Genesis 16:12

Hagar’s flight began inside Abram’s household. Sarai was barren, so she gave her maid to Abram in the hope of having children by her. This was a recognised custom among the patriarchs, as when Rachel later gave her handmaid Bilhah to Jacob, and a child born this way was counted as the wife’s own. Once Hagar conceived, she despised her mistress, Sarai dealt harshly with her, and Hagar fled. A pregnant woman alone in the wilderness faced thirst, wild animals and exposure, with nobody to help her.

“The angel of the LORD found her.” The verb mâtsâʼ means to find or come upon, and the angel is the one who does the finding. Hagar has gone looking for a way out, and God’s messenger comes looking for her. He knows exactly where she is and what state she is in.

He finds her “by a fountain of water in the wilderness”. The word for fountain, ʻayin, is the ordinary Hebrew word for an eye, and it is used of a spring because a spring is like an eye in the landscape. The wilderness, midbâr, is the open country where flocks were driven to pasture, and so the desert. In dry country a spring meant life, and God meets Hagar at the one place where her most urgent need could be met.

The verse then names the spring more exactly: “by the fountain in the way to Shur”. The word derek is a road or trodden way, and Shur was a region of the desert. The way to Shur was a known route from Canaan toward Egypt, and since Hagar was an Egyptian, she was most likely heading home. God meets her on the road of her escape.

The angel’s first word is her name, Hâgâr. She is a runaway slave, the least person in Abram’s household, and God speaks to her as someone he knows. He names her place too: “Sarai’s maid”. The word shiphchâh means a female slave who belongs to a household, and with it the angel ties this meeting straight back to the quarrel she has run from.

Then come his two questions. “Whence camest thou?” turns her to face what lies behind her, the household and the harsh treatment that drove her out. “Whither wilt thou go?” turns her to face what lies ahead in an empty desert. God already knows both answers. The questions are for Hagar’s sake, so that she can look honestly at her situation, say it out loud before him, and be ready for what he tells her next.

Her answer is short and true: “I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai.” The verb bârach means to flee, to get away in haste from danger, which is exactly what she has done. “Mistress”, gᵉbereth, is a lady or mistress, the woman with authority over her. “From the face” uses pânîym, the word for a face, which in Hebrew easily stands for a person’s presence. Hagar hides nothing about why she is there, and the LORD answers her honesty with instruction and promise.

“Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands.” People ask why God would send a woman back to the one who mistreated her. The angel sends her back with the LORD’s care around her and his promises ahead of her, and the command is his direction for her good. Pregnant and alone in the wilderness, she was in real danger, and Abram’s household was where she and the child could live. The return also meant that Ishmael would be born in Abram’s household as Abram’s son, and the angel goes straight on to promise her countless descendants and a son whom God himself has named. So her return became an act of trust in the God who had met her, and the command gives no approval to the way Sarai had treated her.

“Return” is shûwb, to turn back. “Submit” is ʻânâh, a verb whose root sense is to press down, used of being afflicted and of humbling oneself, and here Hagar is told to humble herself. “Under her hands” uses yâd, the open hand, which stands for power, means and authority, so to be under Sarai’s hands is to come back under her authority. Hagar is asked to take a lowly place, and she is given a promise as she takes it.

Peter calls all believers to humble themselves under God’s mighty hand (1 Peter 5:6–7), and Christ walked that road himself, humbling himself and obeying the Father as far as death on the cross (Philippians 2:8).

“I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude.” The verb râbâh means to increase or make many. The Hebrew repeats the verb, “multiplying I will multiply”, and that doubling is what the KJV renders “exceedingly”. It makes the promise emphatic and sure. The word zeraʻ, seed, is used of offspring, so this is a promise about Hagar’s descendants, and the closing words picture them as too many to count.

The angel says “I will”, and only God can promise this. His words echo what God had already promised Abram in Genesis 12, and the night God told Abram that his seed would be as countless as the stars (Genesis 15:5). Now the same God gives Hagar, a servant from outside the family, a promise in the same terms. He kept it. God later promised Abraham that he would bless Ishmael and make him a great nation (Genesis 17:20, Genesis 21:13), and Ishmael became the forefather of numerous Arab tribes.

“Behold” translates hinnêh, a word that calls for attention. The angel first tells Hagar what she already knows, that she is with child, and then what only God could know, that she will bear a son. God knows her present and declares her future.

Then he names the child. The name Yishmâʻêʼl joins the verb for hearing to ʼêl, God, and means “God will hear”, or “God heareth”. The angel gives the reason for it: “because the LORD hath heard thy affliction.” The child’s name would be a lasting memorial of what God did for his mother in the wilderness. The word for affliction, ʻŏnîy, means misery or trouble, and it comes from the same root as ʻânâh, the verb behind “submit thyself” in verse 9. The God who sends Hagar back to be humbled has already heard the misery she suffered.

Scripture shows God hearing the afflicted again and again. He heard the groaning of Israel in Egypt and remembered his covenant (Exodus 2:23–25), and at the burning bush he told Moses that he had seen the affliction of his people and heard their cry (Exodus 3:7). The psalm says, “The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit” (Psalm 34:17–18). Another psalmist loves the LORD because he has heard his voice (Psalm 116:1–2), and John writes of the confidence believers have that God hears what they ask according to his will (1 John 5:14–15).

