived. In time, she saw the telltale signs, saw and felt her body changing. And then, armed with this knowledge, “her mistress was diminished in her eyes” (Genesis 16:4). Exactly what behaviors expressed that, it's hard to tell. One ancient reader commented broadly that “she made her pregnancy a ground for boasting and behaved insolently towards her mistress.”3 A Jewish reader expanded here on Hagar's “insolence to abuse Sarai” while “assuming queenly airs,”4 while a Christian one agreed that Hagar adopted “an ungrateful attitude” and acted “arrogant and self-important.”5
Hagar likely didn't hear either Sarai's dour diatribe about it or Abram's disconcerting dodge ducking the situation. “Behold, your maidservant is in your hand,” – here he disclaims involvement, no longer identifying Hagar as his wife, but instead ceding full authority in the case to Sarai. He continues: “Do to her what is good in your eyes” (Genesis 16:6). Morally, that's not a fine answer on his part; a lot of trouble started when Eve reached for whatever was desirable to her eyes (Genesis 3:6), and things keep spiraling later when each person does what's correct in his eyes (Judges 17:6; 21:25). And with that encouragement to act however she saw fit, Abram “handed the servant girl over for punishment without even waiting for the birth of the child in her womb,” the child Abram both desired and disregarded.6
What we read next isn't pleasant. Your Bible might read: “Sarai dealt harshly with her,” or “Sarai mistreated Hagar,” or “Sarai treated her harshly”; I'd translate either that “Sarai afflicted her” or “Sarai humbled her” (Genesis 16:6). What that looked like in practice, we can guess based on where Sarai grew up. In laws from ancient Sumer, we know that if a wife gave her husband a slave-girl to bear children on her behalf, “after which that slave woman aspires to equal status with her mistress,” one ruling said she couldn't be sold, on account of the children, but was to be humbled by being marked physically as slave and reduced in rank to join the slave women of the household.7 Sarai does that: whether it's a hairstyle or a brand or tattoo, Sarai visibly lowers Hagar in rank to clearly put her back down in her place. No more could Hagar act the part of Abram's wife; she was demoted lower than where she'd started from. Likely as a result, Sarai “makes Hagar work like a servant,” without special considerations for Hagar's pregnant condition.8 An even older law from where Sarai grew up suggested that if any slave-girl cursed her mistress, “they shall scour her mouth with... salt” in large quantities.9 Maybe Sarai followed that law, scrubbing Hagar's mouth out with salt. Sarai had free range, too, to let her imagination run wild and mean; no doubt she lectured, yelled, piled on tasks. Modern commentators have spoken of “physical and psychological abuse,”10 “brutal, humiliating abuse,”11 “aggressive humiliation.”12
And all this does is make Hagar mad. She doesn't look any more favorably toward Sarai; she only becomes prouder and more resentful, “unrepentant and insubordinate.”13 But finally fear and fury flame out of control, until “she fled from her face” (Genesis 16:6) – “a voluntary flight, not a banishment,” which made Hagar not an exile but a runaway slave.14 She abandoned the camp of Abram's tents, rejected Sarai's authority, slipped away under the cover of night and started to run over the countryside. Given Hagar's pregnant condition, it was an especially drastic move which underlines her desperation in the face of Sarai's harshness.15 And the next verses could – we expect that they would – tell us about how Sarai and Abram react, how it affects our usual heroes. Instead, though, the narrator brings us along with Hagar, making her the main character of the story for now.16
When we succeed in catching up to Hagar, we spy her by “a spring of water in the wilderness..., the spring on the way to Shur” (Genesis 16:7). Shur, meaning 'wall,' meant the fortifications at Egypt's northeast border; it was a customary stop on the desert road between Canaan and Egypt.17 Instinctively or intentionally, Hagar is retreating from the land of Abram's promise toward the land of her birth: Egypt.18 (Though, if she could be given away so easily to a temporarily resident foreigner, does she really have any hope of a warm welcome in her native country?) As for how far along she is on the road, this spring is described as “between Kadesh and Bered” (Genesis 16:14), and while we don't know where Bered is, Kadesh is the 'Spring of Judgment' where the eastern kings trounced the Amalekites, on the edge of the Sinai desert (Genesis 14:7). This is already several days' journey from where Abram was encamped, which journey in Hagar's condition testifies to her tenacity and skill in navigating.19 And along the way, though Genesis says nothing about it, many have supposed that during her trek Hagar surely “entreated God to take pity on her”20 – though what god she would've chosen to call on is an interesting question.
