I thought I knew Hagar’s story reasonably well.

She is the Egyptian woman caught up in the complicated story of Abraham and Sarah, the mother of Ishmael, the woman who was eventually sent into the wilderness. I had read those chapters many times and, if I am honest, mostly treated Hagar as a supporting actor in somebody else’s story. Abraham carried the promise; Sarah would become the mother of Isaac, and Hagar seemed to sit somewhere awkwardly between them.

Then I noticed something in Genesis 16 that completely changed the way I viewed her. Of all the people in the Hebrew Bible, Hagar is the only one explicitly described as giving God a name.

I mean, all the people. Not Abraham, Jacob or Moses. Hagar. Even more interestingly, the name she gives him tells us almost everything about why her story matters.

Before Hagar names God, notice who she is

Genesis introduces Hagar without ceremony. She is just described as Sarai’s Egyptian slave.

Although that description actually tells us quite a lot. Hagar is a foreigner living inside Abram’s household, and she belongs to Sarai. When Sarai remains unable to have children, she gives Hagar to Abram in the hope that a child born through her might solve the problem.

It sounds a bit odd, but arrangements like this were not unknown in the ancient world. Other ancient Near Eastern texts describe situations in which a wife who could not have children provided an enslaved woman or secondary wife to bear children for the household. That helps us understand what is happening, but it does not make Hagar’s position equal to anyone else’s.

Crucially, Genesis never tells us that Hagar was asked what she wanted.

She becomes Abram’s wife in one sense, but she also remains Sarai’s servant. Her pregnancy changes her status without giving her freedom. She is suddenly carrying the child everyone has been waiting for, even as she belongs to the woman who could not have one.

You might be thinking that this is a recipe for disaster. If you were, you would be correct. Hagar begins to look down on Sarai. Sarai blames Abram. Abram hands Hagar back to Sarai’s authority, and Genesis tells us that Sarai treats her so harshly that eventually, Hagar runs.

God finds her in the wilderness.

You might think this would be the end of it all, but this is the moment where things start to get strange.

Hagar is somewhere in the wilderness, apparently heading towards Egypt, when the angel of the LORD finds her beside a spring. That wording matters. Hagar does not find God; God finds Hagar. The messenger asks her two questions:

“Where have you come from, and where are you going?”

Hagar can answer the first easily enough.

“I’m running away from my mistress Sarai.”

The second is much harder. She knows what she is escaping from, but the story gives no indication that she really knows where her flight will end.

Then the messenger makes her a promise. Hagar will have a son, and she is to call him Ishmael because the LORD has heard her suffering. The name is usually understood to mean God hears. We should pause there, as this story is already extraordinary. The child at the centre of this messy human arrangement will bear the claim that God heard his mother in his name.

There is something else unusual in the promise.

Hagar is told that her descendants will become too numerous to count. If that sounds familiar, you might be recalling the language already used about Abraham. Hagar is not suddenly made the carrier of the covenant; Genesis will continue to make that distinction very clearly, but neither is she merely given enough help to survive the day.

So the woman with almost no power inside Abraham’s household is given a future that stretches far beyond it, and then Hagar responds by doing something even more remarkable.

She names God.

The name nobody else gives

Genesis says:

“So she named the LORD who spoke to her, ‘You are El-roi.’”

The Hebrew phrase El Roi is difficult to squeeze neatly into English. It can carry the sense of the God who sees me, the God of seeing, or possibly the God whom I have seen. The following sentence is also difficult to translate precisely, which is why English Bibles do not all render it in exactly the same way. Yet the central idea is wonderfully clear.

Seeing has happened.

Hagar has encountered the God who has seen her, and somehow she has also seen God. What I had never realised is just how unusual the wording is. Other people in the Bible call on God’s name. God reveals his name to Moses, Abraham names a place after experiencing God’s provision, and Gideon later names an altar after an encounter with God.

But Hagar’s sentence is different.

Genesis explicitly says that she called the name of the LORD who spoke to her. In that narrow but important sense, biblical scholars have noted that Hagar occupies a unique position. She is the only person in the Hebrew Bible explicitly described as giving God a name.

That distinction is not given to one of the great patriarchs. It is given to an enslaved Egyptian woman sitting beside a spring in the wilderness, with nowhere to go. And she names God from experience.

You are the God who sees me.

Even the place begins to carry her testimony. The well becomes known as Beer-lahai-roi, usually understood along the lines of the well of the Living One who sees me. Hagar’s encounter is written into the geography of the story. Long after the frightened woman beside the spring has moved on, the place itself continues to remember what she discovered there.

