Today we are going to learn about a very important young lady in the Bible. Her name is Hagar and even though the people in her life treated her badly, God treated her like a VIP, a Very Important Person. All of chapter sixteen is about Hagar, so she deserves her own story “before the story”. We will be learning about Egyptians, slavery, and about how important it is to treat others as though they are better than we are. We will also be learning how to do something that Hagar couldn’t ever do—speaking up when something isn’t okay.
If you want to watch me recording a slightly longer version of this live on YouTube, check this out! If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.
Hi! I’m Miss Tyler, and welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I now post slightly longer video versions. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context without reading an entire chapter every week!)
Parents, if you didn’t catch it, I posted a broadcast about the sensitive issues of Hagar’s story on my Character in Context podcast and on my grown-up website, which you can find linked in the transcript. I strongly encourage you to listen to it so that you can handle questions I can’t delve into with a young audience.
Hagar is a very important person in the Bible, even though it might not seem like it at first. In fact, we can even be tempted to not like her at all if we are rooting for Sarai and don’t want to think badly of her. But Sarai, like Abram, was born a pagan, definitely grew up worshiping idols, and was part of the same ancient Near Eastern world as her husband, Abram. So, having slaves was a normal part of her life, and so was treating them like they were nothing but property. The story of Hagar and Sarai isn’t a pretty one full of happy endings because there is nothing nice about the world of slavery. Slavery was something that happened to people, and even those people who chose to be slaves only did so because it was their best chance of surviving when they had run out of money. At the end of Genesis, we will see that near the end of the seven-year famine, all the Egyptians had sold themselves to Pharaoh as slaves in exchange for enough food for themselves and their families to live on.
Something I want you to know about ancient Egyptians is that, like Americans, they weren’t just one color and came from many different backgrounds. Many Egyptians were people from different countries originally who had moved to Egypt because there was almost always plenty of food available there. Egypt was very good about welcoming foreigners—like Abram and Sarai in Genesis 12. And so, Egypt was full of people who had different skin colors, just like America. Most Egyptians were brown-skinned, but some had very dark skin if they were from Cush, and lighter brown skin if they came from Asia, like Abram and Sarai. But there wouldn’t have been anyone who was white there, like me, because we seem to have fallen off the Bible map back in Genesis 10! That’s the last you see of my ancestors in the Bible. I am very grateful for Jesus so that I can at least be there by the time Revelation 22 comes around, and we are all worshipping God together! Egyptians were people from a lot of different places like Sudan (which was called Cush), Ethiopia, and Libya. They were people who were united by the Egyptian way of life. And we can see why people would think that Egyptian culture was something they would want to be a part of. The ancient Egyptians were incredible artists, builders, doctors, and military fighters. They could do things that we still can’t figure out how to do now—like build the pyramids (it isn’t like they would let us take one apart, right?). They even performed eye surgery! So, when you think of ancient Egypt, I want you to remember that they were the richest, most powerful, and most technologically advanced country on earth while Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and his children were alive. And they stayed that way until the time of Moses—but that’s another story.
Hagar was from Egypt, and when we first meet her in Genesis 16, she is a slave belonging to Abram’s wife, Sarai. Although they could have bought her at any time, she was probably given to them by Pharaoh when he took Sarai for a wife. And by the time we see Hagar show up in the story, about ten years have gone by. If she was six years old when she was given to Sarai, then maybe she is sixteen now. Maybe Pharaoh gave her to Abram, or maybe he gave her to Sarai when she was in the palace. Sometimes, when we watch movies about the Bible, they will say this or that, but when the Bible doesn’t tell us, we must remember that we don’t know for sure. Movies “fill in the blanks” to make the story more interesting, but when we’re studying the Bible, we have to pay attention to what it does say and what it doesn’t say. We can make up “what if” stories based on what we know about the ancient world, but when the Bible doesn’t actually say something, we have to be honest about the fact that we just don’t know. All we know for sure about Hagar is that she is Sarai’s slave and that she is Egyptian. She only shows up as a character in Genesis 16 and 21. We don’t know her age, what she looked like, or anything like that. And we don’t even know how she became a slave, but let’s talk about some possibilities based on what we know from history. And the cool thing is that when we explore history, we can learn a lot–way more than by just making up a story about Hagar.
