Reconciling Hagar and Sarah: Feminist Midrash and National Conflict

Adriaen Van der Werrf (1659–1722), a younger contemporary of Rembrandt, portrays the ambivalence of Abraham toward the Divine order to divorce his second wife and expel his first-born son. Abraham’s two hands are extended in a gesture of placation towards the boy and the young mother. With one hand Abraham reaches out longingly to caress Hagar and with the other he seems to bless Ishmael. The powerful figure of Sarah, who demanded this expulsion and supervises its execution, is portrayed with impassive resolution standing behind a pillar—a physical barrier between her and the emotions played out in the main scene. Hagar is portrayed as a young, sensuous, bare-backed woman whose erotic appeal may have aroused her husband’s longing as well as triggering his aging first wife’s fears of being displaced. Hagar’s scanty clothes and Ishmael’s awkward stance portray their vulnerability which heightens the poignancy of the scene. Neither she nor Ishmael has turned their back on Abraham. Perhaps they hope for a last-minute reprieve by appealing to Abraham’s affection and compassion, or his remorse and guilt. Nevertheless, their bodies are already moving away from home towards the wilderness, their fate. Hagar’s dress echoes the Greek goddess Diana of the hunt, as she heads for the desert with her son who is destined to become a hunter. In the lower foreground we witness the emotionally ambivalent separation between the two youngsters. Ishmael, reluctant to go, looks back with nostalgia towards Isaac, while his younger brother Isaac smiles and stretches forth his father's mantle as if offering to share Abraham’s legacy.

This trope was used by both Presidents Carter and Clinton, when presiding over peace treaties. Pres. Jimmy Carter: “Let us now reward all the children of Abraham who hunger for a comprehensive peace in the Middle East.” (March 26, 1979 upon the signing of Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty). Pres. Bill Clinton: “You, the children of Abraham, have made a peace worthy of your great forebear. Abraham, patriarch of both Arabs and Jews, sacrificed power for peace when he said to his nephew, Lot, "Let there be no strife between thee and me. If thou will take the left hand, then I will go to the right” (Gen. 13:9). (at the signing of the Oslo #2 Accords, Sept. 28, 1995). Christianity also presents itself as Abrahamic, and interreligious trialogue among monotheists in the West is grounded in the so-called solidarity of Abrahamic faiths. For a critique of the inadequacies of this politicized historical analogy, see Jon D. Levenson, Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Library of Jewish Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

Etiological tales in Genesis have always been told with an eye for explaining the conflicts between political-ethnic-religious groups who trace their origins back to Abraham. Their significance, however, is not merely to create an ex post facto confirmation of their prophetic authority—what the rabbis call “the acts of the ancestors prefigure the events in the lives of the descendants” (Ramban on Gen. 12:6, paraphrasing Midrash Tanḥuma, Lekh Lekha 9)—but also to shape national political identities upon which policies of peace and war are founded even today. See discussion in David Freidenreich, "What Does Sarah's Expulsion of Hagar Signify for Abraham's Descendants," TheTorah (2018).

I am offering a diachronic reading of the final form of the text here. Nevertheless, many critical scholars assume that the different stories come from different sources. Editor’s note: For an example of this approach, see Philip Yoo and Grace Leake, “‘Take Your Only Son Isaac’—What Happened to Ishmael?” TheTorah (2019).

When God renamed Abram as “Abraham” and Sarai as “Sarah,” God promised him that he would be “The Father of Many Nations” (Gen. 17:5) and her that she would produce her own honored heir (Gen. 17:15–16).

Editor’s note: Yairah Amit has argued that the presentation of Ishmael in the Torah is meant to be positive, and that it was designed to highlight the respectability of one of Judea’s allies. See Yairah Amit, “Ishmael ‘King of the Arabs’ in the Persian Period,” TheTorah (2019).

The first explicit conflict between Judeans/Jews (the children of Isaac) and Arabs (the children of Ishmael) reported in the Bible is that between Geshem the Arab and Nehemiah (Neh. 2:19, 6:11), ca 450 C.E.

Editor’s note, see our Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer topic section for more discussion of this midrash compilation.

See Reuven Firestone, Journeys in the Holy Lands: The Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 76–103; Carol Bakhos, Ishmael on the Border: Rabbinic Portrayals of the First Arab (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 104–119.

See TABS Editors, "Our Stepmother Keturah," TheTorah (2013).

Notably, Sarah never reconciles with Ishmael either, but this problem has not been the focus of feminist readings.

For more on feminist Bible interpretation in general, see Sarah Shectman, "Feminist Biblical Interpretation: History and Goals," TheTorah (2019).

Lamentations Rabbah, proem 24.

Lynn Gottlieb, She Who "Dwells" Within: A Feminist Vision of a Renewed Judaism (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1995).

Gottlieb, She Who Dwells Within, 89

Editor’s note: See discussion in Ishay Rosen-Zvi, "In the Torah Is the Ger Ever a Convert?" TheTorah (2019).

