Genesis 16 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.
Time Period
Around 2100 to 2000 BC, ten years after Abram entered Canaan
Location
Abram's household in Canaan, and then a desert spring on the road to Shur, on the route toward Egypt
Audience
Israelites of the Mosaic era, learning the origin of the Ishmaelite peoples on their southern borders
Situation
Sarai, still childless, gives her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abram to bear a child on her behalf. Hagar conceives, tension breaks out between the two women, and Hagar flees into the desert, where the angel of the LORD meets her and tells her to return, promising that her son Ishmael will father a great multitude.
Key Background
Marriage contracts from Mesopotamia record exactly this arrangement, where a barren wife provides a slave woman as a surrogate and the resulting child is legally credited to the wife, so Sarai is following ordinary practice rather than inventing a scheme. The same law codes also address the surrogate who then treats her mistress with contempt, and permit the wife to discipline her, which explains the legal shape of the quarrel. Hagar becomes the first person in Genesis to give God a name, calling him the God who sees me, and she is a foreign slave woman rather than a patriarch, which is striking in a culture where naming a deity was the privilege of the powerful.
Now Sarai, Abram's hadn't been able to have children for him. But she had an Egyptian named Hagar.
So Sarai said to Abram, "Look, has kept me from having children. Sleep with my servant — maybe I can a And Abram agreed to what Sarai said.
So after Abram had been living in the land of for ten years, his Sarai took her Egyptian servant Hagar and gave her to her husband Abram as a
He slept with Hagar, and she became pregnant. But when she realized she was pregnant, she started down on her
Then Sarai said to Abram, "This is I put my servant in arms, and now that she's pregnant, she looks down on me. you and me!"
Abram told Sarai, "Look, servant is in Do whatever you think is best." So Sarai so that she ran away.
The of found her by a spring of water in the wilderness — the spring on the road to
He said, "Hagar, — where have you come from, and where are you going?" She said, "I'm running away from my mistress Sarai."
The angel of Yahweh told "Go back to your mistress and you."
Then the angel of Yahweh told her, "I will give you so many that they'll be too many to count."
The angel of Yahweh also told her, "You are pregnant and will have a son. Name him — because Yahweh has heard your of
He'll be a of a — his hand against everyone, everyone's hand against him — and he'll in the of all his relatives.
She gave Yahweh — the who had spoken to her — a name: "You are El she said, because she declared, "I have the who me!"
That's why the well is called It's still there, between Kadesh and Bered.
Hagar gave a and — the one Hagar had given birth to — Ishmael.
Abram was when Hagar gave birth to Ishmael.