Hagar and Ishmael: Why God Heard the Boy in the Desert (Genesis 21)

The feast was for Isaac. He had been weaned, which in that world happened around the age of two or three, and Abraham marked the day with a great feast (Genesis 21:8). Among the guests Sarah watched Hagar's son, a teenager by now, and did not like what she saw.

She went to Abraham with a demand: "Expel the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac!" (Genesis 21:10).

What happens in Genesis 21:8–21?

Abraham was distressed, because the boy was his son too. God spoke to him. "Do not be distressed about the boy and your maidservant" (Genesis 21:12), He said, and He made a promise about the son who was leaving: "I will also make a nation of the slave woman's son, because he is your offspring" (Genesis 21:13).

Abraham was up early the next morning (Genesis 21:14). He loaded Hagar with bread and a single skin of water, and mother and son walked out into the Wilderness of Beersheba. He let his son go on the strength of one sentence from God, heard the night before.

When the skin was empty, Hagar left the boy under a bush and walked off about a bowshot. "I cannot bear to watch the boy die!" she said (Genesis 21:16), and she sat down and wept out loud.

Why did God hear the boy?

"Then God heard the voice of the boy" (Genesis 21:17). The boy's name is Ishmael, and Ishmael means God hears.

Hagar had been in this desert before. Some seventeen years earlier, pregnant and running from Sarah, she stopped at a spring on the road to Shur, and the angel of the LORD told her what to call her son: "you shall name him Ishmael, for the LORD has heard your cry of affliction" (Genesis 16:11). She answered by giving God a name of her own. "You are the God who sees me," she said (Genesis 16:13).

So every time she called her son in from the tents, she said out loud what God does. And on the day the water ran out, with that name still on the boy, she sat a bowshot away and waited for him to die. Most of us know that place. We have something God said, and a day comes when the skin is empty and we stop expecting Him to do it.

The angel called to her: "What is wrong, Hagar? Do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he lies" (Genesis 21:17). Then he repeated the promise she had carried all along: "I will make him into a great nation" (Genesis 21:18). "Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water" (Genesis 21:19). It was close enough to fill the skin and get back to the boy.

How does Genesis 21 connect to Jesus?

Centuries later Jesus sat tired by Jacob's well in Samaria, and a woman came at midday to draw water (John 4:6–7). She was an outsider too, and He offered her water: "whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst" (John 4:14). She ran back to town saying, "Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did" (John 4:29). Hagar had met the God who sees. This woman met Him face to face, and found that He already knew her completely.

Hagar learned in the desert that the God who sees also hears, and that He keeps what He has said after she has stopped expecting it. That is how anyone comes to know Him. He speaks, we keep what He said, and we watch Him do it, and along the way we find we were known by Him first.

If God has told you something you are still waiting on, write it down with today's date; this is what the Doxa app is for. On the day the water runs low, read it back before you sit down a bowshot away.

What has God already said to you that you need to read again today?

Deeper study today in the Doxa Deeper Dive: the verb that names Ishmael without saying his name, and the old law behind Sarah's demand. Read it here.