While Hagar's resting at the spring to catch her breath and haul up a drink of precious fresh water, she isn't left to herself; a stranger comes, apparently a fellow traveler also seeking water and a travel break, and the man strikes up a conversation with this lone woman. Female, pregnant, vulnerable, isolated, and now approached by an unfamiliar man in the middle of nowhere... One can't imagine she feels wholly safe in this scenario. But we know what Hagar doesn't: that this stranger isn't a man at all, but a messenger from above, “the Angel of the LORD” (Genesis 16:7). This is the first time the Bible uses the word 'angel,' and he represents the LORD, God Most High, while walking and talking on the earthly plane. The same LORD who seemed silent when Sarai suggested surrogacy has now “sought Hagar out and found her”21 – one ancient reader suggested that this should make us “recognize the virtue of Hagar and also to realize that she is not despicable, since an angel converses with her and displays an interest in her that is not idle.”22
What's the first word to come out of the heavenly messenger's mouth? “Hagar” (Genesis 16:8). For the first time, her name appears in dialogue – Pharaoh hasn't used it, Abram hasn't, Sarai hasn't, but this Angel will; he calls her by her name. I've heard it said that in all the ancient writings of the Middle East, this is the one and only time where a heavenly being ever addresses a woman by name.23 Hagar is known, first and foremost, as a person – and known so by heaven, if not by earth. In just a moment, though, the Angel adds a title: “maidservant of Sarai” (Genesis 16:8). It might be a subtle hint that Hagar's flight has been misguided, that she's still Sarai's maidservant, she's in the wrong place.24 Now, unless Hagar had this info tattooed on her face or something, Hagar sees that this is no chance encounter with a mere fellow traveler. Short of jumping to a preternatural assumption, she has to assume Abram has hired a bounty hunter.
But he puts two natural questions to her, as a fellow traveler might: first, “from what place have you come?”, and second, “and where are you walking?” (Genesis 16:8).25 She knows where she's come from: “From the face of Sarai my mistress I am fleeing” (Genesis 16:8). The sum total of her thoughts have been escape.26 But it's interesting that she answers so honestly (especially if she maybe fears he's come to coerce her on her mistress's behalf). Hagar doesn't lie or obfuscate; she “admits everything truthfully.” She also doesn't point a finger, or complain about her mistreatment, or aim to justify herself.27 She admits she's a runaway slave, and that Sarai is the great lady to whom she's bound – in effect, this is Hagar's confession, her guilty plea. Notice that Hagar never answers the second question, about where she's going; maybe the act of confessing has left her in doubt.28
So the Angel answers for her in the form of a commandment: “Return to your mistress” (Genesis 16:9). It isn't what Hagar wants to hear, and seems to confirm her natural suspicion that this man was sent by Sarai to bring Hagar back. Regardless, now that she's confessed Sarai is her mistress, this command is just the logical course of action. More unsettling, though, are the words that come next: “Afflict yourself under her hand” (Genesis 16:9). Almost every English Bible I could find renders this verb as 'submit' here, but it more precisely means 'afflict' or 'humble.' In fact, it's a new form of the same verb from three verses ago when Sarai 'afflicted' or 'humbled' Hagar (Genesis 16:6). The Angel tells Hagar to return to the same situation, to the mistress who in anger has punished and afflicted her – and to now embrace and accept it? This can't be right, can it, for Hagar to be expected to return to an abusive situation, to lose her hard-won freedom, to run back toward injustice, to let the wrong done to her be upon herself and herself alone?
