Not in God's Name (13 page)

What of the emotional tonality of the Hagar-Ishmael episodes?
⁶
One feature is particularly noticeable. In general, the Hebrew Bible is highly reticent in telling us about people’s emotional states. We do not know, for example, what Noah’s reaction was when he heard that all life was about to be destroyed by a flood, or Abraham’s feelings when told to leave his land, birthplace and father’s house. By contrast, both scenes involving Hagar are etched with drama. The first paints a vivid scene of Hagar alone in the desert, close to despair, then comforted by an angel. The second is unmatched for its emotional intensity.

To understand the significance of this, we have to realise that Genesis 21, the sending away of Ishmael, is a parallel passage to Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac. In both, Abraham undergoes a trial involving the potential loss of a son. Ishmael and Isaac, the two children, are both only dimly aware of what is happening. In both, they are about to die until heaven intervenes, in the
first case by providing a well of water, in the second, a ram to be offered as a sacrifice in Isaac’s place. The similarities serve to highlight the differences.

The story of the binding of Isaac is notable for its complete absence of emotion. God commands, Abraham obeys, Isaac joins him on the journey, Abraham prepares the altar, binds his son and lifts his knife, then an angel says, ‘Stop.’ Throughout the ordeal Abraham says nothing to God except for one word at the beginning and the end:
hineni
, ‘Here I am’ (22:1, 11).

By contrast, the episode involving Hagar and Ishmael is saturated with emotion. Hagar weeps: ‘Then she went off and sat down nearby, about a bow-shot away, for she said to herself, “Let me not see the child die.” As she sat, she lifted up her voice and wept’ (21:16). Ishmael weeps: ‘God heard the boy crying’ (21:17). There is a pathos here that is rare in biblical prose. There can be no doubt that the narrative is written to enlist our sympathy in a way it does not in the case of Isaac. We
identify
with Hagar and Ishmael; we are
awed
by Abraham and Isaac. The latter is a religious drama, the former a human one, and its very humanity gives it power.

None of this is as we would expect. Ostensibly the hero of the story is Isaac. He is the chosen. But our sympathies are not drawn to Isaac, nor, in these episodes at least, to Sarah. Isaac has been singled out to carry the covenantal destiny. God has said so repeatedly. But we are left in no doubt that Abraham is attached to Ishmael, that our sympathies are drawn to him and Hagar, that Ishmael will be blessed, that God hears his tears and is ‘with him’ as he grows up. It is not that Ishmael is evil that disqualifies him from being heir to the covenant. The only term that might cast him in a negative light – that he was ‘laughing’ while Sarah was celebrating – is, as we saw, ambiguous.

Why then was Ishmael not chosen?
The answer suggested by the text is instructive. It is because, like Esau in the next generation, he has physical strength and cunning. He is ‘a wild donkey of a man, his hand against every man, and every man’s hand against him’ (16:12). Eventually he becomes ‘an archer’ (21:20).

We now begin to sense the subtlety of the biblical narrative. This is not the world of myth with its simple plots and two-dimensional characters. In myth, Ishmael would be a tragic hero, strong, resourceful, combative but defeated by implacable fate. Abraham would have sent him away, fearing that he would one day become a threat. Ishmael might return unexpectedly, killing Abraham not realising that he is his father, and we would then have a biblical version of
Oedipus
.

Instead – and this is fundamental to understanding Genesis – what we have is a
subversion
of myth, a consistent frustration of narrative expectation. God’s promise does
not
come true in the way we expect. Abraham’s fortunes are not suddenly transformed. Promised children, he remains childless. Eventually given a son, he is told by God that this is
not
the son. Abraham – unlike Laius, Oedipus’ father – does
not
want to send Ishmael away. He does so against his will. The only vivid image we are given of Ishmael is not as a man of strength, the epic hero, but as a child, abandoned and about to die.

