Sarai Struck Hagar in the Face With a Slipper
Abram quoted two verses about women who may not be sold or enslaved. Sarai answered that she cared neither for Hagar's good nor her harm, three times.
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Hagar knew the moment her body changed, and so did everyone else in the tents. She had been handed to Abram as a wife because Sarai could not conceive, and now she was carrying the household's first child while the woman who owned her was still empty. Something went out of Sarai's standing that afternoon and did not come back. Hagar looked at her mistress and her mistress became small in her eyes (Genesis 16:4).
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Sarai went to Abram. "My wrong is on you," she said. "I put my maid in your arms, and the moment she saw she had conceived I became nothing to her. Let the LORD judge between me and you."
Your Maid Is in Your Hand
Abram gave her one sentence and it settled nothing. "Your maid is in your hand. Do to her what is good in your eyes" (Genesis 16:6).
Sarai answered with a line so cold the sages kept it word for word. "I care neither for her good nor for her harm."
It is the sentence of a woman who has stopped counting someone as a person. Not hatred, which at least admits the other exists. Indifference, with a slave in the room.
Twice He Quoted the Law and Twice She Said the Same Thing
Abram tried the law on her. There is a verse about a woman taken in war, he said, and it says you may not sell her and you may not work her as a slave, because you have already put her through enough (Deuteronomy 21:14). This woman, after what we did to her, are we going to make her a slave again?
"I care neither for her good nor for her harm."
He tried once more. There is a verse about a bondwoman a man has taken for himself, and it says he has lost the power to sell her on, because he dealt with her deceitfully (Exodus 21:8). This woman, after we made her a mistress in the house, are we going to make her a maid again?
"I care neither for her good nor for her harm."
Three times the same words, in a tent, in front of the man who had gone along with the whole arrangement and would not stop it now.
The Slipper and the Buckets
Scripture spends two words on what happened next. Sarai afflicted her, and she ran. The sages would not let two words cover it, and each of them named a different thing his teacher had heard.
Rabbi Abba bar Kahana said she shut the pregnant woman out of Abram's bed, taking back by force the one thing that had raised her.
Rabbi Berekhya said she struck her in the face with a slipper.
Rabbi Berekhya said in the name of Rabbi Abba bar Kahana that she made her carry the buckets and the towels to the bathhouse behind her, so that everyone on the path could watch the wife walk back down into a servant.
A slipper is what is closest to a woman's hand when she is sitting down. It is not a weapon anyone plans. It is what gets used when the person in front of you has stopped counting.
Hagar took the road out of the camp with the child still inside her.
The Spring on the Road to Shur
An angel found her at a spring in the wilderness, on the road that runs down to Shur, which is the road back to Egypt and the house she had come from (Genesis 16:7).
He used her name and her title together, both at once, the way nobody in that camp had bothered to. "Hagar, maid of Sarai. Where have you come from, and where are you going?"
She answered only the first half. "I am running away from Sarai my mistress."
She did not curse the woman. She did not describe the slipper. She named her and stopped, which is its own kind of testimony.
The angel told her to go back and put herself under her mistress's hand again, and then, in the same breath, told her what nobody in the tents had told her. Her seed would be too many to count. She was carrying a son. She would call him Ishmael, God hears, because the LORD had heard her while she was being ground down and nobody in the house had said a word on her behalf (Genesis 16:11).
The Well That Kept the Name
So she gave God a name of her own, which no one else in the book had done. "You are the God who sees me" (Genesis 16:13). She said it standing at the water, still a runaway, with the road to Egypt open behind her and the road back to Sarai open in front.
She took the road back. The well kept her name for it, Beer-lahai-roi, the well of the Living One who sees me, and it sat there between Kadesh and Bered for anyone to drink from (Genesis 16:14). Abram was eighty-six years old when the boy was born, and it was Abram who gave him the name the angel had already given him at the spring.
The slipper stayed in the tradition too. Nobody scrubbed it out to protect the matriarch.
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