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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! 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 usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
This week’s Bible lesson is just sad. Really sad. And it comes right after something that was amazing and was supposed to be happy. If only Sarah and Abraham hadn’t been impatient. If only Sarah had treated Hagar with more kindness. If only Hagar hadn’t been so prideful about having a baby. If only Abraham hadn’t allowed Sarah to be cruel to Hagar. If only Abraham and Sarah would have treated Hagar like a person, but they never even called her by her name. If only they hadn’t acted like the Babylonians and Egyptians they were when they were born but knew enough to love their neighbors. The thing is that loving our neighbors is the hardest commandment of all and especially when we haven’t had Jesus as an example and the truth is that Abraham and Sarah probably never had anyone as an example because, in ancient times, you were only supposed to love your family and even then, the amount of love you owed someone in your family had a lot to do with how well they fit in. Jesus told His followers that loving others isn’t about how they treat us or whether they are friend or enemy—it’s our job to be a good and loving neighbor to whomever we come across. But they didn’t understand that yet. They were having a hard enough time just doing what God was telling them to do in waiting for Him to take care of His promises. We’re all kind of like untrained dogs—we might have good intentions and mean well as we are going about our lives but if you tell us to sit without teaching us what that means, we are going to just keep on doing whatever it is we were doing. God knew that about Abraham and Sarah and it would take Him many generations to get them ready for Jesus. Right now, they aren’t even remotely ready. I don’t know about you, but I have days when I don’t feel ready for Jesus either and I act like a dog who doesn’t know how to sit. That’s normal. As a baby, you couldn’t do any of the things you can do now, right? You needed examples and teaching. And the people to teach you how to walk, talk, and use the toilet needed people to teach them too. That’s where Abraham and Sarah are right now when it comes to loving their neighbors and understanding who their neighbors even are. Abraham would believe that Ishmael, his son, counts but Sarah wouldn’t and neither of them treated his mother Hagar like a neighbor. The world as they knew it was one big mess. Let’s look at today’s verses:
The child grew and didn’t need his mother’s milk anymore, and Abraham held a great feast on the day Isaac was finally weaned off of it. But Sarah saw the son mocking—the one Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham. So, Sarah said to Abraham, “Drive out this slave with her son, get them out of my sight! Because there is just no way the son of this slave will inherit anything alongside my son Isaac!”
Whoa! Dang, Sarah! What’s going on here? We’ve got some exploring to do to figure out why Sarah is telling Abraham to get rid of his oldest son, Ishmael, whom he loves so that he can focus on Isaac, who is just three years old. How do we know Isaac is three years old? Because he was weaned. Babies in the ancient world didn’t have bottles or formula—which could be a serious problem if anything went wrong. A baby with a mouth problem might not be able to get enough milk and could die, and a lot of babies used to die before modern times. Not just from being sick, but from not being able to get enough food. Being weaned means that Isaac wasn’t getting milk from his mom anymore through breastfeeding. And her being able to do that was another miracle for sure. Not all moms can make milk and so babies could die if there was no other way to feed them. My mom couldn’t ever make more than six weeks of milk for my brothers and I so without formula, if we had been born back in the days of Abraham and Sarah, we all might have died. Sometimes, moms died while the babies still needed milk. If a woman was really lucky and rich, she could find another mom who had lost her baby or whose baby was weaned, and that woman could feed her baby. Moses’s mother was paid to do it by Pharaoh’s daughter; a woman who did that for babies was called a wet nurse. I have no idea why. It sounds like a hospital had a sprinkler problem and their nurses got soaked. But a wet nurse is just any woman who breastfeeds her milk to someone else’s baby. In the ancient world, actually before about a hundred years ago, women who were wet nurses saved the lives of many babies who would have died. But poor women’s babies were more likely to die. Until the last hundred years, formula wasn’t very safe because it was homemade based on animal milk and it was generally just full of bacteria and germs. Lots of babies died. Yay science! Now very few babies die who have access to safe food when their moms can’t make milk.