How did Hagar become a slave in the first place? Although we don’t know for sure, we can look at what is written in the cuneiform tablets from Babylon, Assyria, and the Hittites to come up with some ideas. First, she might have been born to parents who were enslaved already. She might have been a slave her entire life. Second, she might have been sold as a slave to Pharaoh by a poor family who could not afford to feed her. Third, her entire family might have been sold into slavery if her father owed someone a lot of money. Fourth, Egypt went to war with a lot of other nations, and she and her family might have been captured and forced to live as slaves. Fifth, Hagar might have been kidnapped and sold. Sixth, if her father took out a loan and put her up as a guarantee that he would pay back the money but didn’t, then they could have just taken her. Seventh, if her father had killed someone, their entire family could be given to the victim’s family as slaves. All of these things happened in the ancient world. We don’t know exactly what happened in the case of Hagar, but it was almost certainly one of these things. What we do know for sure is that Hagar wasn’t a slave just because of the color of her skin. That wasn’t how slavery worked until the last four hundred years or so. People who were slaves looked just like anyone else—so they were sometimes branded underneath their arm, or forced to wear special clothes so that people would know they weren’t free.
About what does and doesn’t count as chattel slavery–
I am 38% Irish, my father is 75% Irish, my grandmother was 100% Irish, and our family has been in America since before the Revolutionary War. There is a good chance that my ancestors came here as poor indentured servants, and some of them were treated very badly when they came to America. BUT, because lifelong slavery here was based upon skin color, my ancestors could run away if they were treated badly and start a new life far away, and no one would ever know that they had been indentured servants—which means that they traded working for a certain number of years in to get to America. They were kind of slaves, but not forever, and their children were born free. So, that’s very different from slavery. It actually makes me really angry when people say that what might have happened to my ancestors is just as bad as slavery in America because it totally wasn’t. My ancestors had it so much better, even if they were sometimes treated very badly.
And because she was a slave, people could treat Hagar as badly as they wanted and tell her to do whatever they wanted her to, and she had to do it. She probably worked hard every day, from when she woke up until she went to sleep. She belonged to Sarai, and so she probably had to fetch a lot of water from the well—which was really hard work—grind a lot of grain into flour, bake a lot of flatbread, milk the cattle, sheep, and goats, card wool and use a spindle to make yarn or thread which she then might weave into cloth for clothing. Hagar wasn’t someone who could go out and decide what she wanted for her life—instead, she was someone that life just happened to based on the decisions of others. No one would choose this sort of life unless there was no alternative, and especially not a woman. And remember that we are commanded to love others as ourselves, so if we wouldn’t want to be enslaved, then it is wrong for us to do that to anyone else. Of course, that commandment hadn’t been given yet. Abram and Sarai were the start of a new thing, and that new thing had to start out small and grow. Jesus told the story of a small mustard seed that grew into a huge plant—and Abram and Sarai are like that mustard seed. Every seed that God plants gets bigger and better and more spectacular. But when we don’t wait for the seed to grow, we can make a lot of trouble for other people and ourselves.
Because Hagar isn’t free, she isn’t going to have any choice about what happens to her in chapter sixteen. She gets told what to do, and she has to do it whether she wants to or not. No one asks her what she wants because no one cares. Now, we know that Sarai wants a baby really badly, but she can’t have one. God has promised a child to her husband, Abram, but He didn’t say anything about Sarai—which must have got her thinking about what she can possibly do to make things happen. Even though she was married to a rich man, everyone would have looked down on Sarai, except for the personal slaves she had power over. I don’t think they would ever dare to say anything mean to her, but in those days, no one had much respect for a woman who couldn’t have a baby. And everyone knew that she was way too old to have one now. Sarah knew it too.