Gottlieb’s reading of Hagar as the archetypal stranger who is abused coheres with the biblical warning against the national temptation of the citizen to mistreat the ger, the resident alien, once Israel the nation settles and conquers the land of Israel (Lev 19:33–34). While we should recall how the Egyptians persecuted us (Gen 15:13; Exod 1:11) functions as a measure for measure punishment for the way Sarah and Abraham mistreated the Egyptians Hagar (Gen 16:6). See Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell, eds., Hagar, Sarah and their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006).

In Israeli poetry the Akedah is the paradigm for Israeli fathers and especially mothers sending their sons off to fight and to sacrifice themselves on the altar of Israeli independence which is the parents’ nationalist-cum-religious ideology. See discussion in, Yael S. Feldman, Glory and Agony. Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). Deborah Dayan, mother of Moshe Dayan, who lost her other son, Zohar (Zorik) in the War of Independence, wrote in her autobiography (translation mine):

Maybe the tragic nature of the Akedah is harsher and nearer to us than to mothers of generations past. Out of acceptance you have to bring the son to the altar, out of silent [or silenced] acceptance, and only when no one sees—tear your hair.

Deborah Dayan, אֲסַפֵּר [I Shall Tell] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1952), 247.

For one example, see Rachel Adelman, "The Expulsion of Ishmael: Who Is Being Tried?" TheTorah (2017).

In the liturgy of the Yom Kippur Machzor, Jews recite as a community, in plural grammatical form, a list of sins called al-chets, “for our sin,” (organized in an alphabetic acrostic poem). At each confession, we strike our hearts/chests with our fists, and in each refrain, they ask God for forgiveness (s’lakh lanu). Nevertheless, as Maimonides specifies, the mitzvah of confession ought to be personalized and detailed in words, not ritualized (Laws of Repentance 2:2-3).

She explains:

The prayer [poem] is to be recited during Rosh HaShanah when we as a people try to come into harmony with all our relations and pray to renew our commitments to living with compassion. On Rosh HaShanah we also prepare ourselves for Yom Kippur, which is a day dedicated to forgiving and seeking forgiveness.

Gottlieb, She Who "Dwells" Within, 89.

Gottlieb, She Who "Dwells" Within, 88.

Gottlieb turns her imaginative commentary into a sermon about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict:

Achti, which means "my sister" in Arabic, is Sarah's formal apology to Hagar. However, apologies are meaningless if they are not followed by actions intended to repair the damage. I hope this prayer encourages Jews and Palestinians to acknowledge our common humanity and end the violence between our peoples. Women’s voices must become the voice of the shofar blown at Rosh HaShanah…. Rather than side with the political and religious ideologies of our husbands, we must sound the alarm that emanates from our common motherhood: Do not harm our children in any way!” Women, let us extricate our peoples from the patriarchal borders that make it impossible to see one another as sisters sharing a common bond. We can no longer afford to place our children on the bloody altars of Abraham’s faith or raise the knife above our children's heads. We must scream, cry, and protest holy wars and national struggles that do not grant basic recognition of the humanity of the other.

Gottlieb, She Who "Dwells" Within, 89.

See, Mohja Kahf, “The Waters of Hajar and Other Poems,” The Muslim World 91 (2001): 31–44 [31–32]. Notably, Kahf includes a caveat as a note on the title:

This poem imagines the subjective feelings of one person in this story at one particular moment and does not draw conclusions on the final truth of the matter. It is not intended to disrespect our mothers Hajar and Sarah or Prophet Ibrahim, peace and blessings be upon them.

The poem was reprinted with slight adjustments in Mohja Kahf and Amina Wadud, Hagar Poems (Fayeteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2016), 10–11, under the slightly adjusted title, "Hajar Writes a Letter to Sarah as a Cathartic Exercise Suggested by Her Therapist."

Kahf rewrites Sarah’s laughter, cleansing it of the biblical associations of disbelief leading to denial and scorn that leads to abuse and expulsion.

The strikeout here is not in the original but appears in the reprinted version. It is important since it captures the ambivalence Hagar is feeling as she writes the letter.

In this remarkable reading, Ishmael’s descendants were destined to punish Sarah’s callousness to his pregnant mother, the enslaved stranger from Egypt! Nachmanides may have constructed his interpretation on the fact that the term for “mistreatment, abuse, persecution” perpetrated by Sarai with Abram’s mandate is found in the previous chapter when God predicts that Abraham’s descendants will be “persecuted and enslaved” as “strangers” in another land (Gen. 15:13) which foreshadows the Israelites enslaved and abused in Egypt in a measure for measure punishment to teach them a moral lesson about how not to treat strangers like Hagar whose name means “The Stranger/Migrant” (Exod. 1:11; 22:20). In the same way the past sins may shape later history (400 years later in Egypt) so too they may explain the history of Islamic rule (13^th C.) or for some interpreters, history may repeat itself in contemporary Israeli-Palestinian history.

Ruth Behar, “Sarah and Hagar: The Heelprints upon Their Faces,” in Beginning Anew: A Woman’s Companion to the High Holy Days, ed. Gail Twersky and Judith A. Kates (Touchstone, 1997), 35–36.

This feminist concept is best articulated in Carol F. Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics & Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).