So the first year and the first three years of a baby’s life could be very stressful in the ancient world. One out of every three babies would die before their first birthday. If a baby made it to three years old, that was a big reason for a huge party! Which is why Abraham threw a big feast when Isaac was finally weaned. Oh, by the way, weaning is a word that means slowing stopping something. It means that Isaac was eating more and more bread and beans and fruit and vegetables and less and less milk. When he didn’t need anymore milk from his mom Sarah, it meant they believed he was healthy enough to do better without it. What a relief! It means that Isaac is much more likely to live to be a grownup. And that is good news but maybe not for everyone. In fact, Ishmael makes a big mistake at the feast: But Sarah saw the son mocking—the one Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham.
Oh man, this was really a bad idea. So far, this is the only thing we have ever heard of Ishmael doing anything wrong and this was a doozy. Sarah hates Hagar and used to even beat her and never calls Hagar by her name. But that didn’t matter as long as Abraham only had one son and they needed Ishmael. Now, Ishmael has been replaced. Maybe he hoped that Isaac would die so that he could be Abraham’s only son again. That’s really awful but it would have been normal back then. Maybe he was jealous about all the attention Isaac was getting because he was a “miracle baby”—but a miracle baby who had wrecked all of Ishmael’s hopes and dreams. Remember that Ishmael was fourteen when Isaac was born and now he is seventeen—a grown man in those days. Ishmael was strong, and a great hunter, and really good with a bow and arrow which means he wouldn’t ever go hungry. Ishmael was half Egyptian and half Babylonian. He might even have a bit of a beard by now. For a long time, Ishmael had been the star of the family as he was taught how to take over the household and everything about caring for the animals and being the boss over all of the hired men and slaves. But now, Ishmael probably felt like the son of a slave for the first time ever; a slave who was hated by his dad’s wife. I don’t blame him for being angry and maybe even feeling betrayed and definitely disappointed. But, at least he knew he would get a third of everything Abraham had.
Inheritance is when your parents die and give you everything they have. In the ancient world, only the sons were given the money, animals, and land. Everything would be divided up by the number of sons plus one. The oldest son would get twice as much as his brothers and in exchange for getting more, it was his job to take care of his mom and unmarried sisters. He had to make sure they got married to good men, and had to give them dowries—which is money that belongs to the woman just in case something went wrong and her husband divorced her so she won’t starve to death. But Ishmael wasn’t the firstborn son even though he was born first because his mom was a slave and not a wife. By the laws of the ancient world, Isaac was the firstborn even though he was only three. Ishmael was still Abraham’s son, but he was now in second place and would get only half as much from Abraham when he died. In three short years, he went from getting it all to getting only one out of three of everything Abraham had. And there were no sisters that Isaac had to take care of so all he had to do was take care of his mom, who was already really old. You can see why Ishmael would feel cheated and why he might be off in the corner saying some really nasty stuff to whoever might listen. Maybe if Ishmael understood exactly what was going on, he would have kept his mouth shut but he didn’t. Sarah noticed exactly what Ishmael was up to—a grown man making fun of her three-year-old son. She was ninety-three and her husband was 103. This could be a little problem or a big problem—a little problem as long as Abraham was alive but a big problem if Abraham died and an even bigger problem if Sarah died too and when you are that old, you have to be thinking about that. What might you be thinking if you were Sarah? Would you just be angry or would you be scared too? What would you do? What should you do? Is Sarah worried because of how she treated Ishmael’s mom? Is Sarah feeling powerful because Isaac is healthy and strong? We just don’t know what is going through their minds—we only know what ended up happening.
So, Sarah said to Abraham, “Drive out this slave with her son, get them out of my sight! Because there is just no way the son of this slave will inherit anything alongside my son Isaac!”
Oh man, this is bad. And it requires a bit of background. If you remember from Genesis 16, Hagar is actually Sarah’s property. Slavery was normal in the ancient world and even in Jesus’s day. The people who wrote the Bible—including Moses who saw his own family being treated cruelly as slaves in Egypt while he was living it up at Pharaoh’s palace. If there was a war and you won, you either had to kill everyone who survived, leave them in their own lands to starve or be picked off by their neighbors, or take them as slaves. As horrifying as it is to us, this was their normal way of life—thank goodness God will begin to change that in the next book of the Bible, Exodus. And the people who owned other people and made them work as slaves figured that they deserved it because their gods were too pathetic and weak to protect them. I mean, we know that’s nonsense but Hagar was either born as a slave to parents who were slaves, or had been captured in war, or who had been sold by her parents who didn’t want to feed another kid. Hagar was probably just a little girl when she was given to Sarah—about ten years before she had Ishmael. People didn’t really feel sorry for slaves because for them, it was a normal part of life. Nowadays, we are not happy about slavery at all and we are sad when we think about it. We know now that slaves were actually humans just like everyone else with the same feelings and needs as everyone else. The only real difference between slaves and masters was power—who was allowed to control and who had to obey. That’s just one of the many changes that have happened because of God’s Holy Spirit teaching us to be better and better neighbors no matter what the rest of the world thinks is okay.
