Hagar Met God Twice in the Desert and Gave Him a Name

Hagar is one of the most theologically striking figures in the entire Torah, and one of the least discussed. She is an Egyptian slave woman given to Abraham by Pharaoh, then given by Sarah to Abraham as a concubine. She is expelled into the wilderness twice — once while pregnant, once with a young child — with nothing but provisions for the journey. And both times she has a direct encounter with God. She is, as the rabbis noted, the only person in the entire Hebrew Bible who gives God a name.

The First Encounter — An Angel at the Spring

The first wilderness encounter occurs in Genesis 16. Hagar is pregnant with Ishmael, having fled from Sarah's harsh treatment. She is found near a spring on the way to Shur — a wilderness road toward Egypt — by the angel of the Lord. The angel asks her two questions: "Hagar, slave of Sarah, where have you come from and where are you going?" She answers the first question honestly — "I am fleeing from my mistress Sarah" — but cannot answer the second. She does not know where she is going.

The angel delivers a prophecy about the son she is carrying: his name will be Ishmael ("God hears"), because God has heard her affliction. He will be a wild man, his hand against everyone and everyone's hand against him, yet he will dwell in defiance of all his kin. The Midrash Rabbah on Genesis (Bereshit Rabbah 45:10, c. 400-500 CE) notes that the description of Ishmael as a wild man is not a curse — it is a portrait of a man who will be entirely free, unbeholden to anyone, living on his own terms in the open world. For a slave woman's son, this was an extraordinary destiny.

The Name Hagar Gave to God

After the angelic encounter, Hagar calls God by a name: El Roi — "the God who sees me" (Genesis 16:13). She explains her naming: "You are the God of seeing, for here I have seen the one who sees me." The well where this happened was named Beer-lahai-roi — "the well of the Living One who sees me" — and it appears again in Genesis as the place where Isaac went out meditating and first saw Rebekah approaching.

The Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg (published 1909-1938) highlights what is unique about this act of naming. No patriarch names God in this fashion. Abraham does not give God a personal name after any of his encounters. Isaac does not. Jacob wrestles with a being and asks its name — and does not receive an answer (Genesis 32:30). Hagar receives not only a divine visit but also the clarity and the confidence to respond by naming. The rabbis debated what this meant. Some said it indicated her prophetic capacity. Others said it indicated the depth of her suffering — only someone who had truly been unseen could understand with such precision what it meant to be seen.

The Second Expulsion — A Mother at the Edge of Death

The second wilderness encounter is starker. After Isaac's birth and the celebration of his weaning, Sarah demands that Abraham send away Hagar and Ishmael (Genesis 21:10). Abraham is distressed — the text says it was "very grievous in Abraham's sight on account of his son" — but God tells him to listen to Sarah. Abraham rises early in the morning, gives Hagar bread and a skin of water, and sends her away with the child.

They wander in the wilderness of Beersheba. The water runs out. Hagar places the child under one of the bushes and moves away, out of sight, saying: "Let me not see the death of the child" (Genesis 21:16). She sits opposite him and weeps. This is the most fully emotional scene in the Genesis narratives — a mother who has run out of everything, positioning herself so she does not have to watch her child die.

God Heard the Child, Not the Mother

The second divine response in the wilderness contains a detail the Midrash Tanchuma (c. 9th century CE, Vayera 8) and other rabbinic sources found deeply significant: God heard the voice of the child, not the mother (Genesis 21:17). But Hagar is the one weeping aloud. The child is under a bush, barely conscious. Why did God respond to the one not crying out?

The Babylonian Talmud (compiled c. 500 CE), Tractate Rosh Hashanah 16b, gives the answer in the context of a larger discussion about how prayer works: each person is judged at the moment of their situation, not by their past or their lineage. Ishmael was dying in the wilderness. His prayer — or his simple, voiceless need — was heard in the context of who he was at that moment, not in the context of who his descendants might become. The rabbis had a tradition that Ishmael's descendants would later persecute Israel. Some argued he should not have been saved. The Talmud's answer is uncompromising: he was judged as he was at that moment, a dying child in a wilderness. At that moment, he was innocent. God heard him.

The Rabbis' Complicated View of Hagar

The tradition is divided on Hagar. Some midrashim present her sympathetically — a woman wronged by her circumstances, never treated as an equal, cast out through no fault of her own. The Midrash Rabbah (Bereshit Rabbah 61:4) records a tradition that after Sarah died, Abraham returned to Hagar — identifying her with Keturah, the woman the Torah says Abraham married in Genesis 25. If this is correct, Hagar became Abraham's wife in full standing only after Sarah's death, returning to the household that had expelled her twice.

Other traditions in the Midrash Aggadah — particularly in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer (c. 8th century CE, chapter 30) — read Hagar as a woman who brought Egyptian spiritual practices with her and was a source of tension in the household for theological as much as interpersonal reasons. The rabbis' difficulty with Hagar mirrors a broader tension in the Genesis narrative: the patriarchal household was not peaceful or simple, and the women who moved through it as servants and concubines had lives that the Torah acknowledges without fully explaining.

What Hagar Teaches

The Zohar (first published c. 1290 CE in Castile, Spain) reads Hagar's two wilderness encounters as a model for the soul's relationship with God — not the elaborate mystical journey of the scholar, but the raw encounter of the abandoned and the unseen. Hagar was not a scholar. She had no lineage, no merit accumulated through generations of covenantal faithfulness. She had her need and her tears. And both times, God met her at the well and at the bush, asking: where are you going? Lift your eyes. There is water. The child will live. El Roi. The God who sees.

Explore Hagar's full story across our collection of 18,000+ ancient Jewish texts at jewishmythology.com.