But we know about some of the things that they did back in Babylon, where they came from. If a wife couldn’t have a baby, she could make her slave have one for her. So, one day, Sarai went to Abram and said, “Here, God isn’t letting me have a baby—have a baby for me with her.” Do you think that Hagar wanted an old man like Abram for a husband when she was just still a kid herself? Do you think she was scared? Or confused? Maybe she had a crush on one of the younger male slaves, and she had hoped to marry him and have babies with him. Maybe she had a lot she wanted to say, but she knew that it wouldn’t do any good. No one cared about Hagar or what she had to say. Sarai wanted a baby for herself and so she could tell her slave to do that, and Hagar had to obey. And then after Hagar had the baby, she would have to give it to Sarai. She couldn’t even be the baby’s mom if Sarai didn’t want her to be. That would be really hard. Hagar didn’t know exactly what would happen to her or the baby. All she knew was that she had to obey. And that might seem strange to us, but it was totally normal back then.
In the ancient world, women were sometimes treated very badly, and slaves were treated even worse. To be a slave and a woman meant you were pretty much always in danger of someone doing something really rotten to you just because they could. And what could you do about it? If you ran away, you would either die or someone else would capture you, and they might be worse than what you left behind! There wasn’t anyone around to protect her—when she left Egypt, she probably got separated from her family. There weren’t any police around. She couldn’t speak up for herself because no one was listening. She didn’t have any rights because she wasn’t free, and so no one would even care about anything bad happening to her. She had no choice but to be something between a low-ranking wife and a slave—because if she was really a wife, then she would get to keep her baby. So, we aren’t entirely sure what Hagar was, and it seems like later in the story Hagar isn’t so sure either, and it caused a lot of problems.
Let’s talk about the differences between you and Hagar and it doesn’t matter if you are a girl or a boy. No matter what anyone told Hagar to do, she couldn’t ever say no. You can say no if someone is telling you to do something you know is wrong or even if you think it is wrong. You are a kid and not an adult, but you are different from Hagar in many ways. If Hagar stuck up for herself, no one would care. If Hagar said no, bad things would probably happen to her, and then she would have to do them anyway. Hagar didn’t have any control over what happened to her, who she had to marry, or even about whether or not she could keep her own baby. And that’s really messed up even though it was normal back then. My own kids are adopted, but it was their birthmom’s choice to place them with us because she loves them.
Hagar didn’t have something we have that is very important—she didn’t have what we would call a voice. In the ancient world and even today, to have a voice means that people will listen to you. For example, people listened to Jesus preach the good news because He worked miracles, cast out demons, raised the dead, made bread and fishes, and did a whole lot of other things. When Jesus did those things, the people knew that God was saying, “Listen to Him very carefully and do whatever He says!” People like kings and priests also had a lot of voice because they had power and respect, so people took the things they said very seriously. If a king said something bad about you, then everyone would believe it. If a king told you to do something, you had to do it. Husbands and fathers were so powerful in the ancient world that they sometimes had the right to kill a wife or a child just because they wanted to. Voice has always been a very important thing to have and to use. But someone without a voice, who no one would listen to, probably learned not to say anything pretty quick. And they probably learned to just do whatever they were told, no matter how much they didn’t want to do it. They were slaves, and escaping wasn’t an easy or safe thing to do.
If Hagar was alive today, I think she would be saying a lot of things. Hagar would have rights. No one could force Hagar to marry an old man and give her baby away. Hagar wouldn’t have been sold into slavery in the first place. Hagar would have choices to make about her own life. I think that Hagar would tell you that when someone is hurting you, you should speak up because if she could have, then she would have! And if they are doing really terrible things to you, you should call the police! Hagar had to be quiet because no one cared. But people do care about you. I care about you. And you are very precious to God, created to be His image-bearer and show the world what He is like. Hagar was raised in a world where slavery was absolutely normal, even though we know it is strange and terrible now. I bet Hagar would study hard in school because she was never allowed to get an education, and she would be amazed at what you get to do! Hagar would learn that she is amazing and important to God and that it isn’t right for people to treat her like she isn’t even a real person. Abram and Sarai never even call her by her first name in the Bible! Hagar would know that her feelings matter, and that if someone was too close, she could ask them to move away. She could tell people that they were wrong about things, and she wouldn’t have to pretend like some people are better than she is just because they are rich.