Because Hagar belongs to Sarah, Sarah has the right to set her free and send her away. Sarah is saying that Hagar won’t be a slave anymore and that as a trade for her freedom, she can’t stay with them anymore. And according to the laws back then, that was her right. But what wasn’t totally her right was to send away Abraham’s son Ishmael too. Even though Sarah owned his mother, and so kinda owned him, he was still Abraham’s son. Sarah could tell Abraham to send them away but Abraham had to be the one to do it because of Ishmael. If Sarah sent Hagar away and Abraham died, Ishmael would probably get even with her later and she was too old to defend herself. And notice that she still doesn’t call Hagar by her first name like God always does—she is calling her “this slave” and calling Ishmael “her son.” What she isn’t calling Ishmael is “your son.” Sarah is treating and talking about Ishmael as a total outsider as opposed to her son, who she sees as Abraham’s real son. Yikes, if I ever had a baby and they grew up to say that Matt and Andy, who I adopted, weren’t my real sons they would definitely be in big trouble with me. Kids are kids and if kids are part of a family they are part of the family. Ishmael and Isaac were both Abraham’s sons and they were brothers and they were a real part of the same family—even if that family was one big mess.
But Sarah wants Hagar and Ishmael exiled, so let’s talk about exile for a bit. We’ve seen it before. Exile is what happens when you are forced out of your home and have to live somewhere else and can’t go back. Does that sound familiar? Sarah wants Abraham to drive out Hagar and Ishmael. And those same words are used when Adam and Eve are driven out of the Garden and have to go live in the East. And when Cain is punished, he is driven out from the ground and won’t be able to farm it anymore. When Abraham is kicked out of Egypt, there is a different word for it but still he has to leave where he is living and never come back. Abraham’s camp is the only home that Ishmael has ever known and Hagar has been there since she was young and so the Bible says that Sarah wanted them sent away just like Adam, Eve, and Cain. The only reason we are told is because Ishmael was making fun of Isaac on his big feast day. I bet if Ishmael even knew this might happen he would have kept his mouth shut, right? But I suppose that for whatever reason, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back and she had had enough. Or, as Popeye would have said in those old cartoons I watched as a kid, “That’s all I can stands, and I can’t stands no more!” Go easy on Popeye, he was a sailor man and I am not sure he ever actually went to school so he talked more like a pirate than anyone on one of those fishing shows.
Now, Sarah didn’t tell Abraham why she got torqued off at Ishmael, she just said that he wasn’t going to inherit anything from Abraham as long as she has any say in it. She didn’t want Isaac to share all of Abraham’s wealth and stuff when he died. She wanted it all for Isaac! But why could she even do that and why did she think it was right? Well, there is this old law that archaeologists found from Sumeria, which later became Babylonia and Assyria. So, where Abraham and Sarah came from. Let’s look at section 25 of those laws, called Lipit-Ishtar: If a man married his wife and she had kids and those kids are still living, and a slave also had kids with the same man but the father set the slave and her children free, then the children of the slave won’t share any of the property with the children of their former master. In other words, the rule of those times was that if the kids were set free, they didn’t get anything when their dad died, which is pretty darned cold. But like I said before, this was normal. And most folks, even today, believe that if something is normal then it must be okay and even good. If it was bad then everyone wouldn’t be doing it, right? NOT! History is filled with messed up stuff that people thought was okay but we think is just awful now like Concentration Camps, slavery, and genocide.
