Washington Post Op-Ed: The Meaning of Hagar, by Marilynne Robinson (Author, Reading Genesis (2024)) (reviewed here):
The Bible’s human authors put characters in play for a reason. What were they trying to tell us with the servant girl cast in the wilderness?
The book of Genesis evokes the vernal moment, the very spring of Being, when new light awakens fecundity, and futurity, in anything it touches. When every niche of the good and possible is filled, mists rise from the primal garden and there they are, our glorious human progenitors, already complicating everything. Genesis introduces a very distinctive understanding of God and humankind and their history with one another. Within the terms of its vision, it establishes fundamental premises — that there is one God, Creator of heaven and Earth, that human beings are made in His image and likeness; that they are estranged from Him nevertheless; that in response to their estrangement, He offers a covenant bond with humankind in the person of a wandering herdsman named Abraham, and with his wife, Sarah, and their descendants. … [T]he God and protagonist of Genesis has intentions through and beyond Abraham and his offspring that will, over vast reaches of time, embrace all the families of Earth. …
Abraham, a hero of faith and patience, dies leaving one son who, despite his miraculous birth, is the slightest possible assurance that God’s promises to Abraham, notably a multitude of descendants, will be fulfilled. The moral of Abraham’s story would seem to be that, though he is the Lord’s familiar and confidant, this does not alter the fact that history unfolds on a scale human hope or dread or foresight cannot accommodate. At the scale of history, Providence can seem so attenuated that it becomes invisible in the stream of events. In Abrahamic terms, the faithfulness of God must be, and may be, taken on faith. No one can gauge the importance or success of his or her life or the life of anyone else, or imagine its further consequences. Nevertheless, because of the interest of Genesis in the origins of things — being, the sidereal heavens, nations, languages, the harshnesses of life — seeing persons or actions as existing in historic time, as having been seminal, with ongoing significance, is pervasive in Genesis.
Modern readers are offended by the story of Hagar, the Egyptian servant girl who, as a surrogate for childless Sarah, is given by her to Abraham as a wife. She bears him a son, then, at Sarah’s behest, is cast out into the wilderness with the child. This is indeed an ugly act, which Abraham permits and the Lord approves — perplexingly, if the proper frame of interpretation is the interactions within Abraham’s household. But Hagar’s story is, among other things, an account of the origins of the Ishmaelites, dwellers in the wilderness who are acknowledged to be descendants of Abraham, close kin of the Hebrews. …
[P]regnant with Abraham’s child, she flees from Sarah’s cruelty into the wilderness. An angel finds her there and tells her to return and submit to Sarah. If the pericope, the portion of the text used as the basis of a sermon, went only this far it could seem to argue that oppression is a state of things to be borne by those subject to it. But “the angel of the Lord also said, ‘I will so greatly multiply your descendants that they cannot be numbered for multitude.’” This reiterates the Lord’s promise to Abraham and elevates Hagar with her child to a dignity comparable to his. … Hagar takes refuge in the wilderness, and her son and descendants are desert-dwellers, hunters skilled with the bow, a literary conflation of her situation and the future it portends.
That blessing is the center of the narrative is startlingly clear in the next words of the angel, identified again as an angel of the Lord: “Behold, you are with child, and shall bear a son; you shall call his name Ishmael; because the Lord has given heed to your affliction.” …
In the narrative of Genesis, Hagar has more in common with Abraham by far than does anyone else. This should be a factor in considering how those who are “chosen” are singular and how they are not. This is relevant to the much larger question of His relationship to the whole human world. That she is a woman, a slave and a foreigner makes this question especially interesting. Very commonly, it is assumed that Bronze Age people would have had demeaning views of women, especially, and to have blighted other ages through the influence of Scripture. But the Bible, by means of its singular point of view, tells us that God’s care, His estimation of worth, were not subject to the limited vision of Abraham, or of the period in which these texts were written, or of the many generations of interpreters who have rationalized prejudices by means of inattentive reading, or readings too narrow to allow the story its fullness of meaning. The old text can give us a new story, of Hagar the matriarch, attended by angels. In the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”
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