You know what? Someone older than me was hurting me a couple of weeks ago, and I told him, “NO!” And he got really angry at me and told me off, but I used my voice and didn’t back down. He was wrong, but he is used to doing whatever he wants, and people just putting up with it. I am always worried when I know I am going to see him. When I said, “NO!” I was using my voice and saying that hurting me is not okay. When I said “NO!” I was telling him that what he was doing was wrong. He didn’t like that. And I was very upset about it for a few days afterward, but then I woke up on my birthday, and I felt so much better. I didn’t hurt anymore. I am proud of myself for using my voice, even though the person who hurt me still doesn’t think they were doing anything wrong. But that doesn’t matter. God will have to show him that it isn’t okay. That isn’t my job. My job was to use my voice and say, “NO!” Maybe if a lot more people would say no to him, he would figure out that he isn’t acting like a good guy. And sometimes you can’t tell someone no, I understand, but you can use your voice to find someone else who can.
And it is really too bad that Abram and Sarai felt the way they did about Hagar and did what they did to her and didn’t care how she felt about it. It’s sad that they thought it was okay to own people and use them like tools. It’s really terrible that they grew up in a world where they couldn’t even see why that was wrong, but that’s how we all are. When something is normal to us, it is hard to see the truth about it. Did you know that it has always been very important to God that we listen to the people who are in danger or being hurt? Even though people don’t much like listening to people who are poor, hungry, cold, sick, or who are widows or children without parents, or put into jail when they are innocent, the Bible tells us that God always hears them when they are crying out and that it makes Him very mad when people who can help them just ignore them instead. In fact, Jesus said that when He comes again, He will judge people not based on what they ate or if they celebrated his festivals or tithed perfectly or anything like that. Those things don’t help the people who are suffering. He said that people will be separated like shepherds separate the sheep and the goats in their herds. One group, He will be happy with because they were taking care of the people who were suffering, and the other group He will not be happy with because they ignored everyone who needed help. Jesus said that whoever takes care of the people who are suffering is taking care of Him, and whoever ignores the people who are suffering is ignoring Him.
Abram and Sarai didn’t understand that, and they never would. God hasn’t done anything yet to show people how much He hates slavery and when people hurt each other. In fact, it won’t be until we come to the story of Joseph, and later during the time of Moses, when God starts telling us stories about the wickedness of slavery. No one ever ended up a slave because things were going good for them, that’s for sure.
It can be really surprising when people like Abram and Sarai aren’t always good examples and can sometimes be just as rotten as the people around them. But to be different, someone needs to teach us a new way to live. God has already asked them to make some big changes in their lives, but they are never going to be as good as Jesus. Jesus has been with God since the beginning, and He knows how everything was supposed to be before it got wrecked by sin and rebellion. Jesus knows that we are supposed to live together in harmony with no wars, sickness, slavery, abuse, lies, people trying to control each other, or any of that. He knows because everything was peaceful and perfect when it was just Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit together. Can you even imagine what they were thinking as humans came up with new and terrible things to do to each other? When Cain killed his brother over something that had nothing to do with him, when Lamech took two wives and then murdered a young man over nothing, and Nimrod went to war and built a mighty empire? Humans are really good at finding ways to make each other suffer, but that was why it was so important that God chose Abram to start a new way of life. As Abram learned to follow God and listen to him, he became a better man than he was. And his son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob will have to learn to follow and listen too. They won’t always listen, and they won’t always obey. The people of God will do awful things, and God will have to hold them accountable. There is only one perfect person in the whole Bible, in the history of the whole world, and that is Jesus.
Because Jesus is perfect, when we trust Him and accept Him as our King, His Spirit comes and lives with us, and we are able to change much more quickly than Abram. The Spirit teaches us how to love others and even forgive them. The Spirit teaches us not to hate people and to love helping them. The Spirit changes warlords and gang members into missionaries and preachers. The Holy Spirit of God can change you into whatever God wants you to be, no matter how impossible it seems. He is still changing me all the time.
I love you. I am praying for you. We can learn a lot from the story of Hagar and how wonderful it is that we can make our own decisions and that it isn’t okay for other people to hurt us.