More significantly still, the conflicts in the story are not what they are in myth – between the personal and the impersonal, human aspiration and blind fate, hubris and nemesis. Instead, the conflict is
within the minds of the protagonists
. Sarah is torn between her desire for a child and her envy of the pregnant Hagar. Abraham is torn between his love of Ishmael and his obedience to God. As Jack Miles puts it, ‘
Tanakh
[the Hebrew Bible] is more like
Hamlet
than it is like
Oedipus Rex
’
.
⁷

Myth belongs to a universe bounded by nature. The gods live within, not beyond, the world. What counts in myth is strength, power, force. What makes myth tragic is its realisation that nature ultimately defeats the strongest. We are dwarfed in its presence, undone by its caprice. The choice of Isaac instead of Ishmael has many dimensions, but they all share one feature: they are a refusal to let nature have the final word.

Sarah, like other biblical heroines – Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah and others – is unable naturally to have children. She is infertile,
ninety years old and post-menopausal: ‘Sarah had stopped having the periods of women’ (18:11). Nor is destiny conferred by fatherhood as it was in the ancient world, but by motherhood: Ishmael is Abraham’s child but not Sarah’s. It is the latter point – anticipating later Jewish law that Jewish identity is matrilineal, not patrilineal – that is crucial. Most fundamentally, Isaac has none of the attributes of a mythic hero. Unlike Ishmael, he is
not
strong, physical, at home in the fields and forests. The same contrast will later be played out by Esau and Jacob. Throughout the narrative Isaac remains a shadowy figure, passive rather than active, done-to rather than doing. If, in myth, character is proved in heroic action, Isaac is the non-hero, the figure of quiet obedience who exemplifies Milton’s line, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’
⁸

Intimated here is one of the most striking themes of the Pentateuch. God chooses
those who cannot do naturally what others take for granted
. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, all promised the land of Canaan/Israel, own none of it and have to beg or pay to bury their dead, pitch their tent or draw water from wells they themselves have dug. Moses, bearer of the divine word, is the man who says, ‘I am not a man of words…I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue’ (Exod. 4:10). Israel is the people whose achievements are transparently God-given. What for others is natural, for Israel is the result of divine intervention. Israel
must be weak if it is to be strong
, for its strength must come from heaven so that it can never say, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have achieved this wealth for me’ (Deut. 8:17). It is Ishmael’s natural strength that disqualifies him.

Yet
Ishmael is not vilified
. That is the masterstroke of the narrative. Despite the fact that Abraham, Sarah and Isaac are the heroes of the story as a whole, in the two crucial scenes in the desert our imaginative sympathies are with Hagar and her child. That is what gives the story its counter-intuitive depth.

There is a moral reason for this and it is fundamental. We saw in
chapter 2
that violence begins in the in-group/out-group
dichotomy. I identify with my side, and am suspicious of the other side. In situations of stress, sympathy for the other side can come to seem like a kind of betrayal. It is this that the Ishmael story is challenging. At the first critical juncture for the covenantal family – the birth of its first children – we feel for Sarah and Isaac. She is the first Jewish mother, and he the first Jewish child.
But we also feel for Hagar and Ishmael
. We enter their world, see through their eyes, empathise with their emotions. That is how the narrative is written, to enlist our sympathy. We weep with them, feeling their outcast state.
As does God
. For it is he who hears their tears, comforts them, saves them from death and gives them his blessing. Ishmael means ‘he whom God has heard’.

Nor is this the end of the story. After the close of the biblical canon, reflection on Israel’s destiny passed from the prophets to the sages, and from revelation to interpretation – the genre known as Midrash through which the sages filled in the many gaps in biblical narrative.
⁹
In the case of Abraham, they noticed several tantalising clues, which eventually led them to piece together an extraordinary sequel to the story. The first clue appears in the announcement of the death of Abraham:

Then Abraham took his last breath and died at a good old age, old and full of years; and he was gathered to his people.
His sons Isaac and Ishmael
buried him in the cave of Machpelah near Mamre, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite. (Gen. 25:8–9)

What is Ishmael doing here, standing next to Isaac at their father’s grave? Until now, we have assumed that from early childhood they had lived separate lives. Isaac grew up with Abraham and Sarah, Ishmael with Hagar. There was, as far as we know, no contact between them. How then did they come together for Abraham’s
funeral? What was their relationship? Did Ishmael bear a grudge at being sent away? These are questions bound to arise for anyone who has been attending carefully to the story. Yet the text offers no answers. It does not even seem to be aware of the questions.

