Hagar Knew Exactly What House She Was In

By the time Hagar became pregnant with Abraham's child, she had already seen more than most people see in a lifetime. She had watched plagues descend on her father's palace because of Sarah. She had left Egypt as the daughter of the king who feared this household enough to give his own daughter to it. She had lived alongside Abraham and Sarah for years in Canaan, learning their ways, walking in their path. She was not a naive girl who stumbled into a miracle-working family by accident.

Which is what makes the Ginzberg tradition's account of her behavior after conceiving so sharp. She had more information than almost anyone. She had seen what this household was. And she still made the mistake of using her pregnancy to settle a score.

The moment she felt the child quicken, she began to treat Sarah with contempt. Not openly, at first. The Ginzberg sources, drawing on the midrashic tradition preserved in Legends of the Jews, describe the mechanics with some care. When noble women came to visit Sarah, Sarah would encourage them to stop by and see Hagar too. The women would go. And Hagar would use the visit to talk about her mistress. My lady Sarah, she would say, is not inwardly what she appears outwardly. She makes the impression of a pious woman, but she is not. If she were truly righteous, how could she have gone childless for so many years while I conceived in an instant?

The logic was airtight and completely wrong. It assumed that the speed of God's response was a measure of the receiver's virtue. Hagar had seen enough to know better. She had watched the plagues in Egypt arrive not because Pharaoh was wicked in some simple way but because he had taken what belonged to someone under extraordinary divine protection. She had watched the furnace miracle at Kasdim, heard the story of Abraham walking in fire for three days. She had lived for years in a household where the holy spirit was not a metaphor but a presence that occasionally instructed people on what to do. She had all this evidence, and she used her pregnancy to decide that Sarah's decades of barrenness was proof that Sarah was not truly good.

The Ginzberg account of Sarah in Egypt gives Hagar's background in precise terms: she was Pharaoh's daughter, given to Sarah because her father preferred to see her serve in this house rather than reign elsewhere. Hagar had been raised, essentially, as Sarah's disciple. The Ginzberg tradition says she had learned all of Sarah's ways and was not deficient in following them. Whatever Sarah knew, Hagar knew. Whatever path Sarah walked, Hagar had walked beside her.

That proximity, the Midrash implies, was the root of the contempt. You cannot despise a stranger the way you can despise someone you have watched closely and decided has feet of clay. Hagar had studied Sarah. She had decided she understood her. And when the pregnancy came and Sarah remained without a child of her own, Hagar concluded that her private assessment had been correct all along.

Sarah, when she understood what was happening, was devastated. The Ginzberg tradition preserves her complaint to Abraham with unusual specificity. She accused him of not praying for her when he prayed to God for children. She said Hagar's contempt arose before Abraham's face and he said nothing. The Book of Jubilees, composed in the second century BCE, records Abraham's response: he gave Hagar back into Sarah's hand and told Sarah to do as seemed good to her. Sarah afflicted her, and Hagar fled to the wilderness.

At Beer-lahai-roi, an angel found her. He told her to return and submit. He told her she would bear a son named Ishmael, and that his hand would be against every man and every man's hand against him, and that he would dwell in hostility toward all his brothers. These were not entirely consoling terms. But the angel also said: God has heard your affliction. He had seen her. That mattered.

Hagar returned. She bore Ishmael. Abraham was eighty-six years old. The covenant with Abraham, the one in which God had promised him descendants as numerous as the stars, was already decades old. Hagar had given it a first shape. That this shape would turn out to be only one branch of a much larger tree was something Hagar could not yet see from her position inside the household. The contempt had cost her. The return had saved her. What she made of both was still, at this point in the story, entirely unresolved.

The Book of Jubilees lists the sending away of Hagar and Ishmael -- which came later, after Isaac was born -- as one of Abraham's ten trials. The trial was not managing Hagar's contempt. It was being called by God and by Sarah to act against his own love for his firstborn son. Abraham passed the trial. Ishmael survived the wilderness. Hagar found a wife for her son from Egypt, her homeland, the country she had never entirely left behind. The two households -- the one she had served and the one she founded -- continued in the world side by side, as the angel at Beer-lahai-roi had said they would.