The God who sees, The God who hears

Exploring the Abrahamic Matriarchs

One thing about the bible that I absolutely love is there is no shortage of rabbit holes to wander down. And one of my favorite things about God is that he is always inviting us to explore the text, wondering things like “what if?” and “what is God like, even here?” The bible gives us snapshots and snippets, but it often doesn’t fill in all of the blanks. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t supposed to ask questions and imagine together. Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time studying one of my favorite women, Hagar/ Keturah- And I’ve got a lot of questions.

There is a school of thought in many Jewish traditions that attribute Keturah to Hagar, suggesting they are the same person. Over and over in scripture, people are renamed, Abraham and Sarah included. But if that were true, how would our reading of the text be potentially impacted? How does Hagar affect the rest of the story? How would centering her affect the way that we read the rest of scripture, and exegete passages in Galatians and 1 peter?

Let’s start at the beginning. Who was Hagar? Depending on who you ask, she was either the daughter of the Pharoah, or an Egyptian princess from the palace of the Pharoah. Abraham and Sarah journeyed to Egypt, but while they were there, Abraham lied and said Sarah was his sister instead of his wife. A plague overtook Egypt, and Hagar was given to Abraham as a handmaid, along with tons of other enslaved people, livestock, and more as part of a lucrative deal. According to midrash texts, the Pharoah told Hagar that it would be better for her to be a servant in Abraham’s house than remain in the famine-stricken land of Egypt, but other traditions suggest that Hagar was a part of Sarah’s dowry, which explains why she “belonged to Sarah.”

Once in Abraham’s house, Sarah treated Hagar horribly. She humiliated her. And when Hagar fled to the wilderness out of desperation and lament, God met her, and honored her. She did not know then that she was the first one to name God El Roi, the God who sees. Notably, Ishmael, her firstborn means “God hears.”

A little later in the text, an interesting exchange takes place between Abraham and the Lord. Sarah overhears their conversation about her future conception and giggles to herself. The Lord heard the giggle— the smirk— whatever you want to call it. He heard and asked Abraham why she laughed. Sarah denied doing it outright. “No, but you did laugh,” The Lord responded. Woops! And yet several chapters later, Abraham names their son Isaac, which means laughter.

Ishmael was a pre-teen when Isaac was born, and when Sarah finally sent Hagar away because the boys were butting heads and she wanted Isaac to have full claim to Abraham’s inheritance, Hagar got lost in the wilderness. Yet when she ran out of water for her and Ishmael in the middle of the desert, God showed up again for her. The God who hears, heard Ishmael and the text says God was with Ishmael as he grew. And The God who sees saw, and provided, (21:19) a prophetic foreshadowing of the Non sacrifice of Isaac in Gen 22:14: “And it is said to this day, ‘On the mountain of the Lord it will be seen and provided.’”

While exploring this story, we tend to focus on the climax of Isaac and the sacrifice. God tests Abraham’s faith, but as God seeks to distinguish himself from the pagan gods of the ancient world who were no stranger to human sacrifice, Abraham says yes when he should have said no. Why was Abraham so eager to obey God? Abraham wanted Isaac to be the promised Messiah, but because the Lord prevented the sacrifice, he wasn’t. Simply put, the fact that the Lord spared him meant that Isaac wasn’t Jesus. Abraham was hoping for an ending—God was just getting started.

Following that moment on the mountain, Sarah and Abraham are never mentioned together again in scripture. Sarah died in Kiriath-Arba, and as Abraham travels to make arrangements for her burial, he tells the residents “He’s a stranger and a sojourner”… it’s as if they were estranged.

One of the most interesting details to me occurs in 24:62. Isaac is still mourning the death of his mother Sarah, but he meets the woman that Abraham’s servant has brought him to marry where? Of all places? At Beer-Lahai-Roi. The text never indicates that Hagar left that region other than to find a wife for Ishamel in Egypt, and it’s not unlikely to assume she was there when Rebekah arrived.

In chapter 25, Keturah is introduced to us for the first time. In some places she’s described as a wife, in others, a concubine (like in Chronicles). Keturah means “incense” and in the ancient world, incense was used as a part of the purification process. This is why many rabbis and Jewish scholars over the past several thousand years have attributed her as Hagar, renamed. Because over the course of her life she was sanctified, as she honored God. Not only did Abraham reunite with her after Sarah’s death, but they had six more children together. Six.

Before Abraham died, he cared for all of his sons and family members, giving them all generous gifts, and left his inheritance-proper to Isaac. But 25:9 indicates some sort of reconciliation between Isaac and Ishmael had taken place, at least on some level, because they buried Abraham together in the same place Sarah was buried. And if Ishmael is still in the picture, its likely Hagar is too. Verse 11 says that after the death of Abraham, Isaac lived at Beer-Lahai-Roi.

He lived in the place where Hagar named God, where he met his wife Rebekah for the first time, and where Abraham and Keturah raised his six brothers. It’s as if the presence of Godly women here is begging us to pay attention.

There’s a lot here in this story. There’s a lot here depending on who we center. But one thing is clear: To God, vulnerability doesn’t equal invisibility. The God who sees, is the God who sustains. The God who hears, hears both laughter and lament. God prioritizes the visibility of the vulnerable, so much so that honoring them honors him.

God is never not lifting the lowly whilst simultaneously subverting the narrative.

In the case of Hagar/ Keturah & Ishmael, God decided on affirming their dignity in advance.

And whenever it’s possible to see those little connections, and whenever glimmers of reconciliation take place, we need to treat scripture like we remember they exist. That way, when Paul quotes Sarah in Galatians thousands of years later, we can recognize he isn’t affirming the way she treated Hagar, he’s warning us against being like her. Speaking via synecdoche, Paul implores us to imagine how living as children of Abraham, people of the promise, as the real “Israel of God”; doesn’t have a thing to do with whether or not the dudes around us are circumcised. But instead, Paul is inviting us to welcome one another into the family well. And whether or not Hagar and Keturah are in fact the same person doesn’t matter much, but what we think of Hagar, Keturah, & Ishmael and their place in God’s family, matters greatly.

As always, thanks for reading along and supporting my work. I’m so glad you’re here.

Liz