Sarah and Hagar: Now This Is an Allegory

Reference Texts: Genesis 16:1-11; Galatians 4:22-28

On the Importance of the Ishmael Story to Metaphysical Interpretation

When thinking about the Hebrew Patriarchs, which people seldom do these days, probably one of the last persons to pop into mind would be Abraham’s first-born son, Ishmael. In fact, when I teach the Hebrew Scriptures, people sometimes wonder if Ishmael really was a patriarch. After all, he doesn’t make the New Testament; he’s AWOL from the list of heroes in Hebrews 11 and is certainly not listed in the genealogies of Jesus by either Matthew or Luke. Ishmael’s fifteen minutes of fame comes from the twenty by-name references to him in the Hebrew Bible, mostly in Genesis. Although fourteen years older than his half-brother Isaac, Ishmael is not fated to inherit Abraham’s wealth or position. Not surprisingly, Ishmael utters not a word of dialogue, and during in his greatest scene in Genesis 21, he is not even called by name.
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And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, "What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him. [1]

("The boy"? That's racist, Lord!) Then, in the middle of the Abraham-Isaac story, Ishmael is discarded like a secondary character in a suspense thriller. We are sympathetic, but he’s expendable. Obviously, the biblical writers and editors needed to include Ishmael, but centuries later the Hebrew authors of Genesis were still not inclined to give him their blessing even if the story made the lad a sympathetic figure. As Abraham’s eldest son, Ishmael remained a threat to Isaac’s supremacy, despite the fact that these tales of national origins were clearly legendary.

This enigmatic patriarch has always intrigued me, especially because the Ishmael-Isaac rift lingers in headline news today. In this brief essay, I will explore the historical-critical significance of Ishmael and apply some of those insights to develop a metaphysical interpretation of the first Arab. As a by-product of the process, we'll see how Ishmael provides a biblical imprimatur for the practice of metaphysical interpretation of the scripture.

FIRSTBORN
Abram’s concern for his advancing years and Sarai’s aged bareness was more than a tale of two fruitless old people. In the ancient world, children were everything. They guaranteed the continuation of the bloodline, kept the family property from falling into the hands of strangers or the government, and provided the only possible shelter for old age and retirement. Having children also made it possible for artisans to pass on their skills to the next generation. In an era before public schools and trade unions, the importance for the wider community of this educative function within the family cannot be overestimated. If the village blacksmith had no sons, the next generation would have no blacksmiths.

Leadership in ancient social systems came almost exclusively from the descendents of the most powerful men in society. This was actually an efficient system to maintain public order before the rise of modern democratic governments. Without a clear line of succession, ambitious secondary players would vie for the top spot and often drag the community into bloodletting. At the highest levels, when a king failed to produce male offspring, it usually meant the most catastrophic upheaval a society can experience, civil war. Since Abram was the leader of his people, he needed to provide a successor before the cohesive unit he had forged dissolved with his demise. The Book of Genesis says that Abram was able to muster a raiding party of 318 fighting men from those “born in his house” to rescue his nephew Lot (Genesis 14:13-16). Since he had no children yet, these warriors must have come from the community of kinsmen and servants that formed around and traveled with Abram and Sarai. He needed to give them hope for a future.

Sarai offered her “Egyptian maid” Hagar as a surrogate mother to meet for Abram’s need for children. The practice sounds barbaric today, but concubines and female slaves were often held in large numbers to insure the lineage and provide amusement for powerful men. I Kings reports: “King Solomon loved many foreign women…among his wives were seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines.” (11:1, 3) Regrettably, women were property in the ancient world, and only the senior-most female in a household wielded any power. Sarai was the first wife, whose duty was to produce an heir. She had failed, so she offered what was in her culture a legally and morally acceptable alternative in the person of her young slave woman, Hagar. The result was predictable. Hagar’s child grew strong and his father loved him, which hardly gave Sarai the kind of pseudo-parental comfort she had envisioned. Sooner or later—especially when her own son was born—Ishmael had to go.

This narrative provided a legendary framework for the continuing suspicion and conflict between Israelites and the people who eventually became known as Ishmaelites. Historically, the Interpreter’s Bible reports that the real Ishmaelites probably passed from the scene some time during the ninth century B.C.E. By the time Genesis was written, after Israel was an established Kingdom in the Holy Land, the term Ishmaelites had begun to mean the Bedouins, who were the likely descendents of that older, more obscure group. Today, most Arabs trace themselves back to their definitive Patriarch, Ishmael. [2]

LET’S GET METAPHYSICAL
The interesting thing about doing a metaphysical interpretation of Ishmael’s story is that it is the only tale in the biblical library specifically declared to be an allegory by another part of the Bible. In Galatians 4:22-24, Paul writes:

For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman. One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise. Now this is an allegory…[3]

From this quote we can surmise that allegorical interpretation has the explicit approval of at least one major player in the NT field. Paul’s interpretation of the story holds that Hagar’s child represents slavery, whereas Sarah’s son stands for freedom. He cleverly links the “freedom” of accepting the Christian gospel with the “slavery” to the spiritual conditions of “sin” and “death”, which he believed was rampant in the world. For Paul, not nationality but consciousness determines ones condition before God. While we might not accept his complete formula (i.e., his belief that those who are outside the Christian circle are slaves to sin), we can affirm the mechanism by which one becomes harmonized with the Divine. Thought and belief are required, not rituals like circumcision.