This language of 'afflict yourself,' 'humble yourself,' shows up later in the Law on the Day of Atonement, when “you shall afflict yourselves and present a food offering to the LORD” (Leviticus 23:28) – Israel was thus to fast and do penance. So for Hagar to return to Sarai will be her Day of Atonement, a Lenten journey; Hagar will do penance for her past pride by a willing humility, submitting herself to affliction. This will heal what she's done wrong. (It will also protect Hagar from the desert road otherwise looming ahead, which might be more hazardous to pregnant Hagar than Abram's tents ever were; and it tells us that real deliverance isn't found in Egypt's independence but in surrendering to the hope which the house of Abram, despite its matron's present actions, is meant to represent.29) Returning penitentially is the way.
After a pause for Hagar to digest the command, there follow two new declarations which add three messages of consolation which make Hagar realize that this messenger wasn't sent by Sarai and Abram. First, though not first in order, is the news that “the LORD has heard your affliction” (Genesis 16:11). The Angel speaks the name of Abram's God, Sarai's God – but says that this God pays attention even to an Egyptian maidservant, to her needs and wants, her pains and fears. Hagar's sobbing in the night hasn't gone unnoticed; her prayers, addressed specifically or generically, haven't gotten lost in the mail. Her sorrow and woe and hurt have reached a caring ear and found there not only sympathy but active redress. Hagar has been afflicted, and it isn't one of the gods of Egypt who rallies to her cause; it's the LORD. It wasn't Amun-Re shining on her, wasn't Ptah speaking justice to her, Osiris shepherding her, Hathor caring for her – no, Egypt's gods now fade from view, and there, there is the LORD. Had she been tempted before to identify the LORD's character and care with the worst behavior of his elect lord and lady, the Angel has hereby corrected her.
And how can Hagar know that the LORD has heard her? Because this messenger declares that not only is she pregnant (which may, by now, have been visibly obvious to anyone), but also that this baby yet unborn, whom the LORD (and not Khnum or Hathor) has given her, is a boy. Until this moment, nobody on earth had the power to know whether that baby was a boy or a girl; they had no ultrasounds. But Hagar's talking to someone not of this earth, one who declares the unknown truth: Hagar will give birth to a son. This child won't miscarry, and he won't die in infancy. He'll live to receive his name, 'Ishmael,' which will forever remind Hagar: the LORD heard her.
Not only that, the Angel tells her Ishmael will grow to manhood. But to what kind of life? Hagar is being sent back to humiliation as a slave woman; Abram already said she was in Sarai's hand, and now the Angel's told her to accept affliction under Sarai's hand (Genesis 16:6, 9). But as for her son, the Angel says, everyone's hand might reach out to control him, but his hand will rise against the hands of all the grasping world.30 The result is, he'll be “a wild donkey of a man” (Genesis 16:12) – a creature which “hears not the shouts of the driver” (Job 39:7); if there's one thing a wild donkey will never be, it's anybody's slave. Hagar can return to slavery with sure knowledge that her submission and sorrow will sow the seed for her son's freedom – that he'll cast off every chain and live in defiant freedom.31
That'd be hope enough to persuade and sustain her, but notice also the dignity given to Hagar by this birth announcement. She's conceived, she will bear, and she “shall call his name Ishmael” (Genesis 16:11). So far, only one woman has named her sons, and that's Eve (Genesis 4:1, 25). Hagar is in Eve's exclusive club. What's more, the Angel refers to Hagar's “seed” (Genesis 16:10), and the only prior reference to a woman having her own 'seed' was the promise that the seed of the woman would battle the seed of the serpent (Genesis 3:15). But where the LORD told Eve that “greatly I will multiply your toils and your conception” (Genesis 3:16), now the Angel of the LORD tells Hagar that “greatly I will multiply your seed so that they cannot be counted for greatness” (Genesis 16:10). And if you didn't know better, you'd assume those were words spoken to Abram, the only one who's yet heard about his uncountable future seed like the earth's dust and the sky's stars (Genesis 13:16; 15:5). Hagar now receives the promise of a patriarch in her own right.32 Though a slave, her promises rival those of the chosen friend of God!
