What Ishmael Prayed in the Desert

The water ran out somewhere in the wilderness of Beersheba, and the two of them responded in opposite ways.

Hagar placed Ishmael under an olive tree when he could no longer walk. She walked away a bow's length and sat down. She did not want to watch him die. The Torah says she wept (Genesis 21:16). The rabbinic tradition, in the Book of Jubilees written in the second century BCE and preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls, adds the detail that she prayed, but not to the God of Abraham. She addressed her supplications, the Legends of the Jews records, to the idols of her Egyptian youth.

Ishmael prayed differently.

The Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's synthesis of Talmudic and midrashic sources compiled in the early twentieth century, preserves Ishmael's words almost verbatim: O Lord of the world, if it be Your will that I shall perish, let me die in some other way, not by thirst. The tortures of thirst are great beyond all others.

This is not the prayer of someone who expects rescue. It is the prayer of someone who has accepted that he might die and is asking only for mercy in the manner of death. The tradition reads this as genuine piety, and it distinguishes Ishmael from his mother at the precise moment their difference matters most.

The angel appeared to Hagar, not to Ishmael directly, though the prayer was Ishmael's. The Book of Jubilees account names the messenger as one of the holy ones: why do you weep, Hagar? Arise, take the child. God has heard his voice. The well appeared. The Jubilees narrative says she opened her eyes and saw it. Hagar filled the bottle and gave Ishmael water to drink. Then she filled it again, because she feared it might run out before they found another.

The well the tradition identifies is Miriam's Well, one of the ten things created at twilight on the sixth day of creation, in the final moments before the first Shabbat. It had been present, waiting, since the beginning of the world, assigned to this moment. The rabbis who compiled the list of twilight creations understood these objects as provisions laid in before time began: the manna, the rod of Moses, the mouth of the earth that swallowed Korah, the rainbow, and the well that traveled with Israel in the wilderness. That the same well appeared first for Ishmael, before it was given to Israel, is a fact the tradition preserves without resolving.

The account of Ishmael's crisis in the desert in the Ginzberg synthesis notes that Hagar returned with her son to Egypt, because the proverb goes: throw the stick in the air as you will, it always lands on its point. She came from Egypt, and to Egypt she returned, to choose a wife for her son from among her own people. Ishmael grew into an archer, a man of the wilderness, and God was with him, the Torah says, in language it does not use for everyone.

The Book of Jubilees notes elsewhere that God did not assign an angel or a heavenly guardian to oversee Ishmael or his descendants, the way God appointed guardians for the nations. Over Israel, the text says, God chose to rule directly. But the same text records that God heard Ishmael's cry in the desert, identified it as a valid prayer, and sent water.

The rabbinic tradition is careful not to idealize Ishmael. The Book of Jubilees, which is less charitable to him than the Ginzberg synthesis, notes that God did not assign Israel's guardian angels to watch over Ishmael's descendants. Over Israel alone, the text says, God chose to rule without intermediaries. Ishmael received the blessing of fruitfulness, the promise of twelve princes, and the gift of a well when he needed it. He did not receive the covenant. The tradition holds these as distinct things, neither collapsing Ishmael into Israel's story nor erasing his own.

What the tradition does preserve, across the Book of Jubilees, the Ginzberg synthesis, and the Talmudic discussions of prayer that cite this episode, is that Ishmael's prayer in the desert was genuine. He did not perform piety. He was dying. He asked for mercy in the manner of death because he could not ask for more than that. The angelic tradition around Ishmael is consistent: God hears what is real. The well rose up for him not because of his lineage or his status but because the prayer was honest and addressed to the right place.

The distinction the tradition draws is not between the heard and the unheard, but between those who pray to what is real and those who pray to what is not. Hagar prayed to Egyptian idols that do not exist. The water came because her son prayed to the God who does. Even at the edge of death, even cast out, even twelve years old and collapsing under an olive tree, Ishmael knew the difference. The well rose up for him.