Why did Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away?

A feast and a laugh

Isaac is born when Abraham is a hundred, and on the day the boy is weaned his father throws a great feast. Then Sarah sees something that Genesis tells in a single word.

Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, mocking. Therefore she said to Abraham, “Cast out this servant and her son! For the son of this servant will not be heir with my son, Isaac.”

The Hebrew word is metzaḥeq, from the same root as Isaac’s name, Yitzḥaq, “he laughs.” It can mean mocking, playing or simply laughing, and its tone here is anyone’s guess. The Greek Septuagint adds that he was playing with Isaac. The rabbis imagined far worse, and Rashi lists idolatry and violence among the possibilities. Paul read it as persecution: the son born “according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit” (Galatians 4:29). Sarah’s own reason is stated plainly, and it is the inheritance.

Abraham’s distress

“The thing was very grievous in Abraham’s sight on account of his son” (21:11). Ishmael is his firstborn. Abraham was eighty-six when he was born and a hundred at Isaac’s birth (16:16; 21:5), and mothers often nursed for two or three years (2 Maccabees 7:27 speaks of three). So Ishmael is about sixteen when the feast is held. God settles the matter: “In all that Sarah says to you, listen to her voice” (21:12), and adds a promise.

I will also make a nation of the son of the servant, because he is your child.

Hagar has been sent off before, in a way. Years earlier, pregnant and mistreated by Sarai, she ran into the desert herself, and an angel sent her back with the promise of a son named Ishmael, “God hears” (16:6–11).

Bread, water and a bowshot

Abraham rises early, puts bread and a skin of water on Hagar’s shoulder, gives her the boy and sends her away (21:14). She wanders in the wilderness of Beersheba, in today’s Negev. When the water is gone, she leaves the boy under a bush and sits down a bowshot away. “Don’t let me see the death of the child,” she says, and weeps (21:16).

God heard the voice of the boy. The angel of God called to Hagar out of the sky, and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Don’t be afraid. For God has heard the voice of the boy where he is.

His name comes true: God hears. Then “God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water” (21:19). Readers have long noticed that this chapter mirrors the next one. Both begin with Abraham rising early in the morning. In both a son of Abraham is about to die, an angel calls from heaven, and a parent looks up and sees the way out: a well for Hagar, a ram for Abraham (22:3, 11–13).

What became of them

• In Genesis. Ishmael grows up in the wilderness of Paran and becomes an archer, and his mother finds him a wife from Egypt (21:20–21). He has twelve sons, “twelve princes, according to their nations” (25:16), and Esau later marries one of his daughters (28:9).
• At the end. When Abraham dies, Isaac and Ishmael bury him together at Machpelah (25:9). Ishmael lives 137 years (25:17).
• In Paul. Galatians turns the two mothers into an allegory of two covenants, slavery and freedom (4:21–31).
• In Islam. Tradition, not Genesis, takes Hajar and Ismail to the valley of Mecca and the spring of Zamzam, and makes Ismail an ancestor of the Arabs (why Abraham is called the father of three religions).