“And he will be a wild man.” The word pere is the onager, the wild ass of the desert, and ʼâdâm is the ordinary word for a human being, so the phrase means a man like a wild ass. The onager roams free and resists taming, and the picture is of an untamed, independent life on the move in the wilderness. It fits the nomadic desert peoples who lived by self-reliance and mobility and were always ready to defend their ground and their way of life.

“His hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.” The word is yâd again, the hand as power and action, the same word as “under her hands” in verse 9. The two halves of the line mirror each other. Ishmael and his people would strike at others and be struck at in turn, guarding their freedom in a harsh land where tribes often raided and fought over scarce resources.

“And he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.” The verb shâkan means to settle down, stay or dwell. “Presence” is pânîym, the same word as “from the face of my mistress” in verse 8. “Brethren”, ʼâch, means brother in the widest sense and covers wider relatives as well. Ishmael would live close to his kin and in full view of them, near them even when at odds with them. Genesis comes back to the phrase when it records Ishmael’s descendants and where they dwelt, from Havilah to Shur (Genesis 25:18). The same mix of kinship and conflict between related peoples appears again with Jacob and Esau (Genesis 27).

“And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me.” Hagar, an Egyptian slave woman, gives a name to the LORD, out of what she has just learned of him. The verb is qârâʼ, to call out or to address by name. Genesis calls the speaker “the LORD”, and Hagar’s own words use ʼêl, God, a word that also carries the sense of strength and might and is used chiefly of the true God. “Seest me” renders rŏʼîy, a noun meaning sight or seeing, so Hagar’s words mean “Thou art a God of seeing”, the God who sees me. The name is often written El Roi, and it is found only here in the Old Testament.

The ʼêl of Hagar’s name for God is the ʼêl at the end of her son’s name. The son’s name says that God hears, and the mother’s name for God says that he sees. She had fled believing herself alone, and she had been in God’s sight the whole time, her low status, her flight and her hiding place all known to him. Psalm 139 says that wherever a person goes, even into the dark, God is there (Psalm 139:7–12), and Jesus says that the Father cares for each sparrow and has numbered the hairs of our heads (Matthew 10:29–31).

“Wherefore the well was called Beerlahairoi.” The word for well, bᵉʼêr, means a pit or a well. The name Bᵉʼêr la-Chay Rôʼîy is built from “well”, “of the Living One” (from chay, alive or living) and “my Seer”, so it means “the well of the Living One who sees me”. Verse 7 calls the water a fountain, ʻayin, and here the place is called a well, and both describe the water where God met her. Her words about God become the name of the place, and a desolate spot becomes a memorial of what God did there.

Wells were lifelines in dry country, and they served as gathering places and landmarks. Naming a place after something God had done there is found elsewhere in Genesis and beyond. Jacob named Bethel after God met him in a dream (Genesis 28:19), and Samuel set up a stone and called it Ebenezer after the LORD helped Israel (1 Samuel 7:12). Isaiah promises that when the poor and needy thirst, the LORD will hear them and open springs in the desert (Isaiah 41:17–18).

“Behold, it is between Kadesh and Bered.” Kadesh, Qâdêsh, whose name means sanctuary, is most likely Kadesh-barnea, a well-known oasis in the Negev desert that later figures in Israel’s wanderings. Bered, a name meaning hail, lay south of the land of Israel, and its exact place is less certain. These names fix the encounter in a real, harsh stretch of country, so that the place where God met Hagar would be remembered.

Hagar was a foreigner, a slave and a woman, outside the covenant family, and God came to her himself. His compassion reaches the lowly and overlooked whatever their standing, as he showed again when he spoke of his pity for the great city of Nineveh (Jonah 4:11). The wilderness where she fled became the place where God revealed himself, as it later did for Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3) and for Elijah when he fled to Horeb (1 Kings 19). Even the household trouble that drove her there, born of Abram and Sarai’s attempt to obtain the promised heir by their own means, could be taken up into God’s purposes.

In Jesus the God who saw Hagar came among us in person. He came to seek and to save that which was lost (Luke 19:10), he tells of the shepherd who leaves the ninety and nine to find the one lost sheep (Luke 15:4–7), and he came to call sinners, as a physician comes for the sick (Mark 2:17). He invites all who labour and are heavy laden to come to him for rest (Matthew 11:28–30).

He met another woman at another well, a Samaritan with a troubled past, and saw her as she was (John 4:1–42). To her he offered living water, springing up into everlasting life (John 4:10–14), and later he called out to everyone who thirsts to come to him and drink (John 7:37–38). He saw Nathanael under the fig tree before they had met (John 1:48), and before him all things are naked and opened (Hebrews 4:13). This seeing is full of mercy. He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows (Isaiah 53:4), and he is a high priest touched with the feeling of our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15).

The conflict foretold for Ishmael and his brethren is the kind of division Christ came to heal. He is the Lamb of God (John 1:29), and he is our peace, who has broken down “the middle wall of partition” (Ephesians 2:14). In him Jew and Gentile are one (Galatians 3:28), and the same Lord is Lord over all who call on him (Romans 10:12).

These verses give two names, and both are about God. The son is called Ishmael because the LORD heard, and the LORD is called the God who sees. Hagar learned both in the worst hour of her life, alone, pregnant and running, and she learned them from God himself, who came looking for her. He spoke to her by name, asked her where she was going, gave her a hard command and a great promise together, and kept his word to her son. The well kept its name, and the passage gives us the same God Hagar met, who hears affliction and sees the one who suffers it. When you are tempted to think that you are out of his sight, Hagar’s words stand in Scripture for you: “Thou God seest me.”