However, there are deeper understandings to be had when considering the Ishmael legend, which is the whole purpose of Metaphysical Interpretation. All characters, places, and events are symbolic of individual soul’s struggle to grow; they are benchmarks along the route to Christ consciousness. As the Apostle Paul said, they are best understood as allegories. Ironically, modern scholarship has given us better equipment to evaluate the content and context of the Bible than even Paul had, because today we understand the history and development of the biblical text better than the people who in isolation wrote the pieces which later became the Old and New Testaments. Outfitted with this toolbox, Metaphysical Interpretation digs for deeper meanings found below the surface of the biblical story.

We begin by looking at the names of the players. First, Abram and Sarai are the parental planners who engineer the boy’s appearance. Both receive name changes soon after, and names are highly important in understanding the deeper meaning of biblical passages, especially in the OT, which often self-consciously employs symbolism. In Mysteries of Genesis Charles Fillmore wrote: “The change in name always denotes a change in character so pronounced that the old name will no longer apply to the new person.” [4]

According to the Metaphysical Dictionary of the Bible, Abram means “Father of exaltation” which “is the name that the author of Genesis gave to the quality through which man has faith in the forces invisible.” [5] When he becomes Abra-ham this new name takes on dual meaning: “Father (source, founder) of a multitude” and “the power of the mind to reproduce its ideas in unlimited expression.” [6] The following are from interpretative statements that Charles Fillmore wrote:

The new name, Abraham, “father of a multitude,” when we apply it individually means that our faith is to be expressed by bringing the multitude of our thoughts into the realm of Spirit and under the guidance of the Christ. [7]

Abraham is also linked to the faith faculty.
Abraham represents faith, the first great faculty developed or “called out” by man in the unfoldment of his spiritual nature or Christ Mind. Faith is that faculty by which we know God as omnipresent Spirit substance…Abraham represents faith in its early establishment in consciousness, and his life portrays different movements of this faculty on the various planes of action in man’s being. [8]

When considering the Sarai/Sarah name change, we discover a profound transformation in consciousness; Sarai means “bitter, contentious, dominative, quarrelsome”; but her new name, Sarah, is Hebrew for “princess, noble woman, noble lady”. [9]

In spiritual symbology woman represents the soul or intuitive part of man. Sarah is the higher phase of the soul. In Sarai the soul is contending for its rightful place in consciousness…[10]

Sarah’s maidservant, occupies an interesting place in Metaphysical Interpretation. Although the victim of Sarai’s bitterness, Hagar was not entirely helpless. After all, she had given birth to the heir of Abram, the leader. This position made her feel somewhat secure, and the triumphant Hagar began to become what later ages will call “uppity” in the face of her mistress. A close examination of the meaning of her name shows how ill-fated this tactic would be. Hagar means “flight, to flee one’s country, fugitive, wanderer, stranger”. [11]

Mr. Fillmore tries to justify Sarah’s mistreatment of her slave by seizing on the scene where Hagar’s son was “mocking” the newborn child of Sarah, but this wording in the KJV is translated “playing with” in the NRSV. [12] This mistake was probably unavoidable since the KJV was the only translation widely available to Fillmore, however a much more compatible picture arises with the better wording: the natural child “plays” with the child of spiritual promise, just as human passions when properly harmonized with spiritual principles can result in a balanced, holistic approach to life. Twice ill-treatment at the hands of her mistress drives Hagar into the wilderness, which metaphysically can stand for the “multitude of undisciplined and uncultivated thoughts,”[13] and both times she hears the voice of God amid her despair.

That Hagar “hears” God is significant in relationship to the name of her son. Ishmael, half-African child of Abraham and Hagar the Egyptian, means “who God hears, understanding of God, whom God understands, who is obedient to God”. This last definition ("who is obedient to God") is especially fascinating when we consider that Ishmael is the legendary father of the Arabs, most of whom today are Muslim, which means in Arabic “one who surrenders” to the will of God. [14] The African connection in Ishmael’s line is reinforced when we read that “his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.” [15]

Unfortunately, the implicit racism of this story is reinforced by Charles Fillmore himself. He wrote: “Egypt signifies the darkness of ignorance, obscurity…flesh consciousness, sense consciousness, or material consciousness.”[16] One could argue that the consciousness of racism works so insidiously that people often fall into the error-belief of racial superiority/inferiority and are unaware of its ugliness until the hateful period has passed. Even people of high spiritual consciousness are susceptible to the dehumanizing tendencies of their age, but that does not excuse the offense of racism against God's One Presence and the Christ-within. Racism is an attempt to negate the central divine Truth that All are One in God, and therefore by the definition of Unity teachers like the late Ed Rabel, it is the very outpicturing of sin itself. Very few people on earth could look Jesus Christ in the eye and proclaim they have never had a prejudiced thought, or have never felt the stirrings of discomfort when encoutering people of other races, religions, cultures, and language groups. We shall overcome, but we aren't there yet.

