Abraham Wrote Hagar a Bill of Divorce Before Sending Her Away

Most people imagine the expulsion of Hagar as a simple scene. A skin of water. A loaf of bread. A mother and a boy wandering off into the desert while a reluctant patriarch looks the other way. The rabbis who stared at (Genesis 21:14) for centuries did not believe it was simple at all. They believed Abraham handed her something else that morning, and the word they used for it is the harshest word in Jewish family law.

A get. A bill of divorce.

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, a narrative midrash composed in eighth-century Palestine under the shadow of the early Islamic conquests, reads the verse with forensic attention. "Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a bottle of water." The text looks at that list and finds a third item hidden inside it. Along with the bread and the water, Abraham gave Hagar a writ of separation, and the separation was not just from himself. It was a severance from this world and the world to come. Words a Jewish husband will spend a lifetime trying never to say, spoken at dawn on the way out of the tent.

Then comes the strangest detail. Abraham took a veil, or a length of cloth, and tied it around Hagar's waist so that it trailed behind her as she walked. The midrash offers two reasons for this, and neither of them cancels the other out. The first reason is legal. He wanted anyone who saw her in the wilderness to know, at a glance, that she was a bondwoman, not a wife. The dragging cloth was a public marker of her status. The second reason is a father's. He wanted to be able to follow the trail. He wanted to know where Ishmael was going. Even the man signing the document could not stop being the father of the child who carried it.

To understand why Abraham arrived at a moment so terrible, you have to go back a few years in the older traditions. The Book of Jubilees, a Hebrew retelling of Genesis composed in the second century BCE and later preserved in Ethiopic manuscripts, is blunt about what the sending away cost him. It says Abraham was faithful under every trial God placed on him, and then it enumerates the trials like a legal docket. His country. Famine. The abduction of Sarah in Egypt. Circumcision in old age. And then, at the end of the list, tucked among the harshest afflictions a soul can face, Ishmael and Hagar, when he sent them away. Jubilees puts the expulsion in the same register as the binding of Isaac. It is an Akedah in lowercase. A quieter knife.

The events that led up to the morning are told more slowly in Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, the seven-volume synthesis of rabbinic tradition published between 1909 and 1938. Ginzberg gathers the midrashic voices into one long scene. Sarah had given Hagar to Abraham during the long years of barrenness, following the custom of the ancient Near East. When Hagar became pregnant, the balance inside the tent tilted, and Hagar began to look at Sarah as if Sarah were the barren one. The pain Sarah had been carrying for decades cracked open. She turned on Abraham and reminded him of everything she had sacrificed for him. She said, plainly, it is you who are doing me wrong.

Ginzberg then preserves a detail that is hard to swallow but hard to forget. Sarah, wounded, cast an evil eye on Hagar, and Hagar miscarried and fled into the wilderness. An angel met her there and sent her back with a name for the son she would eventually bear. Ishmael. God hears. One of only six people in the whole Hebrew Bible, Ginzberg notes, whose names were given by God before their birth. Isaac. Moses. Solomon. Josiah. The Messiah. And Ishmael. The name was a promise Abraham could not unmake.

Years pass inside the tent. Isaac is born. Sarah sees Ishmael laughing at the weaning feast, or playing, or idolizing, or something else the rabbis argued about for centuries, and she says the line that shatters the house. Cast out this bondwoman and her son. Jubilees, in a verse that Jewish tradition has never been able to read without flinching, records Abraham's reaction. The thing was grievous in his sight, because of his maidservant, and because of his son. The Hebrew word for grievous there is the same word the Torah uses for a body bent under a weight too heavy to carry.

God tells him to listen to Sarah. The covenant will travel through Isaac. But the same voice makes Abraham a second promise in the same breath, and the Jubilees writer preserves it carefully. The son of this bondwoman, I will make him a great nation, because he is of your seed. Two futures. One tent. Abraham has to sign one of them away and carry the knowledge that the other is still his.

Which is why Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer's image of the dragging cloth feels so accurate as a piece of emotional reporting. A man who loved this child from the first moment the angel said his name is walking out of the tent with a divorce document in one hand and a water skin in the other, and he is doing it while planning, in the part of his brain that will not stop, how to follow the trail.

Bereshit Rabbah, compiled in fifth-century Palestine from earlier Amoraic material, reads the next verse of Genesis and finds something even stranger. The text says Abraham placed the bread on her shoulder and gave her the child. The child. Ishmael is a teenager at this point. How is a teenager placed on a shoulder? Because, the midrash says, Sarah's evil eye had returned, and Ishmael was sick and feverish, unable to walk. Hagar was carrying him out of the tent in her arms.

This is the picture the rabbis leave you with. Not a neat expulsion. A mother staggering under the weight of a feverish boy. A husband handing over a legal document in the gray light before sunrise. A dragging cloth behind her in the dust, to mark her as a bondwoman and to mark her as a son Abraham was not ready to let go of. Two futures walking in opposite directions, one toward the promise of Isaac and one toward the desert where another angel would meet another mother in the sand and remind her that God had already named the child before the cloth had ever been tied.

The Jubilees writer, watching all of it from the second century BCE, says of Abraham only that his soul was not impatient, and he was not slow to act, for he was faithful and a lover of the Lord. It is the shortest possible summary of a morning that must have felt the longest of his life.