The Angel of the LORD has told her, “I will multiply your seed” (Genesis 16:10) – this 'Angel' is speaking for God in the first person. Finally the narrator lets slip that, directly or indirectly, it was “the LORD who spoke to her” (Genesis 16:13). Though she was being sent back to a lowly condition, she'd been consoled with a mighty experience of God, having been “granted attention from on high... on account of her being humble.”33 She had not merely been interacting with a run-of-the-mill spirit; she “saw God in the angel,” as a great teacher once put it.34 She recognizes him as God of Abram, God of Sarai, but also, yes, God of Hagar.
And to make that clear, Hagar gives the LORD a new name, one all her own. “She called the name of the LORD who spoke to her 'You are the God of Seeing!'” (Genesis 16:13). Don't let this slip past you: Hagar is the only person in the entire Bible who is explicitly said to assign a new name to God, instead of the other way around!35 Abram doesn't do it, Sarai doesn't do it. Enoch and Noah, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezra and Nehemiah – they don't do it. But Hagar does it. She names God out of her own experience of him, because she so abundantly finds him new and fresh and exciting and wonderfully beautiful to her.36 She's heard, how she loves to proclaim it! But she's saved, not from her afflictions, but from them being meaningless and anonymous and unredeemed. She knows she is known, hears she is heard, sees she's been seen, because she herself has seen the One who sees her. “Prior to this moment, it seems that no one has ever seen her...; it was only God who saw her” – and let her see him.37
All along, this has been what it's about. If you look, her story is full of eyes. Once she sees she's pregnant, she looks at Sarai, who is “diminished in her eyes” (Genesis 16:4). Abram thus invites Sarai to act according to her own 'eyes' (Genesis 16:6). Sarai then afflicts Hagar – and in Hebrew, 'affliction' is just a letter scramble of the word for 'eye.' So Hagar runs off until she reaches a spring – and in Hebrew, a 'spring' is literally an 'eye' (Genesis 16:7)! Because of how Hagar used her eyes, Sarai acted from her eyes to eye Hagar, who ran from Sarai's eyes to the eye of the desert. This watery eye is on the road to 'Shur,' which could be read as a Hebrew verb for seeing. There at the eye on the way to seeing, chastened and comforted by the LORD, Hagar renames the desert's eye as the sacred site where she's seen and been seen by a God of Seeing (Genesis 16:13-14)!38
For, proclaiming the LORD as El Roi, “God of Seeing,” she explains that “also here have I seen the back of the One who sees me” (Genesis 16:13). This new definition of God proclaims the LORD as “a god who cares for the needy and the outcast,” the discarded and downtrodden.39 She then embeds her experience into the name of the spring, which is now called a well. She names it Beer-lahai-roi, “Well of the Living One Who Sees” (Genesis 16:14). A medieval monk remarked that Beer-lahai-roi's waters “signified the profound mysteries of divine providence,” revealing to Hagar “the living and unfailing water” that comes from the Living One to all who thirst (Isaiah 55:1).40 A slave suffocating in sorrows and shame, driven to the desolation of the desert, has come to see the God she never quite knew – and the Living One has quenched her thirst, given her new life.41
Genesis jumps over the days of her return journey back into Canaan, but picks up again once she's rejoined the camp of Abram; it doesn't, however, mention her returning to Sarai, per se. Hagar gives birth to the son as her own, not Sarai's; yet she does bear him “to Abram,” not only to herself. It isn't now Hagar who gives the boy a name, but “Abram named his son, whom Hagar had borne, Ishmael” (Genesis 16:15). Abram could only have picked that name if Hagar had “recounted to [them] the vision that she had seen” and the promises that came with it.42 Hagar has testified of the God who hears and sees her! From now on, Sarai must know that God hears and sees Hagar, and so Sarai can't treat Hagar just any way that's good in Sarai's eyes without pausing to wonder if that treatment is good also in the LORD's eyes, or if it will provoke Hagar's groan unto the LORD's ears. And in honor and celebration of that promise, Abram names his precious son after the maidservant Hagar's prayer.
