Old Testament · Patriarchal
Hagar
“She gave this name to the LORD who spoke to her: 'You are the God who sees me,' for she said, 'I have now seen the One who sees me.'”Genesis 16:13
Biography
Hagar was an Egyptian slave in the household of Abraham and Sarah. When Sarah remained childless, she gave Hagar to Abraham to produce an heir — a common practice in the ancient Near East. When Hagar conceived, tension rose between the two women, and Hagar fled into the wilderness. There an angel of the Lord found her beside a spring and promised that her son Ishmael would become a great nation. Years later, after Isaac's birth, Hagar and Ishmael were sent away into the desert, where they nearly died of thirst before God heard the boy's cry and revealed a well. Hagar is among the first individuals in Scripture to receive a direct divine revelation, and the only person in the Bible to give God a new name.
Spiritual Lesson
Hagar's story insists on a truth the rest of the biblical narrative sometimes obscures: God sees the ones the story is not about. She is not the chosen lineage. Her son is not the covenant child. She is a slave from a foreign country. And yet the God of Israel finds her in the desert, calls her by name, hears her affliction, and gives her a promise. El Roi — the God who sees — is not only the God of the elect but the God who notices what happens in the margins of the main story. The woman who had no voice became the only person in the Bible to name God. He had seen her. And in naming him, she acknowledged that she had been seen.