The Handmaid's Travail

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian maid whose name was Hagar, and Sarai said to Abraham, “Behold, the LORD has prevented me from having children; go in to my maid; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai … And he went into Hagar and she conceived, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress.” Genesis 16:1-2, 4 

But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” Genesis 21:9-10.

Our Bible story today begins in the tent of Abraham. It should have been a happy scene with Abraham surrounded by the rustic opulence of the rich desert ruler he is. He should be sitting in fleecy comfort, his every whim satisfied by hard-working and loyal servants. Long gone are the poor shepherd’s itchy burlap garments that absorb the desert’s heat and radiate the odor of human sweat at night. Gone are the sand-encrusted sandals that abused his bunions. God has blessed Abraham, and he is very comfortable and very rich.

So how come his life sucks? Sister wives Sarah and Hagar have been at each other’s throats for years and their discord has wearied the old man. Sarah hates Hagar. Hagar despises Sarah. Sarah beats Hagar and bans her from the tent whenever she can. This is not the domestic paradise envisioned by Joseph Smith when he posited that polygamy was Heavenly Father’s will.

As our bible story opens, the years of discord have come to an explosive climax and Sarah uses her authority as senior wife to demand the  expulsion of Hagar and her child from Abraham’s luxurious tent. What follows is one of those heart-wrenching scenes that dominate the saga of Genesis: 

So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. Genesis 21:14-16.

How could Abraham and Sarah be so cruel?

The back story offers some clues. 

Abraham was 75 when God ordered him to move to Canaan where, God assured him, he would be the primogenitor of a vast nation. God said “jump” and Abraham jumped, pruriently winking his pretty wife, Sarah, to tell her they’d better get started. 

But years went by and the nation-starting business was going nowhere. There’s reason to suspect Sarah was tiring of her husband’s sweaty efforts to make God happy. Looking around, she saw her beautiful Egyptian servant, Hagar, and presented her to him as a gift. “She’s all yours, dear.” Abraham dutifully accepted and continued his feverish endeavors to please God. 

Looking back, Sarah must have wondered what on earth she had been thinking. Naturally, Abraham continued his feverish endeavors to please God by sowing his patriarchal seed. And because it was (and continues to be) the practice of men, he cared little which woman was the holy receptacle. 

Hagar is one of the biblical models for Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which details both the dangers of a literal interpretation of scripture as well as the natural enmity between the barren and the nubile.

Sarah, initially relieved that her vigorous husband was occupied elsewhere, soon became exasperated by Abraham’s sacred enthusiasm and threw Hagar out of the tent. Hagar, heavy with child, was filled with contempt for her mistress. 

Years passed and God – still working on an early draft of a commandment forbidding adultery – decided Abraham’s nation-building tasks needed to continue with Sarah only. Sarah thought she had retired from that job because she was far past the normal age of child bearing. But after years of watching her husband embrace her hated rival and her rival’s son, Sarah gave birth to Isaac. 

Finally with a son of her own, Sarah knew her position as senior wife had been re-established. When she saw Hagar’s son playing innocently with her baby, she snapped. “Cast out this slave woman with her son,” she ordered her husband. “For the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” Genesis 21:9-10.

What a mess. What a great soap opera. But did it really happen?

Genesis is a library of allegories, metaphors, and myths. The stories are fun, and they are a lot more fun when you believe the events are literally true.

That’s about as close to advocating a literal bible as my conscience will allow me to go. I’ve known a lot of brilliant and accomplished people who believe God enables people to survive fiery ovens or live in fish bellies. I once met Colonel Jim Irwin, the aeronautic engineer and astronaut, in a Southern Baptist pressroom in the seventies. He had exchanged his Air Force blues for a dazzling red and yellow double-knit plaid jacket and baggy white pants, and his GI haircut was now a fashionable shag. You don’t often run into people who walked on the moon so we journalists pressed near him to hear what it had been like. Instead, he announced he was going to Turkey to search for the original ark. Retirement can send a guy off in odd directions (I now know), but if an astronaut believed the ark was real, who was I to argue? 

Millions of thoughtful people believe Abraham was a historical figure, and they could be right. But if he was a myth who evolved to explain the origins of the twelve tribes of Israel, he was a captivating myth. His story is a soap opera of betrayal, greed, lust, jealousy, and mass murder. And unlike other protagonists of most sagas, he had 175 years of life to get it done.

Typical of soap operas, it was Abraham’s sex drive that kept getting him into trouble. The teller of his story seeks to make the point that God has decided to build a great nation through Abraham’s seed and Abraham was faithful to God no matter how many obstacles God put in his way. The main obstacle was Abraham’s little Abraham, which was not getting any younger. And, as the bronze-age macho storyteller tells it, God and Abraham pursued their goals by compelling women to graciously submit to their male will.  

This part of the myth is true. Bronze-age men used women as means to their own ends and they never doubted that was God’s eternal plan. We know that is true because it’s still true. Gender equality is a relatively nascent phenomenon and men still hold most of the power in business, the church, and certainly in U.S. Senate.

That is changing because only the most insulated and closed-minded persons still believe the genders are intellectually, spiritually, and physically unequal. Unfortunately, insulated and closed-minded people, though dwindling, have been gerrymandered into our social structure. Hopefully our daughters – and sons – will live to see the time when they have passed from the scene.

In the meantime, our bible story should also be a cautionary tale about the complications of assuming allegorical myths are historically true. 

Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar are convincing characters because they all believed a male God had ordained male patriarchs to use females as unwilling vessels of nation building. Such people did exist in 1800 B.C. and such people exist today. 

But we don’t need prophets like Margaret Atwood to see how such beliefs can be harmful. Such beliefs were an underlying cause of misery for Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar.

This much we know to be true: great nations arose in the fertile crescent of the Middle East, and they bore common witness to the One God, sometimes called Yahweh, sometimes called Allah. These great nations have a common origin and proclaim themselves children of Abraham.

The Abraham of Genesis is a patriarch who believed God wanted him to sow the seeds of nationhood using his wife and her handmaid as inferior vessels for the task.

That part of the myth is true because that is what men have believed for thousands of years.

But the pain that accompanied that belief, meticulously detailed in the Genesis story, remind us that inequality breeds misery for all concerned.

The story also impels us to remember that God is not a God of misery. Our God is a God of love whose metaphorical arms embrace all persons, all races, all ages, all creeds, both genders, and all sexual orientations. 

And that is no myth.