The angel of the Lord said to Hagar: “You are now with child, and you will have a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility towards all his brothers.” (Genesis 16:11–12)
What’s a future Patriarch to do? Eighty-five years old, his wife long past childbearing age, and no children to serve as his heirs! You can read the whole story in Genesis 16.
Abram’s wife Sarai had an idea: Hagar, her female slave, was still young. She could bear children in Sarai’s place. These children would be considered Sarai’s children, so that Sarai could build a family through Hagar.
Abram had no better idea, so he consented to his wife’s plan, slept with Hagar, and she became pregnant. In those days, a woman’s worth was measured largely by the sons she bore for her husband. So as soon as she had conceived and was pregnant, Hagar, though she was a slave, began to look down upon Sarai, her mistress.
This was unbearable to Sarai. She already bore the shame of being childless. She could not brook the further shame of being held in contempt by her own slave woman. She promptly blamed Abram for her troubles—even though the whole plan was hers in the first place.
Abram and Ishmael
Abram was nobody’s fool. He knew better than to argue with his wife and attempt to point out the injustice and irrationality of her accusation against him. Instead, he put the power in her hands to deal with Hagar as she saw fit.
This must have been difficult and painful for him. Hagar was about to become the mother of his first child. He must have felt protective of her. Yet in yielding discretion to Sarai in this matter, he wisely avoided driving a wedge between himself and his wife—a wedge that could have torn apart his household.
Ironically, Ishmael, the son born of his union with Hagar, turned out to be of a very different spirit than the wise and forbearing Abram. Ishmael’s character is described by the angel who spoke to Hagar in the desert after she had fled from the harsh treatment she suffered at the hands of Sarai: “He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility towards all his brothers.”
Abram looked at things from a higher vantage point. He showed thoughtfulness and restraint in his dealings with his family. Ishmael, his firstborn son by Hagar, would look at things from a lower “me against the world” attitude in which he considered himself to be right and everyone else wrong. That’s why he would “live in hostility towards all his brothers.”
Abram: a wise inner love
This provides the key to the spiritual meanings involved in the story of Hagar and Ishmael. It’s all about the perspective from which we view things, and the way we use our rational and intellectual capacities in our relationships with others.
As already mentioned, Abram was nobody’s fool. He showed himself a shrewd character, able to make pragmatic choices to save his own skin and advance his own interests and position. He could also be a courageous fighter when necessary, as shown in the story of his heroic rescue of his nephew Lot from the armies of the Babylonian kings in Genesis 14.
Yet he was able and willing to deal with others in a reasonable, respectful, and mutually beneficial way. He had many contacts with people of various cultures inhabiting the land in which he lived. Usually he got along with them peaceably. Abram represents a wise love coming from within us. This wise love is also the Lord’s presence within us.
In the life of the Lord Jesus, Abram represented Jesus’ own inner divine self. Abram was the divine love that carried Jesus’ life forward. Sarai was the divine wisdom that guided its course.
Ishmael: judging by appearances
Ishmael, on the other hand, was a “wild donkey of a man.” His mother was Hagar, an Egyptian. Egypt represents outward, worldly learning. It represents looking at things from the perspective of sensory data and the things we learn from experience in the world around us. If Abram is our inner dictate, Hagar the Egyptian is what our senses tell us.
These are often very different. Our inner dictate tells us that God is everything, and that goodness, truth, spirit, and compassion are the most important things. Our senses tell us that personal power, reputation, money, praise, possessions, and pleasure are the most important things. Our earthly nature also tells us that we ourselves are the most important thing in this world, and that we see things more clearly and understand things more accurately than anyone else. Not only that, when we think based on what our senses tell us and based on “just the facts,” or truth alone, without the inner compassion and enlightenment that softens it, we become what Emanuel Swedenborg describes in Secrets of Heaven #1949.2:
If our rationality focuses only on truth, even if it is religious truth, and does not at the same time draw on the good of kindness, we are quick to find fault, have no patience, are against everyone, see everyone as being in error, are instantly ready to blame, criticize, and punish people, show no pity, and make no effort to learn how to redirect people’s thinking. That’s because we view everything from the perspective of truth, and nothing from the perspective of goodness. In short, we are rigid people.
This is the character of Ishmael: a “wild donkey of a man” who “lived in hostility toward all his brothers” (Genesis 16:12).
