Hagar

"Hagar in the Wilderness", Corot

הגר


Genesis 16:1 ff: Sarah's Egyptian handmaiden, on whom Av-Raham fathered Yishma-El.

The word used for her status is Shiphchah (שִׁפְחָה), which is generally translated as "handmaiden". However 1 Samuel 25:41 has "amat'cha le'shiphchah (אֲמָֽתְךָ֙ לְשִׁפְחָ֔ה)", which is understood to mean "your housemaid who is a slave-girl", inferring "amat'cha" as "handmaiden" and "shiphchah" as "slave-girl", rather than the other way around.

Shiphcha is also used in Genesis 29:24 when Le'ah gives Zilpah to Ya'akov in exactly the same manner that Sarah here gives Hagar; and again in Genesis 29:29 when Rachel does the same with Bilhah. The root is shaphach (שפח), from which comes mishpechah (משפחה), meaning "a family", and implying that a Shiphchah has been made an honorary member of the family, which a slave-girl would not be unless she was herself Bat Yisra-Eli. Exodus 21:7-11, for example, implementing the Jubilee laws, states that:

"When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has broken faith with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money."

While this is Mosaic Torah, and therefore does not apply to Av-Raham, it is also Hammurabic, so we can presume that it would in fact have been the norm with Av-Raham as well; as he does not do any of these things before sending her away, we can deduce that her status was not that of a slave-girl, or may once have been but was no longer; that she was called a Shiphchah because she had indeed been made an honorary member of the family (clan, tribe). The varying shades of grey in the morality of all this are not the place of TheBibleNet to determine.

Genesis 16:6 describes Sarah's jealousy when Hagar falls pregnant, and her subsequent mistreatment, which are such that Hagar flees to a well named Be'er Lechi Ro'i. An "angel" finds her there and sends her back, with promises that she will have a son, but from the oracular description we might wonder if she is giving birth to Prometheus, or the Egyptian deity Set, or a Golem in the manner of Dr Frankenstein's creation:

"He shall be a wild ass of a man: his hand shall be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the face of all his brethren."

Genesis 21:9-11 tells how Sarah, concerned for the inheritance status of her newborn son Yitschak, makes Av-Raham send Hagar away, with Yishma-El. "And the thing was very grievous in Av-Raham's sight on account of his son."

Genesis 21:12-13 finds Elohim reassuring Av-Raham that both of his sons will be the fathers of great nations.

Genesis 21:14-1 has Av-Raham taking Hagar and Yishma-El to Be'er Sheva, and leaving them there. Not uninteresting, in that Be'er-Sheva will become Yitschak's family home, and remain so in Ya'akov's latter years, before he moves the family to Mitsrayim (Egypt) at Yoseph's invitation.

Genesis 21:17-21 (each of these Genesis 21 links takes you to a different version of the text), Elohim repeats his promise, but now directly to Hagar, and shows her where to find water.

In Yeudit the name is understood to mean "flight", and that from it comes the term "Hejira", Muhammad's flight from Mecca, in 622 CE. This however does not quite synchronise with the Moslem view - the full account, which may surprise you in several of its aspects, can be found by clicking here.

1 Chronicles 11:38 and 27:31 name the Hagri (הַגְרִֽי), known in English as the Hagarenes or Hagarites, an Arabian tribe from beyond the river Yarden (Jordan). It may be that the two names are simply coincidentally similar, or that the Hagri were themselves descendants of Yishma-El from after the time of their flight; their location among the Yoktanite Arabs certainly conforms to the Arab tales, in the Qur'an and before the Qur'an.

Speaking of which, Hagar does not in fact get a mention of any kind in the Qur'an, which is surprising, given that it was she and Yishma-El, or Ismāʻīl, who, just as in the Tanach, went searching for water, and found it at the Zamzam well, and that running back and forth between the two hills of Mecca - Safa and Marwa remains to this day one of the central ceremonies of the Moslem Hajj.

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