Narrative22 min
Hagar and Ishmael
Genesis 16:1-16
An Egyptian slave woman flees into the desert, and the angel of Yahweh finds her at a spring. By the time she leaves the spring, she has named God — the only human in the Hebrew Bible ever to do so. Gen 16 is the chapter where humanity first tries to help the covenant along, and the chapter where the helper, broken and named El-Roi by the woman she abused, hears for the first time the Exodus formula a slave will hand to a nation.