Critical people
I suspect we have all encountered such people—and some of us may have gotten caught up in that sort of attitude ourselves. As teenagers we humans are famous for thinking that we have all the answers, and that everyone else is stupid compared to ourselves. It can be quite remarkable to experience the consummate lawyerly skill of teenagers seeking to justify their own position and portray any other possible way of seeing things as utterly crazy and foolish. Of course, anyone who thinks differently than they do must be crazy!
But this attitude is not confined to teenagers. As adults we are also quite capable of being sure that we are right and everyone else is wrong. It is our natural inclination. It is the Ishmael in us—the firstborn fruit of our spirit in an early, immature style of rationality that desires to seek out and discover what is right, but still thinks it can do so based on how things appear outwardly rather than based on God’s deeper dictates coming from within.
This can also manifest itself when we first become religious—when we make our first conscious commitment and effort to change our lives for the better according to the beliefs of our church. One of our natural inclinations at that time is to start comparing ourselves to others who haven’t made the same commitment we have, and to condemn and criticize them in comparison to ourselves.
Psychologically speaking, it is really our own remaining bad attitudes and inclinations that we are condemning. But we don’t realize that. We think that we’re pretty good for having made a commitment to turn over a new leaf—and that everyone else who hasn’t done so is distinctly second-class. We can become just like what the angel of the Lord and Swedenborg describe: self-righteous, critical and condemnatory towards everyone around us, our hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against us. It’s a lonely “desert” kind of a state to be in. The desert to which Hagar fled from her mistress was an emotional desert as well as a physical one.
A critical choice
As a young boy, the Lord Jesus felt the pull of that “wild donkey” type of rationality within himself. After all, he of all people had a right to be critical of others. He had far deeper insight than any of us into the true nature of things. He could see the true character of the people around him. And unlike all of them, he himself had never committed any sin. It would have been easy for him to take the self-righteous and critical “Ishmael” path, blasting away at everyone around him just because he could. Later in his life he did at times draw on the Ishmael in him, such as when he lambasted the scribes and Pharisees for their hypocrisy.
Yet he saw far earlier than any of us do that no matter how clear-sighted he was, and no matter how accurately he saw the real character of those around him, without love and compassion this meant nothing. At times, harsh criticism of others may be necessary when nothing else will get through. But even then, to be truly effective it must be done from an underlying compassion that hopes for people to genuinely change from the heart and become better and happier as a result.
Making the compassionate choice
There is a brief vignette of the approach Jesus took to others in this story from Luke 4:31–37:
Then he went down to Capernaum, a town in Galilee, and on the Sabbath began to teach the people. They were amazed at his teaching, because his message had authority.
In the synagogue there was a man possessed by a demon, an unclean spirit. He cried out at the top of his voice, “Ha! What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are: the Holy One of God!”
“Be quiet!” Jesus said sternly. “Come out of him!” Then the demon threw the man down before them all and came out without injuring him.
All the people were amazed and said to each other, “What is this teaching? With authority and power he gives orders to unclean spirits and they come out!” And the news about him spread throughout the surrounding area.
When Jesus saw the man possessed by a demon, he could have taken the course that most of the people, and their religious leaders, took in those days. He could have assumed that the reason this man was possessed by a demon was that he had sinned, and therefore deserved everything he got. He could have passed on by, turning a cold shoulder to one who was so obviously not deserving of his respect and his healing powers.
But that’s not what he did. Instead, he had compassion on the man. He confronted the demon who possessed him. His words to the demon were stern, but in his heart was a warm and burning love for the poor soul who, for whatever reason, was in the grip of evil, pain, and sorrow. It was from the power and authority of a deep underlying love that Jesus could command the evil spirit to leave the man, and the spirit had to obey.
We face a similar choice in our own dealings with people. Will we yield to the Ishmael impulse to accuse and criticize? Or will we listen to the deeper promptings of love, calling on us to have compassion for others, and do what we can to alleviate their suffering and help them along a path toward goodness?
(Note: This post is an edited version of a talk originally delivered on February 29, 2004. For the next article in this series, please see: “A Covenant with God.” To start at the beginning of the series, please go to the article, “What Child Is This?”)
For a related video on YouTube, please see: “What does it Mean that Jesus was Glorified?”
For further reading:
- Darkness at Home
- From Literal Slavery to Spiritual Freedom
- Hate Speech Says More About the Hater than the Hated
- One Girl’s Heaven is Another Man’s Hell
- What Does it Mean that Jesus was “Glorified”?
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
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