Another, kinder interpretation of Egypt might be to see it as representing the best that humans can achieve without a fuller understanding of the divine potential within them. Thus, when the “human” Hagar produces a child who achieves recognition by God as the father of a great nation, we can see this as symbolic of the soul’s struggle to know Truth, and the hope that all paths lead to Christ consciousness. Fillmore seems to allow this kind of possibility when he defines metaphysically the Egyptians as “thoughts that pertain to the subjective consciousness in its unawakened state”, [17] although I would have preferred a similar interpretative generosity about Egypt itself.

This final player is Isaac, whose name means “laughter” and, according to the MBD, stands for “Divine Sonship”. [18] Isaac, who was offered as a blood sacrifice by Abraham until prevented by God from carrying out the gruesome ritual, is a prefigure of Jesus Christ, whom some Christian authors say was offered as a sacrifice for all humanity.

METAPHYSICAL INTERPRETATION
The elements of the story are now in place. If we operate under the Fillmorean premise that all events, people, and places are symbolic of the soul’s growth, we can draw the following allegorical conclusions about the Ishmael legends. The Faith faculty in us (Abram) can become impatient for demonstration, especially if we allow our contentious thoughts (Sarai) to challenge our trust in Truth principles. We take the easy way out and flee to Hagar for a quick fix, believing we must solve the problem ourselves because God is not trustworthy. When these uninspired but well-intentioned actions produce results (the child), we can still hear (Ishmael) the Truth if we abandon our reliance on things in the outer world and go into wilderness of our inner, undisciplined thoughts and be calmed by listening for the voice of God. The children of our human nature and the children of our spiritual nature will both father great multitudes of demonstrations in the outer and spiritual enlightenment in the inner life. The outer man must be brought to a point where he becomes obedient to the voice of Spirit within, and the inner man must learn to liberate his joy for life (Isaac) by trusting in the Faith faculty (Abraham).

VALUE OF METAPHYSICAL INTERPRETATION
This ancient method of discovering allegories in the plain meaning of the text continues to be an excellent way to explore the depths of Scriptural Truth. While, hopefully, no one would pretend that the interpretation given above was what the authors/editors of Genesis intended to say when they recorded the Ishmael legends, certainly the elements of this elucidation are present in the words of the text.

Since the Apostle Paul practiced allegorical interpretation, one can scarcely be criticized for taking up the tools of the trade and applying them to the same texts. Through working on its allegorical meaning—even though he arrived at conclusions most of us find suspect--St. Paul nevertheless validated the methodology of Metaphysical Interpretation. Therefore, Ishmael must be consider the cardinal patriarchical legend in the biblical library for New Thought Christianity.

This is the importance of the Ishmael story to Metaphysical Interpretation.

Biblical Texts:

GENESIS 16:1-11
1 Now Sarai, Abram's wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian slave-girl whose name was Hagar, 2 and Sarai said to Abram, "You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my slave-girl; it may be that I shall obtain children by her." And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.
3 So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave-girl, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife. 4 He went in to Hagar, and she conceived; and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress.
5 Then Sarai said to Abram, "May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my slave-girl to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me!"
6 But Abram said to Sarai, "Your slave-girl is in your power; do to her as you please." Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she ran away from her.
7 The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. 8 And he said, "Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?"
She said, "I am running away from my mistress Sarai."
9 The angel of the Lord said to her, "Return to your mistress, and submit to her." 10 The angel of the Lord also said to her, "I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude." 11 And the angel of the Lord said to her, "Now you have conceived and shall bear a son; you shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.”

PAUL'S LETTER TO THE GALATIANS 4:22-28
22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman. 23 One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise.

24 Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery. 25 Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. 26 But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother. 27 For it is written, "Rejoice, you childless one, you who bear no children, burst into song and shout, you who endure no birth pangs; for the children of the desolate woman are more numerous than the children of the one who is married." 28 Now you, my friends, are children of the promise, like Isaac.


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NOTES:
1. Genesis 21:17-18, NRSV.
2. Cuthbert A. Simpson, “Introduction and Exegesis of Genesis” in The Interpreter’s Bible, Volume I, George Buttrick, ed. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1978), 663.
3. Galatians 4:22-24, NRSV.
4. MG, 151.
5. MBD,18
6. Ibid., 17.
7. MG, 151.
8. Ibid., 116.
9. MBD, 573.
10. MG, 155.
11. MBD, 247.
12. Genesis 21:913, NRSV: “But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said 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.‘”
13. MBD, 677.
14. Keith Crim, ed., The Dictionary of World Religions (NY: HarperCollins, 1989), 508.
15. Genesis 21:21, NRSV.
16. MBD, 183.
17. Ibid., 184.
18, Ibid., 299.