"Now Sarai, Avram’s wife, had not borne him children.  She had an Egyptian maid–her name was Hagar.  Sarai said to Avram:  Now here, YHWH has obstructed me from bearing; pray come in to my maid, perhaps I may be built-up-with-sons through her!  Avram hearkened to Sarai’s voice:  Sarai, Avram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian-woman, her maid . . . and gave her to her husband Avram as a wife for him.  He came in to Hagar; and she became pregnant.  But when she saw that she was pregnant, her mistress became of light-worth in her eyes."  Genesis 16.1-4, translation by Everett Fox

"These ancient stories are told to children growing up, and wherever they are told and accepted they shape the way people unconsciously think. . . .  Often when people hit a troubling time or issue in their own life, such as relationships between men and women, attitudes about gender or work or death, [they often] go back to these stories as a kind of touchstone . . . these stories shape perceptions from childhood whether the people are religious or not."  Elaine Pagels

Hagar’s story is a story for our time:  she is a homeless woman, an abused woman, and a surrogate mother; her story is the primeval Handmaid’s Tale.  Yet readers of the Bible tend to view Hagar and her progeny negatively, if they don’t forget them completely.  Those who remember Hagar’s story often assert that her son Ishmael “persecuted” Isaac, Sarah’s son and Ishmael’s half-brother, thus bringing about Sarah’s wrath and Hagar’s and Ishmael’s banishment to the wilderness.  For some, this negative attitude towards Hagar and Ishmael is based on their readings, either current or dimly remembered, of Genesis, and, in addition for many Christians, of Paul’s devastating re-writing of Hagar’s story in Galatians.  The Hebrew Bible seems to encourage such a response as it describes God’s rejection of the Egyptian Hagar and her progeny and his preference for Sarah and her Israelite descendants.  The Christian Bible reinforces this negative attitude as it continues to Galatians, where Paul claims that Ishmael “persecuted” Isaac, and further exacerbates the antagonism between Sarah/Israel and Hagar/“Arabia” begun in Genesis by separating them into the exalted “Spirit” and the debased “flesh.”  Indeed, it is sadly ironic that Hagar rises from abused and exiled slave to assertive and independent woman in Genesis only to be exiled once again to ignominy and erasure in Galatians.  Her erasure is the result of both the Hebrew Bible’s project to assert the superiority of the biblical Israelites and the Christian Bible’s similar project to establish the superiority of the early Christians.  Both traditions claim a special relationship to God and to history that naturalizes the “inferiority” of the Arabic people.  Both thus encourage readers of the Bible to assent to the marginalization not just of a female literary character but of an entire human community.

The following excerpts are from the entry on Hagar in Harper’s Bible Dictionary (1985), a popular resource directed to the interested, general reader:

Hagar, the Egyptian maidservant whom Sarah gave to Abraham as his concubine; she bore him Ishmael.  There are two stories concerning Hagar, both showing the rivalry between her and Sarah.  In the first (Gen. 16:1‑16), Sarai (Sarah) was barren and . . . gave her maidservant to her husband so that she could bear a child in place of her mistress.  When Hagar became pregnant, she acted arrogantly towards Sarah and so Sarah, with Abraham’s permission, dealt so harshly with her that Hagar fled into the Wilderness. . . .  There she met an angel who announced that she . . . would bear a son, to be named Ishmael, from whom would spring many descendants. . . .

In Gen. 21:8‑21 Hagar is back in Abraham’s household.  Some time has passed and Sarah has given birth to Isaac.  Sarah felt that Ishmael threatened Isaac’s position as heir, so she urged Abraham to expel Hagar and Ishmael.  He acquiesced only after God assured him that he should heed Sarah, for Abraham’s main line of descent was to be through Isaac, although God would also make a nation from Ishmael’s descendants. . . .

These stories show that Ishmael’s descendants . . . were of the same stock as the Hebrews but from a religiously less important branch of the family.  The inferiority of Hagar and Ishmael is used allegorically in the N[ew]T[estament] by Paul (Gal. 4:21‑31).

Harper’s Bible Dictionary was edited by a group of highly respected scholars affiliated with the Society of Biblical Literature.  According to the general editor, “The purpose of this dictionary is to make more widely available, and to an audience of nonspecialists, the results of the best of current biblical scholarship.”  Unfortunately, however, Harper’s entry on Hagar does not reflect “the best of current biblical scholarship”; indeed, it repeats, and thus perpetuates, several erroneous assumptions about the story of Hagar and her descendants.  The most disturbing aspect of this entry is that the “inferiority” of Hagar and Ishmael and their “religiously less important” descendants appears to have been uncritically received by the editors of Harper’s Bible Dictionary.  In addition, several feminist critics have questioned each of the other assumptions listed as fact in Harper’s:  Hagar’s status as Abraham’s “concubine,” the “rivalry” between Sarah and Hagar, Sarah’s “barrenness,” Hagar’s “arrogance,” and Ishmael’s “threatening” Isaac.  In this article, I will briefly examine the first “fact” given in Harper’s, the designation of Hagar as a “concubine.”