This story only deepens when we remember Abram's plunge into darkness, when he heard how his seed would be “sojourners” in a land not their own, made “servants..., and they will be afflicted for four hundred years” (Genesis 15:13). The Hebrew word for 'sojourners' is gerim, so you could actually read the name 'Hagar' as 'The Sojourner.'43 She's also a slave and afflicted – exactly fitting the bill of what Abram heard about.
The prophecy to Abram was, we know, fulfilled in Exodus when the Egyptians began to “afflict” his seed “with heavy burdens” (Exodus 1:11). Though Moses was exempted through his mother's cunning, “one day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens” and took violent action (Exodus 2:11-12). When word thereof reached the king, “Moses fled from Pharaoh,” just as Hagar fled from Sarai (Exodus 2:15). Moses sat down at a well in the desert (like Hagar!), and when his first son was born there, “he called his name Gershom, for he said, 'I have been a sojourner in a foreign land'” (Exodus 2:22). In Moses' absence, “the sons of Israel groaned from their slavery..., and God heard their groaning..., and God saw the sons of Israel” (Exodus 2:23-25). As a result, while Moses was in the desert, “the Angel of the LORD,” who first encountered Hagar, “appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush” (Exodus 3:2). “God called to him out of the bush,” identified himself as the God of Abraham, and told Moses, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people..., and I have heard their cry from the face of their oppressors” (Exodus 3:4-7). And then this God-Who-Sees-and-Hears sent Moses back whence he came to face up to the afflicting Pharaoh and to rescue the afflicted (Exodus 3:10). In light of Exodus, Hagar is being set up in Genesis as “a heroine with the same characteristics as Moses,” as almost a Moses before Moses, maybe even “a liberator like Moses.”44
Ultimately, after the LORD had heard and seen and acted, “the people fled” (Exodus 14:5) – just like Moses, just like Hagar. “Then Moses made Israel set out from the Red Sea, and they went into the wilderness of Shur” (Exodus 15:22), with an “Angel of God who was going before the host of Israel” (Exodus 14:19). For as they'd later say, “when we cried to the LORD, he heard our voice and sent an angel and brought us out of Egypt” (Numbers 20:16). At the mountain, they all heard a stern warning to “not oppress a sojourner..., for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). But Israel “heard the sound of words, but saw no form” (Deuteronomy 4:12), while Moses had the unique privilege, like Hagar, of seeing the LORD's “back” (Exodus 33:23). And only after all that did they at last move to Kadesh (Numbers 13:26).
Again, these are no coincidences. Hagar is a foreshadowing of Israel – she's The Sojourner like them, enslaved and afflicted like them, flees like them, meets the Angel of the LORD like them, is linked to places like Shur and Kadesh like them, and finds she's heard by God like them. Hagar got a promise like Abram, an exodus like Israel, and a vision like Moses – an incredibly impressive lineup.45 And what's so surprising is that, to foreshadow Israel being afflicted by Egyptians, Genesis gives us an Egyptian afflicted by the future grandmother of Israel – almost as if what the Egyptians did to Israel was only retaliation in kind!46 It's shockingly subversive, the sort of story I can't imagine a later Israelite just making up. When the Law commands Israel that “you shall not afflict any widow or orphan; if you afflict them in any way, and if they cry to me, surely I will hear their cry, and my wrath will burn hot” (Exodus 22:22-24), it tells them not to repeat the sins of Grandma Sarai, because God's still hearing the Hagars of the land. For “God is justice, and [Hagar] stands for those for whom God has special concern,” whom God sees and hears even when Abram or Israel (or we!) betray the call of justice and fail to seek the lost.47
Through ages of judges and of kings, often Abram's seed “were rebellious in their purposes and were brought low through their iniquity,” so that the LORD “gave them into the hand of the nations... and they were brought into subjection under their power.” But “nevertheless, he looked upon their distress when he heard their cry” (Psalm 106:41-44). And so they kept abiding in the hope David preached in magnifying the LORD who'd “heard him and saved him” (Psalm 34:3-6): that “the LORD is near to the broken-hearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18), so “the Angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them” (Psalm 34:7). But what about after the Temple where the LORD sees and hears is gone (1 Kings 8:28-30)?
