Abraham Wrote Hagar a Bill of Divorce Before Sending Her Away

Before Dawn, Before the Bread

Abraham rose early. That detail is in the text, and the rabbis who read it noticed the hour. He rose before anyone else in the household was awake. He took bread. He took a skin of water. He put them on Hagar's shoulder. Then he sent her into the desert with their son Ishmael.

Genesis 21:14 is eleven words in the Hebrew. The rabbis stared at those eleven words for centuries and found a third item hidden inside them, one the Torah does not name but the tradition insists was there.

A get. A bill of divorce.

The Veil That Trailed in the Dust

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, a narrative midrash composed in eighth-century Palestine, reads the verse with the attention of a lawyer examining a contested will. The text says Abraham took bread and a bottle of water. What else did he take? What else did he give her?

A writ of separation, the midrash says. And the separation was not just from Abraham personally. It was a severance from this world and the world to come. Those are the words the midrash uses. Words a Jewish husband would spend his life hoping never to say, spoken at dawn on the way out of a tent.

Then comes the stranger 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 into the desert. The midrash offers two reasons for this, and neither cancels the other out. The first is legal: anyone who saw her walking alone would know from the trailing cloth that she was a freed bondwoman, not a runaway, not a fugitive. The cloth was her documentation in a world where a woman walking alone in the desert without documentation was in danger of a kind that had nothing to do with thirst.

The second reason was social and crueler: so that she could not pass herself off as a freewoman in whatever settlement she reached. She was marked. The mark was meant to be seen.

The Hardest Trial

The Book of Jubilees, a second-century BCE Hebrew retelling of Genesis found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, lists the trials of Abraham's faith in sequence. The furnace in Ur. The famine in Canaan. The wealth of kings. The taking of Sarah. The binding of Isaac. And among them, the sending away of Hagar.

The rabbinic tradition preserved by Ginzberg is more specific about the ranking. The day he sent Hagar away was the worst day of Abraham's life. Not the furnace. Not the binding, which ended with an angel and a ram. The sending away of Hagar ended with nothing. No voice stopped him. No substitute appeared. He watched his firstborn son walk into the wilderness holding a skin of water, and there was no intervention, and there was no explanation, only Sarah's command and God's confirmation that Sarah was right.

He wrote the get before he put the bread on her shoulder. He did it formally because that was who he was. He could not undo what he was doing, but he could do it with the legal precision of a man who understood that even the worst acts of necessity had to be performed with their eyes open.

What Sarah Had Been Before Hagar Was

The tradition does not let Sarah off easily either. Ginzberg's synthesis of the midrashic material preserves a long account of Sarah's own jealousy and her years of barrenness, during which she gave Hagar to Abraham in the first place. Hagar had been Pharaoh's daughter, given as a gift during the episode in Egypt. She had chosen to serve Abraham as a handmaid rather than be the mistress of another household, because she had seen what the presence of God looked like when it rested near a person, and she wanted to be close to that.

The moment Hagar conceived, the dynamics of the household shifted in ways Sarah had not anticipated. A woman who had been deferential became something else. The rabbis read Hagar's changed behavior as the natural consequence of a natural development: she was carrying what Sarah could not carry, and she knew it.

When Isaac was finally born and Ishmael's behavior toward the younger child became a question, Sarah's demand was not entirely without foundation. She saw where the lines of inheritance were being drawn. She drew them herself, sharply, the way a woman draws lines when she has spent thirty years waiting for the thing that was promised to her.

Abraham gave Hagar a bill of divorce and a skin of water and watched her walk away in a veil that trailed in the desert dust, and the morning after was the morning he started carrying the worst of the ten trials.