The concept of concubinage does not exist in the Hebrew Bible.  And, in fact, although there is a word in biblical Hebrew used to indicate a secondary wife, pilegesh, usually–and erroneously–translated into English as “concubine,” Hagar is never referred to as pilegesh in the Hebrew Bible.  Although she is demoted to ‘amah, or “slave,” by both Sarah and God in Genesis 21, in Genesis 16 Hagar is described as either siphah, which means “a virgin, dependent maid who serves the mistress of the house,” or ’ishah, which means either “wife” or “woman.”  As the Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament [BDB], the standard scholarly dictionary, reports, ’ishah, when standing alone, means “woman” or “wife.”  Its meaning changes only when it is used as part of a compound word.  For instance, according to BDB, ’ishah zarah means “adulteress,” and ’ishah hakamah, “wise woman.”  Since Sarah herself is identified as Abraham’s woman, or wife [’ishah] in Genesis 16.1, it is reasonable to conclude that Hagar became his woman, or wife in Genesis 16.3, when Sarah “gave her” to Abraham “as a wife” [literally, “to wife,” le’ishah].  Although, according to custom, Hagar would have been Abraham’s secondary wife, and thus by definition subordinate to Sarah, nonetheless, in this story Hagar is, like Sarah, a “wife.”  Yet, she has been insistently labeled “concubine” by generations of biblical editors, commentators, and critics.

In her discussion of androcentric biblical commentators’ use of the word “concubine,” feminist critic Mieke Bal observes that the “contemporary concept of concubinage [is of] a defiled woman, without clear, proper status, held in low esteem, at least by modern critics” (1988 73).  As Bal further explains, the concept of the concubine . . . is derived from . . . Latin traditions.  There is no way to match the Hebrew “concubine” and the Latin concubine:  the biblical woman [pilegesh] was, as most studies acknowledge, legally married while the concubine [concubina] in Roman times was not.  (1986 78)

The second meaning for “concubine” in the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) is “In reference to polygamous peoples, a secondary wife.”  However, for most modern readers, the primary definition comes to mind, given in the OED as “A woman who cohabits with a man without being his wife,” a denotation which even today carries pejorative undertones.  Indeed, the current understanding of the word “concubine” is reflected in the thesaurus provided in my word processor, Corel WordPerfect Suite 8 (1997), which gives eight synonyms for “concubine,” among them, “harlot,” “hooker,” “madam,” and “prostitute.”  I would argue that, in the standard versions of the Bible and in the mainstream biblical dictionaries and commentaries, the word “concubine” has been automatically and uncritically applied to Hagar, whose “inferiority” has become naturalized in both popular and scholarly discourse.

The Bible is one of Western culture’s most influential texts, the source of many of our myths and legends, standards of behavior, and constructions of gender.  For many of its readers, it is a sacred text, imbued with moral and political authority.  A feminist reading, however, strives to remain continually alert to the fact that the Bible was written by, for, and, for the most part, about, men.  Indeed, although this first step in the feminist project to rehabilitate Hagar by demonstrating that she was a legally married woman, rather than a “concubine,” is important and necessary work, it is also important to recognize that this very project is both impelled by and enmeshed in the patriarchal ideology that values women primarily as wives and mothers and that has constructed the concept of “concubine” in the first place.

In this short article I have barely touched upon several additional aspects of the patriarchal ideology that resonates throughout the story of Hagar, including the promotion of slavery–indeed, of female sexual slavery–and the recurrent biblical theme of violent nationalism, inaugurated in a narrative about the purported enmity between two women, an Israelite and an Egyptian.  However, I hope I have shown in this brief discussion that to uncritically accept androcentric commentary on an androcentric text is dangerous.  It is more productive to approach these texts with a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” defined by feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza as a reading practice that “takes as its starting point the assumption that biblical texts . . . serve patriarchal functions [and that] questions the underlying presuppositions, androcentric models, and unarticulated interests of contemporary biblical interpretation” (1984 15-16).

References

Bal, Mieke.  1986.  “The Bible as Literature: A Critical Escape.” Diacritics 16:71-79.

________.  1988.  Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fox, Everett.  1995.  The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  New York: Schocken Books.

Pagels, Elaine.  1996.  “In God’s Image.”  “Men and Women.”  Online Posting. 11/15/1996.  Bill Moyers Genesis, A Living Conversation: Bulletin Board. <http://www.pbs.org/wnet/genesis/bboard.html>  accessed 1/21/1997.

Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth.  1984.  Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation.  Boston: Beacon Press.