Centuries unfolded, and the people were subjected and afflicted beneath the hands of Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome – until, at last, another woman met an angel of the LORD, who conveyed a birth announcement to her, God's most highly favored lady: “You will conceive in your womb, and you will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus” (Luke 1:31), “for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).48 She confessed herself to be, not the maidservant of a mortal mistress, but “the handmaiden of the LORD”; and she fled not from her Master, but bowed to his hand: “Let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). Standing where Abram and Sarai and Hagar once pitched their tents, she sang that her soul magnified the LORD because “he has looked on the humble estate of his maidservant” (Luke 1:48). More deeply even than Hagar, Mary knew that the LORD had seen her in her humility, in her lowliness, in the affliction she shared with her people Israel.
When the months had passed and she had given birth, her baby boy opened his eyes, and Mary was the first to look him in the face – and then, with Hagar, she saw the God who saw her. But in this child, that very God of Seeing had “emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). As he grew to human manhood, he became his people's New Moses, teaching from the mountain, so that now “the ministration of the Law... is, in a way, a servant of the gospel teachings..., ordered to submit to the oracles given through Christ,” as was foreshadowed by Hagar's mandated submission to Sarai.49 If Hagar knew God heard her, how much better did the Son know his God and Father heard him (John 11:41)! And “in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications..., and he was heard because of his reverence” (Hebrews 5:7).
To David's city he'd come, “humble and mounted on a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9); “and being found in human form, he humbled himself” more radically than was ever asked of Hagar – for Jesus “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8), being “crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23). But yet he had “offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the One who was able to save him from death; and he was heard” (Hebrews 5:7). The Father's hearing the Son didn't omit the cross, any more than his hearing Hagar immediately voided her afflictions. Christ tasted death, but, having already been heard by his Father who saves from death, “God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death” (Acts 2:24), and “has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that's above every name” (Philippians 2:9) – better than Hagar's! Now the “Son of God who has eyes like a flame of fire” declares: “I am the First and the Last, the Living One; I died, and behold, I am alive forevermore!” (Revelation 1:14-18) – he's the Living One who sees, he's the LORD El Roi of Beer-lahai-roi!
When we're “found in him,” we have “a righteousness which comes through the faith of Christ” (Philippians 3:9), and so ours is the old promise that “the eyes of the LORD are toward the righteous” (Psalm 34:15), that “the eye of the LORD is on those who... hope in his steadfast love” (Psalm 33:18). With him we are not anonymous slaves with muted voices; we are heard, we are seen, and we are named. Hagar's hope has become our hope, for the LORD is a God who “hears the needy” (Psalm 69:33). We are sojourners on the earth (1 Peter 2:11; Psalm 119:19), yet he will hear us (Psalm 39:12). Already we're on an exodus “out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). He himself, the Living One, has promised that “whoever humbles himself will be exalted” (Matthew 23:12), and so our hands are free to be for all those who set their hands against us.
Hagar had the privilege of saying, “Here I have seen the One who sees me” (Genesis 16:13); but each of us must confess a “God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). For now, “though you have not seen him, you love him” (1 Peter 1:8). But we have a more blessed assurance: that “we will see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). The Living One who sees us will then be the Living One whom we see, as we drink eternally from his living spring of love (Revelation 22:1). And then, only then, shall we have been “saved to the uttermost” (Hebrews 7:25). Until we reach that place, we persevere through these desert days of Lent. So at this holy oasis, the Beer-lahai-roi that is this day and hour, “humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time he may exalt you” (1 Peter 5:6). For we are heard, we are seen – and if our eyes be refreshed by this water and disciplined under his hand, then shall these eyes grow strong enough at last to see God who sees us. Amen.
1 John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 261.
2 James McKeown, Genesis (Eerdmans, 2008), 96; John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 261.
3 Theodoret of Cyrus, Questions on Genesis 68, in Library of Early Christianity 1:141.
4 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.188, in Loeb Classical Library 242:93.
5 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 38.12, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:364.
6 Theodoret of Cyrus, Questions on Genesis 68, in Library of Early Christianity 1:141.
7 Laws of Hammurabi 146, in Writings from the Ancient World 6:109.
8 Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 180.
