Genesis 16:1 Commentary and Bible Study

Genesis 16 records this sad event in which Abram embraces culture, but it issues into much better things, especially in chapter 17. Abram and Sarai turned to human ingenuity to secure the great promise of God. They used the ancient customs of the day from the society round about them, and felt that it would be the best solution to the lack of an heir for Sarai, to lend to Abraham, as it were, her handmaid, bond servant. They had the right motives; Abram still worked in a measure by faith. He believed the promise of God that the seed royal would come. He had, you might say the right doctrine, but he had the wrong method. So Sarai and Abram move together down this pathway and it seems to have led to thirteen years of relative silence in their spiritual walk. God surely dealt with them and they prayed and they walked in communion with him, but for thirteen years after the sorry events of the first part of chapter 16 nothing spectacular happened: no great revelation, no move from God to further his promises towards them. They enjoyed fellowship with him, but it was a very quiet level as it were. Thirteen lost years, you may say, because of what took place. So they believe in the promise. They believe that the seed is coming, despite their age. We have to be very careful not to over criticise them. ‘Now Sarai, Abram's wife bear him no children: and she had an handmade, an Egyptian’ – no doubt brought out of Egypt, just a couple of chapters earlier when through the famine they went down into Egypt – ‘whose name was Hagar.’ That is not necessarily a real name at the time. It may be, coincidentally, but since Hagar means ‘fugitive’, and it really happened halfway through this event that she becomes a fugitive. It seems more likely that it is a name assigned to her in the recording of the incident and not her actual name. But it may have been Hagar, fugitive.