The One Who Named Him

A pregnant woman was sitting by a spring in the desert.

She was a long way from the tents she’d run from and still a long way from home. The road she was on went toward Shur, on the edge of the wilderness. Shur lay toward Egypt, which is probably not an accident; that’s an inference, but she was an Egyptian, on foot, heading that way. She had no money that the text mentions, no one with her, and a child coming.

The Bible puts it in one plain line. Now the angel of the LORD found Hagar by a spring of water in the desert.

Found her. She wasn’t looking for anybody. She was getting away.

Her name was Hagar, and nothing that happened to her up to that point was her idea.

She was an Egyptian servant in the household of Abram and Sarai. They had been promised a son and had waited ten years in Canaan without one. So Sarai made a plan that was ordinary in that world and hard to read in this one. She gave her servant to her husband, so that a child born to Hagar could be counted as hers.

Hagar wasn’t asked. The text doesn’t give her a line in the whole arrangement. And he slept with Hagar, and she conceived.

Then it went the way things like that go. When Hagar knew she was pregnant, the text says she began to despise her mistress. Whatever that looked like, a look or a tone or a refusal, it’s on the record, and it’s Hagar’s. Sarai went to Abram angry. Abram washed his hands of it. Your servant is in your hands. Do whatever you want with her.

Then Sarai treated Hagar so harshly that she fled from her.

Nobody in that tent comes out of this well. The record doesn’t tidy any of them up, and it doesn’t make her a saint either. It just tells you that a woman with no say in her own life ran, pregnant, into the desert.

At the spring, the first thing the angel did was use her name.

Hagar, servant of Sarai, he said, where have you come from, and where are you going?

Where did you come from, and where are you going. Two questions, and she only answered the first one. I am running away from my mistress Sarai. She knew exactly what she was running from. She had no answer at all for where she was going.

What the angel said next is hard, and it should be read as it stands. Return to your mistress and submit to her authority. The text doesn’t explain it, and this book won’t pretend it’s easy. A woman in her position, alone and pregnant in the wilderness, had very few ways to live, and going back to the tents was one of them. That is as far as the record goes, and it’s where this chapter leaves it.

Because the angel kept talking, and the rest was for her.

Her son would have more descendants than anyone could count. She was to name him Ishmael. The name means God hears, and the verse gives the reason. The LORD has heard your cry of affliction.

He’d heard. The word the text uses is affliction, and it’s the text’s word, not hers. Somebody had been listening to what was happening to her in those tents the whole time.

Then Hagar did something the Bible doesn’t record anyone else doing in quite this way.

She named God.

People in Scripture are named by God all the time. Abram becomes Abraham. Jacob becomes Israel. People name places after what God did there. But here a servant woman, a foreigner, pregnant by a man who hadn’t stood up for her, sitting by a spring she’d reached by running away, turns around and gives God a name of her own.

So Hagar gave this name to the LORD who had spoken to her: “You are the God who sees me.”

The King James puts it in four words, and it’s the version a lot of people still carry: Thou God seest me.

Then she added a line that sounds like wonder. Here I have seen the One who sees me! Even here. Even out here.

The spring got a name too. Beer-lahai-roi. Scholars usually render it something like the well of the living one who sees me, though that’s an explanation of the Hebrew, not a line in the text.

Nothing about her situation had changed yet. She still had no money, no say and a hard road back. What she had was the fact that she had been seen, by name, at the lowest point of her life, and she named him for it.

The record keeps going, and it gets worse before it gets better.

She went back. Ishmael was born. Years later, Sarah had Isaac, and at the feast when Isaac was weaned, Sarah saw Ishmael mocking and told Abraham to put them out. Expel the slave woman and her son. Abraham was distressed about it, because Ishmael was his son. He sent them anyway.

He got up early, put bread and a skin of water on her shoulders, and sent her away with the boy. She wandered in the Wilderness of Beersheba until the water ran out.

What she did next is one of the most human moments in the Bible. She put the boy under a bush, went off about as far as a bowshot, and sat down. I cannot bear to watch the boy die! Then she lifted up her voice and wept.

She had named God the one who sees. And now she had walked a bowshot away so she wouldn’t have to see.

God heard. This time the text says he heard the voice of the boy, the boy crying under the bush, and the angel called to Hagar out of heaven. What is wrong, Hagar? Do not be afraid. Get up, it said. Pick the boy up and hold him by the hand.

Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water.

The line doesn’t say God made a well. It says he opened her eyes, and she saw one. It had been there. She was sitting in grief a bowshot from a child and a well, and couldn’t see either of them.

She filled the skin and gave the boy a drink. He grew up in the wilderness and became an archer. His mother found him a wife from Egypt, her own country. The last thing the text records her doing is choosing something for her son, freely, with nobody’s permission.

Being seen came first. Rescue came after, and it took years, and it came in the form of a well that had been there all along. But the first thing God ever did for the person nobody in that household saw was see her.

Where this meets your week

The running you haven’t named. Some leaving is a clean decision. A lot of it is just getting away from a face, a room, a voice, and it’s only later that anyone calls it leaving. Hagar could say exactly what she was fleeing and had no idea where she was going. If that’s close to where you are, you don’t have to invent a destination to be honest. Say the first half out loud. What you left, and why. Say it once, to him, and let it be true without a plan attached.

What was done without your vote. Some of what shaped your life was decided in a tent you weren’t in. A parent’s choice, a partner’s, a board’s, a family’s. The record gives Hagar no line at all in the arrangement that changed her life, and it still calls what happened to her affliction. You’re allowed to use the plain word for what happened to you. Write it down, the plain word, without softening it for anyone. Nobody has to read it.

The one you can’t bear to watch. Somebody you love is under a bush in their own wilderness. A grown child, a sibling, a friend. You’ve backed off a bowshot because you can’t stand to watch, and nobody could blame you. Hagar backed off too, and the first instruction she got was lift up the boy, and take him by the hand. Not fix him. Hold his hand. Call them this week. Don’t bring a solution. Be close enough to see.

The well you can’t see. Grief narrows your eyes to the one thing in front of you. There may be help closer than a bowshot that you haven’t been able to see: a person, a practice, a place that used to give you water. You don’t have to force your eyes open. Ask for it, the way the text says it happened. Open my eyes. Then look around the room once, slowly.

Answer the two questions.

A piece of paper, and the angel’s two questions written across the top. Where have you come from, and where are you going? Answer the first one honestly, as specifically as you can. Answer the second one only as far as you actually know, even if that’s I don’t know. Hagar didn’t know either. She was found anyway, and named at the spot where she didn’t have an answer.

There’s one more place her well turns up. Years after all of this, when Abraham was dead, the text says where his son Isaac made his home.

After Abraham’s death, God blessed his son Isaac, who lived near Beer-lahai-roi.

The well a runaway servant named ended up on the family map.