Ishmael Cast Out, Then Visited in Secret

Two stories about Ishmael, separated by years but joined by the same theme: what it means to be cast out but not abandoned. The first comes from the Ginzberg collection, drawing on Talmudic-era midrash. The second from a parallel midrashic stream preserved in the midrash aggadah sources. Together they form something the individual texts only suggest: a portrait of Ishmael as a man who spent his life at the edge of his father's attention, close enough to feel the warmth, distant enough to understand the distance.

The expulsion from Abraham's household began, in the midrashic telling, with a glance. Sarah's evil eye fell on her stepson Ishmael and made him sick with fever. The detail is striking because Ishmael by this point was a grown young man, not an infant. His mother Hagar had to carry him, grown-up as he was, because the fever had made him unable to walk. In his illness he drank constantly from the water bottle Abraham had given Hagar when they left the household, and the water ran out quickly. When Hagar saw that the water was gone and death was near, she cast Ishmael under the willow shrubs. The spot she chose, the tradition notes, was the same spot where angels had previously appeared to her and promised her that she would bear a son. She knew the ground. She had been there before, in her own crisis, and angels had found her. Now she laid her son there and moved away so she would not have to watch him die.

Her prayer to God was blunt with grief. "Yesterday Thou didst say to me, I will greatly multiply thy seed, that it shall not be numbered for multitude, and today my son dies of thirst." Yesterday and today. The promise and the dying child. Ishmael himself was praying, and the angels in heaven were arguing against him. "Wilt Thou cause a well to spring up for him whose descendants will let Thy children of Israel perish with thirst?" This is one of the most uncomfortable moments in the midrashic canon, the heavenly court weighing future guilt against present need. God's answer was decisive: "What is Ishmael at this moment, righteous or wicked?" The angels said righteous. God said, then I treat him according to what he is now, not what his descendants will do. The well appeared.

This principle, that God judges each person according to the moment, not according to future consequences, was considered one of the foundations of divine justice by the rabbis who transmitted this tradition. It protected Ishmael in the desert. It also complicated any simple reading of the expulsion as a divine condemnation. Ishmael was not cast out because he was wicked. He was cast out because of the dynamics of a household that could not contain both sons of Abraham. The divine calculus was not about guilt. It was about which line would carry which covenant.

Years passed. Ishmael grew up in the desert, married, built a house. Abraham had sworn to Sarah that he would not dismount from his camel when he visited his son. He came to Ishmael's tent at midday and found Ishmael's wife there. He asked for a little bread and water; his soul was faint from the journey through the desert. She brought it. And then Abraham arose and prayed before God for his son. The midrash does not give us the words of the prayer. It gives us the result: Ishmael's house was filled with all good things, with all the blessings of various kinds. The man who had refused to step down from his camel, who had kept his oath to Sarah even at the distance of his son, filled the house with blessing by praying from the height of the saddle.

When Ishmael came home and his wife told him what had happened, something shifted in him. The tradition says he "knew that his father's love was still extended to him." The verse it cites is from Psalms 103:13: "Like as a father pitieth his sons." The quote is deliberate. The love was not revoked. It was present in the blessing that flooded the house, in the prayer offered by a man who sat on a camel at noon in the heat and prayed for a son he was not allowed to embrace.

After Sarah's death, Abraham returned to Hagar, whose name in this context is given as Keturah, because she was perfumed with all kinds of scents. The tradition is careful here: it says Abraham "again" took her, because on the first occasion she had been his wife, and he was returning. The marriage dissolved by circumstances had not been dissolved by the heart. Abraham's return to Hagar after Sarah's death was the final resolution of what the expulsion had begun, the acknowledgment that the care he had felt for that household had never entirely gone away.

The Ginzberg corpus, which spans the great narrative midrashim of the Talmudic period through the medieval commentaries, treats Ishmael's story with unusual care. The Legends of the Jews does not flatten him into a foil for Isaac or reduce him to the ancestor of enemies. He is a man who was sick in the desert and prayed and was heard. He is a man whose father visited him in secret and blessed his house without stepping inside it. He is a man who read his father's love in a house suddenly full of abundance, not in an embrace he was never given. The distance between them was real. The love was also real. The midrash holds both without resolving the tension, because the tension is the truth of the story.