Did Hagar give Ishmael up for dead? Gen. 21.14-21 re-visited

Abstract

This article advances the thesis that Hagar’s statement in Gen. 21.16, ‘Let me not look upon the death of the child’, is not so much a despairing whimper of resignation as it is a cohortative prayer for divine intervention. Accordingly, the ‘casting’ of her son under a bush is not an act of exposure, but a signal of the child’s availability for adoption. Attending to the vocabulary and syntax of Hagar’s ordeal, then, we understand the scene to represent the enactment of Ishmael’s name, ‘God hears’.