9 Laws of Ur-Nammu 25, in Writings from the Ancient World 6:20.
10 Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 120.
11 Joseph McDonald, Searching for Sarah in the Second Temple Period: Images in the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, the Genesis Apocryphon, and the Antiquities (T&T Clark, 2020), 57.
12 Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 164.
13 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 253.
14 Philo of Alexandria, On the Cherubim 1 §3, in Loeb Classical Library 227:11.
15 Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 100.
16Ed Noort, “Created in the Image of the Son: Ishmael and Hagar,” in Martin Goodman, George H. van Kooten, and Jacques T.A.G.M. van Ruiten, eds., Abraham, the Nations, and the Hagarites: Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Perspectives on Kinship with Abraham (Brill, 2010), 40.
17 Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 120.
18 Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 164.
19 Ed Noort, “Created in the Image of the Son: Ishmael and Hagar,” in Martin Goodman, George H. van Kooten, and Jacques T.A.G.M. van Ruiten, eds., Abraham, the Nations, and the Hagarites: Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Perspectives on Kinship with Abraham (Brill, 2010), 38-39.
20 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.188, in Loeb Classical Library 242:93.
21 James Chukwuma Okoye, Genesis 12-50: A Narrative-Theological Commentary (Cascade Books, 2020), 86; cf. Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 280.
22 Didymus the Blind, Commentary on Genesis 16:7-8, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 103:214.
23 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 254.
24 Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 180; Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 102.
25 John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 266.
26 Tremper Longman III, Genesis (Zondervan, 2016), 211.
27 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 38.17, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:368.
28 Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 164; James Chukwuma Okoye, Genesis 12-50: A Narrative-Theological Commentary (Casacade Books, 2020), 86.
29 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 253; Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 152.
30 Ed Noort, “Created in the Image of the Son: Ishmael and Hagar,” in Martin Goodman, George H. van Kooten, and Jacques T.A.G.M. van Ruiten, eds., Abraham, the Nations, and the Hagarites: Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Perspectives on Kinship with Abraham (Brill, 2010), 41.
31 Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 121; James McKeown, Genesis (Eerdmans, 2008), 97; Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 181; Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 106.
32 James McKeown, Genesis (Eerdmans, 2008), 96; Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 182; James Chukwuma Okoye, Genesis 12-50: A Narrative-Theological Commentary (Cascade Books, 2020), 87.
33 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 38.21, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:371.
34 Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis 13.4.2, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 91:156.
35 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 255; John C. Lennox, Friend of God: The Inspiration of Abraham in an Age of Doubt (SPCK, 2024), 161.
36 James Chukwuma Okoye, Genesis 12-50: A Narrative-Theological Commentary (Cascade Books, 2020), 88.
37 David W. Cotter, Genesis (Liturgical Press, 2003), 105.
38 Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 120; Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 183; Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 110.
39 Michael B. Hundley, Yahweh among the Gods: The Divine in Genesis, Exodus, and the Ancient Near East (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 211.
40 Bede, On Genesis 16:13-14, in Translated Texts for Historians 48:280.
41 Jonathan Grossman, Abraham: The Story of a Journey (Maggid Books, 2023), 109.
42 Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis 13.5, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 91:156; cf. Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 160.
43 Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 119; David W. Cotter, Genesis (Liturgical Press, 2003), 103.
44 Alexandre A. Martins, “Hagar and the God of the Oppressed: Genesis 16:1-6 as Seen from the Perspective of the 'Losers,'” in Andrei A. Orlov, ed., Watering the Garden: Studies in Honor of Deirdre Dempsey (Gorgias Press, 2022), 192-196.
45 David W. Cotter, Genesis (Liturgical Press, 2003), 106.
46 Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17 (Eerdmans, 1990), 448; Terence E. Fretheim, Abraham: Trials of Family and Faith (Fortress Press, 2024; reprint from University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 96; Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 151.
47 David W. Cotter, Genesis (Liturgical Press, 2003), 85, 106.
48 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 257.
49 Cyril of Alexandria, Glaphyra on the Pentateuch 3.1.9, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 137:149.
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