16
About Hagar and Ishmael
1 Abram stayed there in Canaan. He lived there for ten years, but his wife Sarai still didn't have any children. Before that Sarai had taken a girl from Egypt called Hagar. Her husband had bought her from her family so that she could work for Sarai as a servant.
2 So Sarai said to her husband, “Yahweh hasn't given me any children yet. So take this girl and sleep with her. Then if she has any children they will be mine.”
Abram agreed.
3 So Sarai gave Hagar to her husband to be his wife
4 and they knew each other.
After a while Hagar knew that she was pregnant and she became proud towards Sarai. And she said to Sarai, “Now I am good because I am carrying Abram's child.”
5 Sarai said to her husband, “Because she is carrying your child, she has become proud. I myself told you to take her. She has become proud because she is carrying a child. She keeps on speaking unkindly to me. She has been doing it all the time,” Sarai said. “Which one of us is right, you or me? Let Yahweh decide!”
6 Abram said, “She is yours, and she is working for you. You are the one who controls her, so you may do anything you want with her.”
Then Sarai was cruel to Hagar and kept on teasing her. She beat her with a stick, because of the way she had been speaking to her. And so Hagar ran away.
7 She ran far away into the desert. She followed the road that went to Shur, and after a while she found a waterhole. And Yahweh's angel met her there.
8 He said to Hagar, “You are the girl who has been working for Sarai, aren't you? What are you doing here? Where have you come from and where are you going?”
Hagar answered, “I am running away from Sarai.”
9 “Go back to Sarai and work for her, because you belong to her,” Yahweh said to Hagar.
10 “I will give you so many descendants
that no one will be able to count them.
11 You will have a baby boy and you will call him Ishmael,
because I have heard you crying.”
The name Ishmael means “God hears.”
12 The angel also said to her,
“Your son will be like a man from the bush.
He will cause trouble for everyone
and everyone will cause trouble for him.
He will live by himself, away from all his family.”
13 “Oh!” thought Hagar. “That wasn't an angel. I have seen Yahweh himself. I have seen him with my own eyes and I am still alive!” So she called Yahweh “The God Who Sees Me.”
14 Because she said that, today people call that waterhole, “The Owner of the Waterhole Is Alive and He Sees Me.” The waterhole is between Kadesh and Bered.
15 Then Hagar went back to Sarai and gave birth to a baby boy for Abram, and Abram called him Ishmael.
16 When the baby was born, Abram was 86 years old. He was a very old man.