Then the story becomes even stranger

There is another detail hiding inside Hagar’s story that I find almost as surprising.

Genesis says Sarai treated Hagar harshly, and the Hebrew verb used can mean to afflict, oppress or mistreat someone. Much later, when the book of Exodus describes what the Egyptians do to the Israelites, it uses the same Hebrew root. You might think, so what?

But think about the reversal.

We usually remember Egypt as the place where Abraham’s descendants will eventually become slaves. The Israelites will be oppressed by Egyptian masters, cry out to God and flee from Egypt into the wilderness. But before that story happens, Genesis gives us Hagar.

She is Egyptian. She is enslaved inside the household from which Israel will eventually come. She is afflicted. She flees. She enters the wilderness, and God hears her suffering.

Several biblical scholars have noticed the irony. Hagar’s story begins to resemble Israel’s later Exodus, only with the roles reversed. Before Egyptians oppress Israelites, an Egyptian woman is oppressed within the family of Israel’s ancestors.

Once I realised that everything changed for me. It makes it much harder to read this simply as a story about the good people on the inside and the troublesome outsider who gets in their way.

Genesis is doing something far more challenging than that.

The part I wish were easier

There is, however, a problem. After finding Hagar in the wilderness, the divine messenger tells her to return to Sarai and submit to her. Honestly, I would have liked the story to end before that part.

It would be much easier if God found an abused woman in the wilderness, condemned everyone who had mistreated her and sent her somewhere safe. That would fit much more comfortably with the article I might want to write, and we can finish in an uplifting way; you could give me claps and move on (hint).

But frustratingly, Genesis does not give us that story.

Even more uncomfortably, the Hebrew wording connects Hagar’s instruction to submit with the same root used for the harsh treatment she has experienced. Jewish and Christian interpreters have wrestled with this for centuries. Some have tried to explain the command as part of Hagar’s formation. Others have been far more critical of Sarai and Abram; the medieval Jewish commentator Nachmanides even argued that Sarai sinned by mistreating Hagar and that Abram sinned by allowing it.

I do not think we need to pretend the problem disappears. God sees Hagar, but being seen does not immediately make her circumstances easy.

She returns, and for a while, the story carries on.

God hears again

Later on, we join Hagar in the wilderness for a second time.

By now Sarah has given birth to Isaac, and the tension over inheritance has become impossible to ignore. Sarah demands that Hagar and Ishmael be sent away. Abraham is distressed, but eventually Hagar leaves with bread and a skin of water. This time she is not fleeing; she has been expelled.

Eventually, of course, the water runs out. Hagar places Ishmael under a bush because she cannot bear to watch him die, then moves some distance away and begins to weep. And once again, the language of the story becomes very deliberate.

God hears the boy. The child whose name means God hears is heard by God. Then God opens Hagar’s eyes, and she sees a well. The woman who once named God as the one who sees her now has her own sight opened to the water that will keep her son alive.

Seeing and hearing run through both encounters. In the first story, God hears Hagar’s suffering, and Hagar speaks about being seen. In the second, God hears Ishmael and enables Hagar to see. It is difficult to believe those connections are accidental.

Hagar was never just a supporting actor

So, I have come to the conclusion that I was wrong about Hagar.

I had always remembered her as an extra in the Abraham story. She was part of the complicated route towards Isaac, the son through whom the covenant promise would continue. Genesis certainly does distinguish Isaac from Ishmael, as Isaac carries the covenant line.

But that does not mean Ishmael is abandoned, and it definitely does not mean Hagar is invisible. God promises that Ishmael will become a great nation. He survives and eventually grows up in the wilderness. Hagar finds him an Egyptian wife, and their story continues outside Abraham’s household.

The promise goes through Isaac, but divine attention is not restricted to Isaac.

That matters.

Hagar is outside the central line of the story, but she is not outside God’s sight. She is foreign, enslaved and eventually expelled, yet Genesis gives her two encounters with the divine. Her suffering is heard, her son is preserved, and her descendants are promised a future. Extraordinarily, she gets to speak about who God is.

El Roi.

The God who sees me.

Perhaps that is why the name has survived. Because Hagar does not discover a God who sees only the people standing at the centre of the story. She discovers a God whose attention reaches far beyond the tent and the household, far out into the wilderness.

And Genesis gives the person everybody else had treated as expendable the words by which that God is remembered.