Third Sunday after Pentecost

Hagar and Ishmael

 Third Sunday after Pentecost
1. Some stories in the Bible leave us stunned because they attribute to God something that is totally
unjust and morally offensive, like todays story of the rejection of Hagar and of her baby
Question: is this story the word of God, or is is something else? For fundamentalists and literalists, every word in
the Bible is the word of God. If so, then they have to explain how God can be so schizophrenic and order Abraham
to reject these 2 innocent people, and, a few pages later, order the Israelites to love their neighbor and be
compassionate to strangers.
The Bible contains not only the revelation of God, but also the culture, views, prejudices and the hang ups of
ancient societies.
We need to have a clear understanding of the cultural and historical context in which the Bible was written in order
to understand its message and interpret it properly, and we need to sort out Gods revelation from cultural
baggage.
2. The book of Genesis originated as a collection of oral traditions about 3,000 years ago, and it reflects
the ideas and traditions of an ancient Middle Eastern culture, in which the leader of the clan was an
absolute monarch with power of life and death over the members of his extended family.
Genesis was written by members of a society in which women were not regarded as human beings, but as
property. Women had no legal rights, and were owned by their fathers before marriage and by their husbands
after marriage. Polygamy was practiced by wealthy individuals who could afford to buy additional wives.
In that society the first born son inherited double the share of his brothers. Consequently, often brothers fought
over birth rights and it was not unusual for a newly crowned king to kill his brothers to keep them from
challenging his right to the throne.
From a modern perspective, those traditions and customs are barbaric and we need to understand that some
Bible stories reflect the customs of that time and that place, and are not the word of God.
 Third Sunday after Pentecost
3. We must also keep in mind that the Bible is not a history books.
The Bible was not meant to give an accurate historical accounts of events, but it was meant to teach lessons, and
sometimes lessons are taught by telling stories.
Writing was not used I Israel till the 7 th Century BC, and the Torah (the first part of the Bible) was written during the
Babylonian exile, based on older oral traditions.
Priests and scribes who had been exiled to Babylon wrote the Torah to keep their traditions alive and keep their young
from being assimilated into Babylonian society. This document was then edited several times by later generations of
scribes
4. According to Biblical scholars, the story of Hagar and Ishmael reflects the situation of the Jews at the end
of the Babylonian exile, when their leader Ezra, forced the men who had married foreign wife to divorce
them and reject them and their children
Ezra was a Jewish priest and scribe during the Babylonian exile. The Babylonians were defeated by the Persians, and
Cyrus, king of Persia, allowed the Jews and all other exiles to return to their countries, that were now provinces of the
Persian empire
Ezra had been appointed by the Persian King to be the governor of the Jews who had returned from the Babylonian exile.
Ezra was also a priest and a fundamentalist who believed that the Jews who had survived the Babylonian exile had been
chosen by God to be the new people of God.
He believed strongly that his mission in life was to ensure that the new Israel should remain a pure race,
uncontaminated by mix marriages with non-Jewish populations. So he rejected the legitimacy of marriages between the
Jews who had retuned from exile and spouses from other nationalities and even with Jews who had not been taken into
exile by the Babylonians.
Many of the Jews who had returned after 50 years of exile in Babylon had married foreign women and had children by
them. Ezra forced these Jews in mixed marriages to divorce their spouses and to disown the children born of mixed
marriages.
Up to this point Judaism had been a religion that accepted people from other countries who converted to Judaism and
incorporated them in the 12 tribes. From this point on Judaism became a religion and also a race, an ethnicity.
 Third Sunday after Pentecost
5. Remember though that Ezras actions did not go unchallenged in the Bible.
The Prophet Malachi, who lived in Jerusalem at the time of Ezra, issued a strong challenge to the policy of forcing
people in mixed marriages to divorce their wives and disown their children. For Malachi marriage was indissoluble,
and foreign wives and their children should have been converted to Judaism, not rejected.
There is historical evidence that Ezras reforms were urged by Jewish children of polygamous fathers to prevent their
half brothers born of foreign women from inheriting ancestral property.
The story of Hagar and Ishmael was placed in Genesis in the context of Ezras forced divorces. It is an attempt to
justify Ezras policies by projecting the practice back into ancestral times
6. Observations:
a. In the Hebrew Bible the topic of mixed marriages was always controversial because there was a concern that
foreign wives would worship idols and bring up their children that way. Some stories about foreign wives are
negative (Solomon was driven to idolatry by his 700 foreign wives). However, there are also very positive stories of
foreign wives in the Bible such as Ruth
b. Learn to read the Bible: a key lesson in the story of Hagar is that she was rejected by Abraham and his clan, but not
by God. God was with Hagar and Ishmael and made sure that they survived and thrived.
Biblical scholars call this episode an etiology: a story made up to explain something. For the Bible, Ishmael is the
father of the Arabs. Thus, the story explains how Jews and Arabs happen to live in the same area, have so much in
common, and yet be hostiles to each otherThe prophets emphasize that God was not only the God of the Jews,
but God of every nation
c. We live at a time when, for political reasons, families are split, as immigrants are sent back to their country of
origin. Politics are politics. Dont use God to justify politics of exclusion
Malachi stood up to Ezra and denounced his policy to reject foreign wives and children. God protected Hagar and
Ishmael. Jesus preached and practiced inclusion reaching out to all outcasts and welcoming everyone into the fold.