The name Sarah is a popular one for baby girls born into Jewish, Christian, and Muslim families alike. As the first wife of Abraham, Sarah is often revered as a great matriarch in all three Abrahamic faiths. But Abraham had another wife whose story highlights her faith in God. Her name was Hagar. Yet, while one encounters many girls and women named Hagar (pronounced Hajar in Arabic) in Muslim communities, one is hard-pressed to find a Christian or Jew who goes by that name. Why? Who is Hagar in these three faiths?
Hagar in the Hebrew Bible
There are two stories about Hagar in the Hebrew Bible—the collection of books Christians often call the “Old Testament.” Both of these stories are in Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
Hagar in Genesis 16
In the first story, Hagar is introduced as an Egyptian woman enslaved to Sarah. No further background is provided about her origin. Because Sarah had not been able to have children, she offered Hagar to Abraham as a second wife so that he would not die without an heir. Abraham agrees, and Hagar falls pregnant.
Not long after, the text reports that Sarah was “despised” in the eyes of the expectant Hagar. The nature of this offense is not clear in the Hebrew text. However, with Abraham’s permission, Sarah reacts so harshly toward Hagar that Hagar runs away into the wilderness.
While in the wilderness, a character called “the angel of the Lord” finds Hagar near a spring that is described as being “on the way to Shur,” and later as “between Kadesh and Bered.” Shur is a region in the northwest corner of the Sinai Peninsula, but scholars disagree about the location of Kadesh and Bered. Some argue it is meant to refer to a place close to Petra, in the southwest of modern-day Jordan. Others argue that it is a shortened form of the name Kadesh-Barnea, a biblical place to the southwest of the Dead Sea. In either case, Hagar’s encounter with the angel was near the land that would eventually be associated with the Israelite nation. This is far to the northwest of where these events occur in Muslim tradition (see below).
Upon finding her in the wilderness, the angel tells Hagar to return to servitude under Sarah. However, the angel also gives her a promise:
“Now you have conceived and shall bear a son; and shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has given heed to your affliction. He shall be a wild ass of a man, with his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him, and he shall live at odds with all his kin” (NRSVue).
The promise sounds largely negative in most English translations. In particular, referencing someone’s son as a “wild ass of a man” in English is unlikely to be well-received. However, it is clear from Hagar’s response that she understands the promise positively. The “wild ass” as a metaphor in the Bible tends to emphasize freedom and rugged independence. Other elements in the promise are ambiguous in the Hebrew text—which is why English translations of Hagar’s promise vary significantly from one another. Still, if Hagar’s response is to guide an interpretation of the promise, she seems to see it as providing hope that, in contrast to her own experience as an enslaved woman, her offspring would be free.
Hagar, seemingly feeling her plight has been understood by God, responds by naming God, “El-roi,” which means something like, “God who sees.” She also names the spring where the angel met her, “Beer-lahai-roi,” which means something like, “Well of the living one who sees.” Normally, God self-identifies to people in encounters like this in the Bible. However, interpreters of this story often note that this is the only time in the Bible in which a person gives God a name directly instead of in the second person.
Hagar in Genesis 21
The second Hagar story in the Bible appears in Genesis 21. Certain elements of this second story are very similar to the first, and many scholars believe these were originally two variations of the same narrative. In the Bible, however, they are presented as two events, the first occurring while Hagar is pregnant with Ishmael and the second when Ishmael is a young boy.
Despite Sarah’s having given Hagar to Abraham as a wife after despairing of having children herself, she later has a son and names him Isaac. In this second story, Sarah becomes offended by Ishmael’s behavior toward his younger half-brother. Once again, the exact nature of the offense is not clear in Hebrew. Sarah’s solution, however, is not ambiguous. She says 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” (NRSVue). The apostle Paul later quotes Sarah’s statement as “scripture” in the only New Testament reference to this story (see below).
While initially resisting the idea of sending his second wife and first son away from the family, the text presents God as conceding to Sarah’s wish and instructing Abraham to follow through with the expulsion. Thus, Hagar once again finds herself in the wilderness. But unlike the first time, instead of escaping her oppressors, she has been exiled, and she is accompanied by a young child.
The location of Hagar’s experience in this story is Beersheba, located in what would later be called the Judean Wilderness in the land of Israel. As the story is told in the Bible, Hagar runs out of water and, after placing little Ishmael under the shade of a bush, begins to weep in despair. God hears her cries and “the angel of God” calls to her from the sky, revealing the location of a spring. She and Ishmael survive as a result, and the story ends with Ishmael growing up healthy and free.
