Commentary on Genesis 21:8-21

In the third segment of our lectionary’s focus on the Abrahamic covenant—beginning with God’s promise to make Abraham a great nation (Genesis 12), and continuing with God’s promise that Sarah would bear a son (Genesis 18)—we finally arrive at the long-awaited birth of Sarah’s child in Genesis 21.

Readers may recall that in Genesis 11:30, the narrator reports that Sarah was childless, making God’s promise of descendants to Abraham (Genesis 15) difficult to imagine. That implausibility deepens in Genesis 18, where Abraham and Sarah are described as advanced in age, and Sarah—already identified as barren—is said to be past childbearing age (verse 11).

In a patriarchal world where a son not only was prized but also brought economic stability to a woman, barrenness was almost universally regarded as a burden of shame. In the ancient world, which lacked an understanding of the reproductive process, women were often blamed for reproductive failure. Yet as a wealthy woman, Sarah had options.

Several chapters earlier, Sarah gave her slave woman Hagar to Abraham as a secondary wife to bear a son for him (Genesis 16:4). Ishmael’s birth would also have brought Sarah esteem, since ancient Near Eastern surrogacy laws granted her the right to raise the child as her own. With the birth of Isaac, however, Ishmael’s status changed—from Sarah’s legal son and Abraham’s firstborn heir to the son of a slave woman. That transition was not complete until Isaac was weaned. Weaning marked survival beyond the precarious stage of infancy and signaled readiness to become a productive member of Abraham’s household.¹ Abraham celebrated this milestone with a feast in Isaac’s honor (Genesis 21:8).

The narrator then reports that Sarah saw “the son of Hagar” playing (or “laughing,” verse 9).² This act of seeing signals that what follows is filtered through Sarah’s perspective, and she sets in motion the rejection and expulsion of Ishmael and his mother. The Hebrew term metsacheq, translated “playing with,” literally means “making [him] laugh” and can also carry the sense of mocking or jesting. It is rooted in tsachaq (“to laugh”), a deliberate play on Isaac’s name (Yitzchaq). Elsewhere, I have translated metsacheq as “Isaacing” to suggest that the narrator invites readers to see what Sarah saw—Ishmael behaving in a way that imitated her son Isaac.³

Perhaps Sarah feared that affection between the two boys would threaten God’s covenant promise to her son, a promise that included economic security. She makes this fear explicit when she demands that Abraham cast out Hagar and Ishmael so that Ishmael will not share in Isaac’s inheritance (verse 10). By removing Isaac’s competition, Sarah reinforces the idea that motherhood begets financial stability.

God appears to read Abraham’s mind in response to Sarah’s action. After the narrator reports that Sarah’s demand regarding Ishmael was “distressing” to Abraham (verse 11), God reassures him that he need “not be distressed” about the boy and his mother (verse 12). Both Hebrew terms share the root ra‘a’ (“evil”), so that “the matter was very distressing” is literally “the thing was very evil in Abraham’s eyes.” What Sarah sees as expedient, Abraham experiences as morally troubling.

Nevertheless, God instructs Abraham to do as Sarah says, clarifying that it is through Isaac and his offspring that God’s promise in Genesis 12 will be fulfilled (verse 12). God appears to support Sarah’s exclusion of Ishmael by referring to him not by name but as na‘ar (“the boy”) or “the son of the slave woman” (verses 12–13). Yet God does not abandon Ishmael entirely. God acknowledges that the son of the slave woman is also Abraham’s seed and promises to make a nation of him as well (verse 13; see also 17:20).

The next morning Abraham rises early, gives Hagar bread and a skin of water, places them and the boy on her shoulder, and sends them into the wilderness (verse 14). The Hebrew verb translated “cast out” means “to drive out” or “forcibly remove,” underscoring the violence of the act. The text twice refers to Ishmael as a yeled (“child”), suggesting infancy or early childhood (verses 14–15), even though God earlier called him a na‘ar, a term closer to adolescence.

As expected, their provisions soon run out. Fearing death in the wilderness, Hagar places her son at a distance, unable to watch him die, and weeps loudly (verse 16). The text then states that God hears the boy’s crying—again calling Ishmael a na‘ar—and an angel of God calls to Hagar, telling her not to fear. God has heard the boy’s cries and promises again to make a great nation of him (verses 17–18).

The distinction between yeled and na‘ar may seem minor, but as Rabbi Jesse Olitzky observes, a na‘ar is “someone who is forced to grow up—someone who was vulnerable before, but empowered at this moment.”⁴ Rabbi Olitzky was writing about our nation’s children who experience gun violence in schools. But the yeladim—children forced to grow up too soon—become na‘arim when they seize the moment to protest in response. Perhaps by referring to him by na’ar, God was anticipating that Ishmael would go from a yeled to a na‘ar who became an expert archer in the wilderness of Paran (verse 21).

In Genesis 21, God’s promise moves forward with covenantal promises while refusing to ignore the cries of those pushed to the margins. The God who hears Ishmael’s voice still listens for the voices of those forced to grow up too soon—and calls us to stand with them.

Notes

1. Naomi Steinberg, The World of the Child in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2013), 38–39.
2. Notably, the Hebrew manuscript omits the phrase “with her son Isaac.”
3. Vanessa Lovelace, A Womanist Reading of Hebrew Bible Narratives as the Politics of Belonging from an Outsider Within (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2024), 16.
4. Rabbi Jesse Olitzky, “Our Children Are No Longer Children,” November 20, 2019, https://rabbiolitzky.wordpress.com/tag/naar/.