Abraham Pleaded for Ishmael and Meant Something Deeper
When Abraham asked God to let Ishmael live, Philo reads the plea as more than parental love. It is a theology of what it means to have a son who stands before you but was not the promise.
Abraham had just been told he would have a son by Sarah. A real son, a son of the covenant, a son whose descendants would become the nation. He had waited his entire life for this. And his response, the very first thing out of his mouth, was a prayer for the child he already had.
“O God, would that Ishmael might live before You” (Genesis 17:18). Not: thank you. Not: I believe you. Not: when? Just: let Ishmael live.
This is the moment that Ishmael and Abraham's Transgression in the Midrash of Philo 18:2 stops on. Philo of Alexandria, writing around 40 CE, reads Abraham's words with a philosopher's precision. What exactly is he asking for? And what does it reveal about how Abraham understood the situation he was in?
Philo quotes Abraham expanding on the request: “I do not despair of a better generation, but I believe thy promise: nevertheless, it would be a sufficient blessing for me for this son to live who in the meantime is a living son, standing visibly, even though he be not so according to the legitimate blood, but is only born of a concubine.”
Notice what Abraham is doing. He is not bargaining with God or expressing doubt about the promise. He explicitly says he believes the promise. What he is asking is whether the promise's fulfillment requires Ishmael's erasure. Whether the son of Hagar, standing right there, visible and present, must give way entirely to the son who has not yet been born.
The prayer is not for Ishmael's survival only in the biological sense. Philo reads “live before You” as a request for a particular kind of life, a life lived in God's presence, a life of consciousness and clarity. What Abraham is asking for is that Ishmael not simply continue breathing, but that he live with “a salutary soundness of mind, which is equal to immortality.” A joy so complete and so grounded that it transcends ordinary circumstance.
Why does this matter to Philo? Because he is making a distinction that runs through his entire philosophy. Hearing divine law is not the same as living it. The words of Torah can pass through a person like water through a sieve and leave nothing. What Abraham is praying for is that Ishmael will be shaped at the deepest level by what he has heard. Not a legal education but a formation. The law “entering more deeply into the inward man, and forming his principal part.”
Philo knew what it meant to live in a world where Jewish identity could be worn on the outside while the inside remained untouched. Alexandria in the first century was full of people navigating that tension. When he reads Abraham's prayer for Ishmael, he hears a father asking not that his son survive but that his son live, that the son born outside the primary covenant nonetheless inhabit his life with real presence and real rootedness.
God's answer in Genesis 17:20-21 is yes and no. Ishmael will be blessed. He will become a great nation. Twelve princes will come from him. But the covenant will be established with Isaac. Philo does not read this as Ishmael's rejection. He reads it as God acknowledging two different kinds of living: the covenant life of Isaac, which carries the particular sacred obligation of Israel forward, and the blessed life of Ishmael, who will flourish and multiply but along a different path.
Abraham accepted both. He did not argue further. He accepted the terms because he had already been given what he asked for: the assurance that the son standing before him would not simply cease but would live, fully, in the presence of the God who had made all of this so complicated.
The Philo collection preserves this reading alongside dozens of others that find similar philosophical depth in moments the Torah passes over quickly. His method was to believe that the Torah says exactly what it means and means more than it seems to say. Abraham's hesitation before receiving the best news of his life is one of those moments. It says something true about how people actually receive promises. With gratitude, yes. And also with their eyes on what the promise might cost the ones they already love.