The second anomaly: throughout Abraham’s long journey, he has been accompanied by Sarah. The text emphasises their faithfulness to one another and to God. Sarah dies and Abraham buys a field with a cave in which to bury her – his first share in the Promised Land. In the next chapter, he sends his servant to find a wife for Isaac. The story seems to have reached closure. Abraham has seen, if not the fulfilment of the divine promises, at least a beginning. He has a son, his son is married, and he has a fragment of the land. We expect, in the next scene, to see him die in peace. At this point, however, the text takes a digression that seems to make no sense at all:

Abraham took another wife, named Keturah. She bore to him Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak and Shuah. Jokshan was the father of Sheba and Dedan; the descendants of Dedan were the Asshurites, the Letushites and the Leummites. The sons of Midian were Ephah, Epher, Hanoch, Abida and Eldaah. All these were descendants of Keturah. (Gen. 25:1–4)

What is happening here? Why, after the protracted drama of Abraham’s wait for a child, do we suddenly read that, in old age, Abraham has six more sons by a new wife? Who is Keturah, of whom we have heard nothing until now and of whom we will hear nothing again?

Genesis is a highly purposeful narrative. It tells us nothing merely because it happened. It is not ‘history’ in the conventional sense. It is
covenantal
history, the working out of truth through time. It discloses a pattern, and nothing extraneous to that pattern is allowed to divert our attention. It may be that the story of Abraham’s other children is there to supply the background to certain nations who will later play a part in Israel’s
story – Midian, for example, or Asshur (Assyria). Alternatively it may be telling us that this is how Abraham became, as God said he would, ‘the father of many nations’. Neither, though, seems likely. No weight is later placed by the Bible on the fact that the Midianites and Assyrians were children of Abraham. Nor does it emphasise, as it does in the case of Ishmael, that they were to become ‘great nations’. Who was Keturah, and why does this episode appear just before the end of Abraham’s story?

The third oddity is location. After the binding of Isaac, Abraham returned to Beersheba. The death and burial of Sarah take place at Hebron. We would expect to find Isaac at one or other of these two places. However, two episodes locate him elsewhere. When Abraham’s servant returns, bringing Rebekah to become Isaac’s wife, we read: ‘Isaac had just come from
Beer Lahai Roi
, for he was living in the Negev’ (24:62). After Abraham’s funeral we read again: ‘After the death of Abraham, God blessed his son Isaac. At that time, Isaac was living near
Beer Lahai Roi
’ (25:11).What is this place and what was Isaac doing there?

It was this that gave the rabbis the key to unlock all three mysteries. Looking back, we discover that
Beer Lahai Roi
appears in Genesis 16 when Hagar first fled into the desert. Having been met and blessed by an angel, she gave the place a name:

So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God of seeing’, for she said, ‘Did I not have a vision after He saw me?’ That is why the well was called
Beer Lahai Roi
[‘the well of the living One who sees me’]; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered. (Gen. 16:13–14)

Beer Lahai Roi is
the place of Hagar
. Teasing out the implications of this unexpected turn in the plot, the sages said: ‘On seeing that his father had sent to fetch him a wife, Isaac said, Can I live with her while my father lives alone? I will go and return Hagar to him.’
¹⁰
Isaac had been on a mission of reconciliation to reunite Hagar and Abraham.

The rabbis made a further interpretive leap. One device of Midrash is to identify unknown with known biblical characters.
¹¹
Who then was Keturah? Said the rabbis: Hagar herself! Why then was she called Keturah? Because, said the sages, ‘her acts were as fragrant as incense [
ketoret
]’.
¹²

A complete counter-narrative is taking shape. Whether of his own accord or at the prompting of Isaac, Abraham took Hagar back and gave her a place of honour in his household. What does this Midrash tell us about how the rabbis read the text?
¹³
It tells us that they felt there was something morally amiss about the story as it stood. Hagar, obedient to her mistress’s wishes, was sent away. So too was Ishmael, the child born at Sarah’s request.