Hagar in the New Testament
Hagar only finds significance in the New Testament as part of an allegorical illustration in chapter four of the apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Unfortunately for their legacy, Paul uses Hagar and Ishmael’s experience of being expelled from Abraham’s household as a symbol for what should be done with what he refers to as the “old” covenant. Here, Paul speaks of the covenant that God made with Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai in the Exodus story. The “old” is in contrast to the “new” covenant inaugurated by Jesus. Paul zeroes in on Hagar’s status as an enslaved woman in this analogy. Those who place themselves under the “old” covenant, he says, parallel the heirs of an enslaved woman, who receive no inheritance. Those who find themselves in a “new” covenant, by contrast, parallel Sarah’s offspring who, because she is a free woman, will inherit God’s promises.
Paul alludes directly to Sarah’s request to Abraham in this passage, writing, “But what does the scripture say? ‘Drive out the enslaved woman and her child, for the child of the enslaved woman will not share the inheritance with the child of the free woman’” (NRSVue). Paul, thus, uses Sarah’s words in Genesis 21 as the primary reference point for his allegorical reading of the Hagar and Ishmael story.
While this is only an illustration and says nothing condemnatory about Hagar and Ishmael as persons per se, it is nevertheless a negative take. Upon reading a passage like this, it is not difficult to understand why the name Hagar is not commonly given to baby girls born into Christian families.
Hagar in the Muslim Tradition
Because Hagar’s name (“Hajar” in Arabic) is a favorite for girls in Muslim families, it may surprise some that it does not appear anywhere in the Qur’an. Her story may be found in considerable detail, however, in the collections of the sayings and deeds of Muhammad known as the Hadiths. These traditions, which tend to refer to Hagar as “the mother of Ishmael,” are paired with the biblical stories from Genesis in popular Muslim retellings of her story to form a distinctly Islamic Hagar tradition.
The location of Hagar’s encounter with God in Islamic tradition is in Mecca, on the east coast of the Red Sea, in the middle of the southwest border of the Arabian Peninsula, in modern-day Saudi Arabia. This location is over 1,300 kilometers (808 miles) from where the Bible says the story happened. According to the record left by the 9th-century Muslim scholar Muhammad al-Bukhari, whose Hadith collection is widely considered highly reliable by Muslims, Abraham left Hagar between two small mountains called Safa and Marwa, which are adjacent to where the Great Mosque stands today in Mecca.
Unlike in the biblical telling, Hagar is depicted as demanding an explanation from Abraham for this action. But, once Abraham tells her that God had commanded him to leave her there, she responds with faith that God will care for her.
Unlike in the Bible’s stories, Ishmael is a nursing infant in the Islamic version. But, similarly to the biblical version, al-Bukhari’s Hadith relates that Hagar ran out of water. As in the biblical story, she leaves the baby Ishmael in the shade and begins to run back and forth between mounts Safa and Marwa in search of provision from God. After doing this seven times, she looks down and sees an angel digging in the ground with his heel—or his wing—and from there, a spring miraculously emerges. She drinks from the spring, nurses the baby Ishmael, and survives (see al-Bukhari, Book 60, Hadith 38). The place of this spring is called Zamzam.
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this story for Muslim tradition. Every Muslim is expected to make at least one pilgrimage (called Hajj) to Mecca within their lifetime (if they can afford it and are physically able). On this pilgrimage, there are a series of rituals performed that memorialize various events in the lives of Abraham and Muhammad. One of these rituals is a sevenfold run or brisk walk between Safa and Marwa. This ritual is meant to imitate the actions of Hagar as she ran between these mountains waiting for God to provide water for her and her son’s survival.
The picture above shows a view from the inside of the Great Mosque in Mecca. The black cube in the middle is called the Kaaba (also spelled Ka’bah), and was built by Abraham and Ishmael according to Muslim tradition. The well of Zamzam is located under the building on the lower left side of this photograph. This building is no longer there and has been replaced with a more practical structure to accommodate pilgrims.
According to al-Bukhari, Hagar was able to establish a center for trade in Mecca because of the spring at Zamzam. While there are multiple other important reasons for Mecca’s significance in Islam, the significance of Hagar’s role in Muslim tradition about this site is far from marginal. All Muslims expect to drink the water of Zamzam when they do their Hajj, and it is popular to bring some of this water home as a gift for friends and family.
While Hagar’s story in the Hebrew Bible does not view her negatively, she and her son Ishmael are nevertheless secondary to the story of Sarah, her son Isaac, and Isaac’s descendants who, traditionally, eventually become the Israelites. Christian tradition, while appropriating Jewish scripture for its own, did not develop an admiration for Hagar. This was left to Islam, which took a story that can easily seem like a mere subplot in the Bible and made it an integral part of its tradition. Hagar’s story could not have survived without the Hebrew Bible, and there are irreconcilable differences between the Bible and Islam’s telling of Hagar’s story. But unlike in Judaism and Christianity, Hagar’s memory takes a living, active place in Muslim faith and practice.
