1. The league of friendship which it had pleased the Most High to contract with Abraham was entered into with him not as a private individual, standing alone, but as the head and destined progenitor of a nation. Yet his marriage had been so long unblessed with issue that he had begun to entertain the idea of an adopted heir, in despair of one sprung from his own body. This idea was dissipated by a Divine communication which preceded the first formation of the covenant: “He that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir.” These words left no doubt that Abraham should become a father; but they said nothing to indicate that Sarah was to be a mother.
Two passionate hearts under the grey tent dwelt ever on one thought: the mother's to clasp a son to her milky breast, dearest desire of all to an Oriental woman; the father's to found a mighty race, to be the father of nations, his personal desire merged in the larger thought of mankind. Year after year went by and no less keen was the longing. Deeper grief then gathered round it; and though Abraham believed still, Sarah despaired. At last she could wait no longer; she adopted the Oriental usage and gave her slave-girl to her husband.
In the matter of Sarah giving her handmaid Hagar to Abraham as a second or inferior wife, because she had no children I herself, it is not improbable that we have a record of what was a common custom at that time. In the inscriptions, however, the woman of inferior position, though she is expected to be the servant of the other, is raised, to all appearance, into a higher position, and described as the sister of the first wife, apparently by adoption. There was to be no difference in the status of the children of either of them, and it was apparently on account of the hope that Hagar's son would be as her own that the patriarch's wife acted as she did.1 [Note: T. G. Pinches.]
2. As soon as the end was obtained, the results, like a crop of nettles, began to appear in that home, which had been the abode of purity and bliss, but which was now destined to be the scene of discord. Raised into a position of rivalry with Sarah, and expectant of giving the long-desired son to Abraham, and a young master to the camp, Hagar despised her childless mistress, and took no pains to conceal her contempt. This was more than Sarah could endure. It was easier to make one heroic act of self-sacrifice than to bear each day the insolent carriage of the maid whom she herself had exalted to this position. Nor was she reasonable in her irritation; instead of assuming the responsibility of having brought about the untoward event, so fraught with misery to herself, she passionately upbraided her husband, saying: “My wrong be upon thee: the Lord judge between me and thee.”
In such an emergency as now arose in Abraham's household, character shows itself clearly. Sarah's vexation at the success of her own scheme, her recrimination and appeal for strange justice, her unjustifiable treatment of Hagar, Abraham's Bedouin disregard of the jealousies of the women's tent, his Gallio-like repudiation of judgment in such quarrels, his regretful vexation and shame that through such follies, mistakes, and wranglings, God had to find a channel for His promise to flow-all this discloses the painful ferment into which Abraham's household was thrown. Sarah's attempt to rid herself with a high hand of the consequences of her scheme is signally unsuccessful. She forces Hagar to flee, and fancies that she has now rid herself and her household of all the disagreeable consequences of her experiment. She is grievously mistaken. The slave comes back upon her hands, and comes back with the promise of a son who should be a continual trouble to all about him.
3. When Hagar fled from her mistress she naturally took the way to her old country. Instinctively her feet carried her to the land of her birth. And as she crossed the desert country where Palestine, Egypt, and Arabia meet, she halted by a fountain, spent with her flight and awed by the solitude and stillness of the desert. Her spirit is breaking under this sense of desolation, when suddenly her heart stands still, as she hears a voice utter her own name “Hagar, Sarai's maid.” As readily as every other person when God speaks to them does Hagar recognize who it is that has followed her into this blank solitude. In her circumstances to hear the voice of God left no room for disobedience. The voice of God made audible through the actual circumstances of our daily life acquires a force and an authority we never attached to it otherwise.
