The Test Ishmael Did Not Know He Was Taking

After Sarah demanded that Hagar and Ishmael be expelled from the camp of Abraham, the boy grew up in the wilderness of Paran. He became an archer. He took a wife from Egypt. He built a tent and raised children and wandered with his flocks through the months and years. And after a long time Abraham said to Sarah: I yearn to see my son. I have not seen him for a long time.

He rode a camel. He made no announcement. The story is told in the Legends of the Jews, drawn from early midrashic sources, and the detail of the camel is not incidental. Abraham had sworn to Sarah that he would not descend from it, would not set foot on the ground at Ishmael's tent. This was a limit he had set for himself, a promise to the wife who had sent her rival's son away. He would look. He would not stay.

He arrived at noon and found the wife alone with her children. Ishmael was away hunting. Abraham asked after his son. He asked for a little water. He said he was tired from the road.

The woman did not offer him water. She did not ask who he was. She sat in the tent and beat her children and cursed them, and cursed her husband Ishmael, and spoke evil of him in the presence of this old stranger on a camel who had asked nothing but a drink. Abraham called her out and gave her a message for her husband: a very old man from the land of the Philistines came to seek you, and he said this: when you come home, put away this tent-pin that you have placed here, and set another in its place.

Ishmael returned and heard the message and understood it immediately. He divorced his wife. She went away.

Three years later Abraham went again, again on the camel, again unannounced, again at noon. This time another woman came out of the tent. She said: he is away in the field, but come in, my lord, and eat bread, for your soul must be weary from the journey. Abraham said he would not stop, he was in haste, but could she bring water. She ran and brought out water and bread, and she urged him to eat and drink, and his heart was merry, and he blessed his son Ishmael. He gave her a message: when Ishmael comes home, tell him the tent-pin which you have is very good, do not put it away.

Ishmael understood again. He took his wife and his children and his cattle and everything belonging to him, and he went to live near his father Abraham in the land of the Philistines. The two lived together many days in that land.

The midrashic tradition that Ginzberg collected from earlier sources, including the Book of Jasher and related texts, is extraordinarily precise about what Abraham was testing and why. A wife who does not honor a stranger cannot honor a family. A wife who curses her husband to an old stranger on a camel has already told you everything you need to know about what her household will become. The tent-pin is not metaphor, or rather it is nothing but metaphor: the pin is the wife, the home hinges on her, and when the pin is wrong the whole structure fails.

The rabbis noticed that Abraham did not explain himself. He gave no name, no identity, no context for his strange request. The first wife did not ask. The second addressed him as lord and invited him in without knowing who he was. Hospitality in this tradition is not a social grace. It is a spiritual diagnostic. Abraham had inherited from his own household the tradition of receiving strangers, the same tradition that had sent angels to his tent at Mamre. He tested Ishmael's wives by the same standard God had used to test Abraham himself: how do you treat the stranger who arrives at your door without announcement, without credentials, needing only water and a little bread?

The first wife failed by indifference. She was not cruel. She simply did not look. The second wife passed by looking, by running, by insisting that he eat. She did not ask what she might receive. She gave what she had.

Ishmael himself appears in neither scene. He is always away. His character is revealed entirely by the two women he chose. By his first choice you learn that exile had made him careless. By his second you learn that something of his father had reached him after all, the father who had always known that the measure of a person is what they do with the stranger who arrives uninvited, hungry, and tired, and does not say who he is.