They Were Not White, Part 2: Hagar

In Part 2 of the series They Were Not White, I would like to help us re-envision Hagar, the Egyptian woman who served Sarah, was Abram’s concubine/second wife, and who gave birth to Ishmael (Gen. 16).

Let’s start with ethnicity. Scholar Peter T. Nash writes that for most of the twentieth century Biblical researchers presumed that ancient Egyptians were phenotypically Caucasoid rather than Negroid, based on racist assumptions. Many of us still need reminding: Hagar was an African woman.

Others know this quite well. Hagar’s story has delivered comfort to African American women for at least the last century. She has been seen as black Hagar, says professor Nyasha Junior. The themes of slavery, abuse and privilege make Hagar ever-relevant, writes Wilda C. Gafney.

Note that Sarah is not white, either. Alice Ogden Bellis says

We assume that a black woman is serving a white one. However, Abraham and Sarah came from Ur of the Chaldeas, the home of the Sumerians known as the ‘black-headed’ people. Although some argue that this is a reference to hair color, others suggest that it refers to skin color.

Even if the reference is to hair color, Sarah was Middle Eastern and not Anglo-Saxon.

Princess Hagar

But who else was Hagar besides African? We can infer that Hagar was a woman with self-esteem, despite her position as a slave. We too often presume she would carry a sense of lowliness, when the text actually indicates otherwise.

In fact, the ancient rabbis provide a backstory for Hagar’s sense of self-worth. Wilda C. Gafney notes a rabbinic midrash which states that Hagar was the Pharaoh’s daughter, given as a gift to Abram in compensation for the attempt to gain Sarai as a wife (Gen. 12). If so, Hagar’s special status as princess was stolen from her. In its place she suffered as an “outsider” (from the Hebrew ‘hagger’ says Tikva Frymer-Kensky) serving a woman who would eventually be called Sarah, or “princess” instead of her.

I believe that putting on this royal lens to view Hagar may help us understand the text better.

Superior to Sarai

For example, Hagar was truly an outsider, not an Israelite. Yet, Sarai chose her. Sarai trusted her to lie with her husband and to bear her a family to raise. The Pharaoh would have educated his daughter, especially in reading and writing. Hagar stood out to Sarai as someone to respect, someone who could fulfill God’s promises for her and the “exalted father,” Abraham.

Perhaps this respect was longstanding. Sarai and Hagar would have known each other when Pharaoh made Sarai join his harem (Gen. 12). In that situation, Sarai was the powerless one, and Hagar protected. Abram pressured Sarai to deceive every one they met about her marital status. Subsequently, Pharaoh forced Sarai to have intercourse with him. Princess Hagar might have viewed the foreign Sarai with contempt from afar.

And this disdain rises to the surface once more with Hagar’s pregnancy. Emily Peecock notes that scholar John Waters sees “that her attitude throughout the story is not that of a humbled and de-humanized slave woman.”

However, as Tikva Frymer-Kensky notes, “neither Sarai, who proposes Hagar, nor Abram, who agrees, mentions obtaining the consent of the slave girl.” Though Hagar’s consent is not asked for, Peecock sees a positive status change for Hagar via a new, improved relationship with Abram. She observes “that once Sarah gives Hagar to Abraham, she loses her power over the Egyptian woman. Someone who has grown up in a life of servitude would not grasp the shift of power as quickly as Hagar does, nor have the courage to act upon it for her own benefit.”

Pregnant and Powerful

Hagar would have understood power keenly, having seen its dynamics in her own home growing up, and now losing what she had. Along with her royal status disappearing, now her virginity and power over her own body have been taken as well. But she has something new that Sarai does not–pregnancy.

Though Hagar was vulnerable as a slave/concubine, Sarai remains vulnerable to the many ways in which women were unjustly judged, including by their ability to bear children. In that (too familiar) system of values, Hagar finds a new power. And she flaunts it in ways so pointed that Sarai complains to Abram: “…now that she has conceived, you allow me to count for nothing in her eyes! Let Yahweh judge between you and me!” (Gen. 16:5).

Abram is the silent bystander, watching dramas of injustice play out between the women with passivity. (Perhaps he and Sarai were used to this, as half-siblings, having shared the same father and two different mothers). He says to Sarai, “Do to her what is good in your eyes,” (Gen. 16:6) washing his hands of the situation.

Finally Seen

In contrast to Abram, Yahweh is deeply involved with Hagar’s fate. Her response to God makes Hagar stand out as the first and only person to name Yahweh in the Bible, says Delores S. Williams. This comes from Yahweh’s own saving action. After Sarai abuses Hagar in outrage at Hagar’s new attitude, Hagar runs into the wilderness, where the angel of Yahweh finds her near a spring. Yahweh asks, “Where have you come from, and where are you going?” Sometimes questions like these make us feel noticed and cared about, and these stopped Hagar in her tracks.

Yahweh’s angel disappointingly tells Hagar to go back to Sarai–her only chance of survival in the desert. But the messenger has much more to say about Hagar’s present and future, beautiful promises in those times, like “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count” (Gen. 16: 10). This promise belonged not only to Abram and Sarai, but to Hagar, the outsider. The angel knows Hagar is pregnant with a son who is given the name Ishmael and who is already known. And Hagar herself is now seen for who she is–not condemned, not ignored, but fully esteemed.

What we often don’t recall is that Hagar hadn’t known Yahweh, except in the stories of the people now around her. Her parents, whether royal or not, raised her to worship Egyptian gods and goddesses. Hagar “the foreigner” not only personally meets and speaks with the angel of Yahweh in the desert, but is so astounded by the prophecies about herself and Ishmael that she spontaneously bursts out with a worshipful, grateful name for Yahweh: God becomes El Ro’i, the One who Sees Me (Gen. 16:13). El Roi sees her true worth. And she has seen God, and lived.

See Her Now

Ironically, Hagar hasn’t been seen very well as the non-white, African woman that she was, except in the African-American churches. I want us to pause a moment to remember this. Yahweh also now sees the worth of African Americans everywhere, princesses and their brothers stolen into slavery and kept there by sending them into the desert to survive on their own, like Hagar.

Hagar’s worth was affirmed by Yahweh by her representation of Israel’s own trials in the desert. She stands too for their eventual freedom. “In fact” writes Wilda Gafney, “Sarah’s oppression of Hagar in Genesis 16:6 is the same as Egypt’s oppression of Israel in Exodus 1:11.” Just as God exalted Israel through the exodus from Egypt, Hagar would become an “exalted mother” (especially in Islamic tradition) through her descendants.

However, this honor would happen long after her death. Gafney puts it this way in her blog post, “Jesus and Hagar“:

Hagar’s liberation was going to take more time. That is also one of the uncomfortable truths of this passage. One can stand in the presence of the Majesty of God, be fully seen and fully known and simultaneously be entrapped and entangled by the tentacles of evil extending from corrupt powers and institutions. Just ask the Africans enslaved in America crying out for 400 years just as the Israelites cried out during their enslavement for another 400 years. Ask those of us crying out Black Lives Matter even as the bodies continue to drop along with the news coverage. Yet God is there and here seeing and seen, knowing and known.

As we affirm the value of all black lives, and all non-white lives, may we remember Hagar in a truer light now, seeing her as she was seen by Yahweh: an African and perhaps a princess, an exalted mother, and a woman of worth.

2 thoughts on “They Were Not White, Part 2: Hagar”

  1. Thank you, Susan. This was very informative and accessible, even for a non-Bible reader. And so timely to honor ‘other’ colored skin.

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