One well-known and welcome fountain broke to the traveller of that age his monotonous march across the barren interval which divides the rolling pastures on the south-west of Hebron from the nearest green corner of Egypt. At this oasis on the route to Shur was the weary runaway reposing, when, in the childlike phrase of the old Book, “the angel of the Lord found her.” It is the first time we encounter this solemn title, which afterwards recurs so often, not only in the Pentateuch, but in the prophets of the Old Testament, and the early narratives of the New. Whether, under every appearance which bears this name of “the messenger of Jehovah,” we ought to understand a real theophany or manifestation of the eternal Word and Son of God, clothed by anticipation with such a human form as He was destined ultimately to assume into personal union with Himself; or only some angelic creature, of more than usual dignity, commissioned to represent for the occasion the majesty of the Godhead, and therefore entitled to speak and act with delegated authority on the Divine name-this long-disputed question is one on which it is impossible to pronounce with confidence.
The angel of Jehovah is a self-manifestation of Jehovah: he identifies himself with Him (Gen_31:13, cf. Gen_31:11; Exo_3:6, cf. Exo_3:2), speaks and acts with His authority (Gen_16:10; Gen_21:19, cf. Gen_21:17-18; Gen_22:12; Gen_22:15 f.), and is spoken of as God or Jehovah by others (Gen_16:13; Gen_48:15 f.; Jdg_6:14, cf. Jdg_6:12; Jdg_13:21 f.; Hos_12:4-5). On the other hand, he is also distinguished from Jehovah (Gen_16:11; Gen_19:13; Gen_19:21; Gen_19:24; Num_22:31): “the mere manifestation of Jehovah creating a distinction between the angel and Jehovah, though the identity remains. The form of manifestation is, so to speak, something unreal (Deu_4:12; Deu_4:15), a condescension for the purpose of assuring those to whom it is granted that Jehovah in His fulness is present with them. As the manifestation called the angel of Jehovah occurred chiefly in redemptive history, older theologians regarded it as an adumbration or premonition of the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. This idea was just, in so far as the angel was a manifestation of Jehovah on the earth in a human form, and in so far as such temporary manifestations might seem the prelude to a permanent redemptive self-revelation in this form (Mal_3:1-2); but it was to go beyond the Old Testament, or at any rate beyond the understanding of Old Testament writers, to found on the manifestation distinctions in the Godhead. The only distinction implied is that between Jehovah and Jehovah in manifestation.”1 [Note: S. R. Driver.]
4. “And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands. And the angel of the Lord said unto her, I will greatly multiply thy seed, that it shall not be numbered for multitude. And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son; and thou shalt call his name Ishmael, because the Lord hath heard thy affliction. And he shall be as a wild-ass among men; his hand shall be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren” (Gen_16:9-12).
In the promise of a son which was here given to Hagar and the prediction concerning his destiny, while there was enough to teach both her and Abraham that he was not to be the heir of the promise, there was also much to gratify a mother's pride and be to Hagar a source of continual satisfaction. The son was to bear a name which should commemorate God's remembrance of her in her desolation. As often as she murmured it over the babe or called it to the child or uttered it in sharp remonstrance to the refractory boy, she was still reminded that she had a helper in God who had heard and would hear her.
The prediction regarding the child has been strikingly fulfilled in his descendants, the three characteristics by which they are distinguished being precisely those here mentioned. “He will be a wild man,” literally, “a wild-ass among men,” reminding us of the description of this animal in Job: “Whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings. He scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth he the crying of the driver. The range of the mountains is his pasture, and he searcheth after every green thing.” Like the zebra that cannot be domesticated, the Arab scorns the comforts of civilized life, and adheres to the primitive dress, food, and mode of life, delighting in the sensation of freedom, scouring the deserts, sufficient with his horse and spear for every emergency. His hand is also against every man, looking on all as his natural enemies or as his natural prey; in continual feud of tribe against tribe and of the whole race against all of different blood and different customs. And yet he “dwells in the presence of his brethren”; though so warlike a temper would bode his destruction and has certainly destroyed other races, this Ishmaelite stock continues in its own lands with an uninterrupted history. In the words of an authoritative writer: “They have roved like the moving sands of their deserts; but their race has been rooted while the individual wandered. That race has neither been dissipated by conquest, nor lost by migration, nor confounded with the blood of other countries. They have continued to dwell in the presence of all their brethren, a distinct nation, wearing upon the whole the same features and aspects which prophecy first impressed upon them.”1 [Note: Marcus Dods.]