Sarah was obeying the law, just like people in my country who had slaves and were allowed to do whatever they wanted to them, or who killed Native Americans just because there were no laws against it. You know, there has never been a perfect time in the whole history of the world where God could say, “Oh man, these people are awesome and they are doing things perfectly! Hey everyone, be exactly like those people because they really are just right,” God has never said anything like that and the Bible tells us the story of how messed up every single person is other than Jesus, who really is perfect and when He is King here, everything really will be awesome. Until then, God’s Holy Spirit is always trying to get us to do better.
So that’s what Sarah wants and we can guess how Abraham will react but what will God say and why will He say it? We will talk about that next week. For the rest of today, I want to talk about rejection—which means people don’t want anything to do with you. That was a big part of Jesus’s life and the lives of His followers after He left to be with His Father. Sarah rejected Ishmael when he was a baby and never adopted him like she had originally planned. And now she wants to completely reject him and wants Abraham to reject him too—forever! Jesus knew a lot about that because He was rejected by almost everyone at one time or another. Even his own mom! But we shouldn’t really be surprised by that because a prophet named Isaiah, about six hundred years earlier, said that it would happen. He said that people would turn away from Jesus and that Jesus would be hated and that he would suffer because of it. And it was true. Once, his mom and brothers came up to a house He was teaching in and tried to grab Him to get Him out of there because they thought he had gone crazy—and if His own mom was doing that even though she was visited by an angel, how was anyone else supposed to react? When he was teaching in Nazareth on the Sabbath, everyone loved what He had to say until He told them that God was wanting to bless the Gentiles instead of killing them, they wanted to kill Him! They wanted a Messiah, a King, who would fight against their enemies and get the Romans out of their country but instead, He would only fight demons and he had arguments with their own religious leaders. They loved Him when He was working miracles and healing people and casting demons out of people who were suffering and raising the dead and feeding thousands of people with just a few bits of bread and some fishes—but they didn’t want anything to do with a King who wasn’t acting like a king.
When Jesus told His disciples that He had to die in Jerusalem, they rejected what He was saying and even got in His face about it and wouldn’t listen. When Jesus told them that they would all reject Him and run away and leave Him, they swore they wouldn’t but then all of them did just that as soon as the soldiers grabbed Jesus. And they stayed hidden away until after Jesus came back to life again. The only people who were with Him when He died were a few of the women who were disciples who had taken care of Him—including His mom who maybe was beginning to understand and didn’t think He was crazy anymore or maybe just because she loved Him so much. His own brothers and sisters didn’t believe Him until after He came back from the dead. And the saddest thing of all, maybe, is that even though all of the people He had ever fed or healed or raised from the dead or preached to were right there in Jerusalem when He died, none of them came to be with Him except for those few women. People still reject Jesus today but they are people who have never seen Him before. All of those people had seen Him and He had done wonderful things for them but as soon as things got ugly, they didn’t want to have anything to do with Him. That’s what it means when Isaiah said that Jesus was going to know a whole lot about suffering. And suffering isn’t just about dying on the Cross but also about having everyone you love leave you.
I am definitely not comparing Ishmael, Abraham and Hagar’s son, with Jesus but he knew about rejection too. Sarah didn’t want anything to do with him, and he was being rejected as the future head of the family because of little Isaac, and now what would his father do? Would Abraham tell Sarah, “No way!” Or would he go along with her plan? And what about God? What will God have to say about all of this? Will God reject Ishmael and Hagar too? Will God tell Sarah to be nicer to them? This is one of those times when we could say what all those old radio and tv shows and movies used to say—“Stay tuned for next week’s episode when we will find out what happens next!”
If I had my way, there would be a solution where Abraham and Ishmael could still be close, and where Hagar wasn’t a slave anymore, and Sarah wouldn’t hate them anymore and that Ishmael would love his little brother. But sometimes things just aren’t possible when so many people are involved. All of those people would have to behave themselves and do what is right instead of doing whatever it was that was normal. We’ve talked a lot about the difference between what is normal and what is right and good. They aren’t always the same thing. Two hundred years ago, slavery was normal in certain parts of my country but it wasn’t ever right and good. Now, it’s normal for people to hate slavery, and so that is good and right.
I love you. I am praying for you. Do some thinking about what you consider to be normal—how about something like “finders keepers.” It’s normal, but is it good and right?