Sarah Gave Hagar Away and Regretted It the Moment She Laughed

The decision was Sarah's. That is the part the story makes clear and then immediately tries to complicate. It was Sarah who told Abraham to go in to Hagar. Sarah who chose her. Sarah who placed her own maidservant in her husband's arms because the years had passed and her womb had not opened and she had run out of other ideas.

The Book of Jubilees, a second-century BCE retelling of Genesis that reframes the patriarchal narratives in meticulous calendar cycles and jubilee years, records the moment plainly. Abram had rejoiced at the news of God's promise. He had told Sarai everything. He believed. But Sarai did not conceive. So Sarai advised her husband and said: Go in unto Hagar, my Egyptian maid. It may be that I shall build up seed unto thee by her. And Abram hearkened. And Hagar conceived. And she bore Ishmael in the fifth year of the week, in the forty-first jubilee.

For years, things held together. Abraham had a son. Sarai was still the wife, still the first woman in the tent. The arrangement had done what it was designed to do. Jubilees notes that Abraham rejoiced, blessed God, and saw that he had not died childless. He remembered the words God had spoken to him on the day Lot had parted from him. He walked through those years grateful, his heart eased by the presence of a living son.

Then everything cracked on a single day. Sarah saw Ishmael playing. Dancing, some traditions say. And Abraham was rejoicing with great joy nearby. That image, of her husband's delight in the child of another woman, was the thing she could not hold. Jealousy moved through her fast and hard. Send the maidservant away, she told Abraham. Send the boy. The son of this bondwoman will not be heir with my son Isaac.

The grief that hit Abraham was real. Jubilees does not flatten it. The thing was grievous in Abraham's sight, because of both Hagar and the boy. He had made Ishmael. He had watched him grow through years of hunger for a son. The thought of driving them into the wilderness was not a simple instruction to follow. It required God's intervention directly. Let it not be grievous, God told him. In all that Sarah has said, listen to her voice. For in Isaac shall your name and seed be called. But for Ishmael, I will make him a great nation, because he is of your seed.

What the Jubilees account preserves is the texture of the decision that the Torah compresses into a few verses. Sarah was not simply jealous of a slave. She was watching the structure of inheritance she had built with her own hands threaten to swallow her son. She had given Hagar to Abraham. She had constructed the arrangement that produced Ishmael. And now the arrangement had a laughing boy in it who was making her husband beam. She had been the architect of her own displacement.

The Ginzberg tradition, drawing on tannaitic and amoraic midrash from the first through fifth centuries CE, notes that what Sarah saw Ishmael doing was not innocent play. He was practicing with a bow. He was mocking his younger brother. There is a tradition that Ishmael would boast that he was the firstborn and that the birthright would come to him. Sarah understood what would happen to Isaac if Ishmael remained in the household long enough to make the claim legally and publicly. So the expulsion was not cruelty born of spite. It was strategy born of fear. A mother doing what mothers do when they see the threat clearly and the room for error is zero.

Abraham sent them out with bread and a skin of water. The wilderness received them. The skin ran empty. Hagar set the boy under a bush and walked a distance because she could not watch him die. And God, who had promised Ishmael a nation, was already in the desert ahead of them. He opened Hagar's eyes and showed her a well. Their survival in the wilderness is its own story of divine care extended to the child of a woman who had been given, used, and sent away.

But that story begins because Sarah asked for something she had originally given away and no longer wanted to share. The text does not condemn her. It does not vindicate her either. It records what she did, what it cost everyone around her, and what God chose to honor in spite of all of it. The arrangement Sarah built produced two great nations. She had only wanted one.

The story does not end neatly for Hagar either. She went into the wilderness twice: once when she was pregnant and fled, and once when she was expelled with a young boy. Each time she encountered the divine in a place where no human help was available. She named God in the desert, El Roi, the God who sees. She gave a name to the One who looked at her when no one else would. The child she bore grew into a nation. The woman who had been given away built something that lasted, sustained by a God who saw her even after the woman who had given her away had stopped looking.