Abraham Wrote Hagar a Bill of Divorce Before Sending Her Away

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The Feast Where Sarah Made Up Her Mind

They put on a great feast the day Isaac was weaned, and Sarah watched the older boy all the way through it. Ishmael was a young man by then, the son of the house before there was another son of the house, and he was playing.

She went to her husband with a sentence she had plainly built in advance. "Cast out this bondwoman and her son. The son of this bondwoman will not be heir with my son, with Isaac."

Not send away. Cast out. And she used neither of their names. She had known the woman for close to twenty years and she called her the bondwoman.

Grievous in His Sight

Abraham did not answer his wife. The thing was grievous in his sight on both counts, because of the maidservant and because of his son, and he took it to God instead.

The answer came back against him. Let it not be grievous in your sight, because of the boy and because of the bondwoman. In everything Sarah says to you, listen to her voice and do it, because your name and your seed will be called through Isaac. As for the son of the bondwoman, He would make a great nation of him too, because he was Abraham's seed.

So the case closed twice in one day, once by his wife and once from above, and both rulings ran the same direction. Neither of them made the morning any easier.

What He Wrote Before Dawn

He got up early. He always got up early when something was going to cost him.

Before the household was moving he wrote out a document, and it was not a note. It was a get, a bill of divorce, drawn correctly, the instrument a husband spends his whole life hoping he will never have to draft. It cut Hagar loose from him and from Isaac, and the severance it named was not only the severance of a marriage. From this world and from the world to come.

Then bread. Then a cruse of water. He set them on her shoulder and bound them at her waist with his own hands, and the binding said something too, because a woman with her water tied to her loins was a servant, whatever else she had been inside that tent for twenty years.

The Cloth That Dragged Behind Her

The last thing he did was take a veil and tie it around her waist so that the loose end trailed on the ground behind her as she walked.

Anyone who met her on the road would read it at a glance. Bondwoman, released, not a runaway, not stolen property. That was one reason and it was a kindness of a sort, since a woman walking alone through open country without a story about herself was in a danger that had nothing to do with thirst.

The other reason had nothing to do with her. A dragging cloth writes a line in dust. He wanted to see which way they went. He wanted to be able to stand at the tent and follow the mark his son's road made going away from him for as long as the light held.

Then he let them walk out, and he watched the line.

She Went Off the Road

They went south toward Beersheba. The line held on the road for a while, and then she left the road.

The water ran out. The bread ran out. She put the boy under one of the bushes and walked off about a bowshot and sat down with her back to him, because she was not going to watch her son die, and she lifted up her voice and wept.

Behind her, in Beersheba, Abraham was counting. The furnace in Ur. Leaving his country with no destination given. The famine. The wealth of kings. His wife carried into a foreign palace and handed back. The knife he had not yet been asked to lift. And this. A woman on a road with a cloth dragging behind her, getting smaller, and then off the road, and then gone.

He was found faithful in every one of them. That is the whole verdict on him, and it is not the same thing as saying he came through them unmarked.