What Sarah Saw
Examines what provokes Sarah's demand to banish Hagar and Ishmael after seeing Ishmael metzahek with Isaac (Gen. 21:9-10), weighing explanations ranging from Ishmael as ethnic Other and rabbinic accusations of sexual misconduct to a more benign reading of Ishmael as an overly influential older sibling, and situates Sarah's reaction within her broader, complicated biography as a woman who endured humiliation, barrenness, and the wife-sister deception before becoming matriarch of Israel.
Zucker asks what exactly provokes Sarah’s demand to banish Hagar and Ishmael after she sees Ishmael metzahek - “laughing” or “playing” - with Isaac (Gen. 21:9-10). He surveys several explanations: Ishmael as ethnic Other, given Sarah’s own traumatic history in Egypt; a controversial rabbinic reading of metzahek as sexual misconduct, drawing on the word’s use elsewhere in Genesis; and a more benign view of Ishmael simply amusing his much younger half-brother, which nonetheless threatens Sarah by giving Ishmael outsized influence over Isaac’s upbringing. Zucker frames Sarah’s reaction within her larger, complicated biography - two wife-sister episodes, prolonged barrenness, and forced surrogacy - and traces how later rabbinic and Islamic traditions reshaped the Isaac-Ishmael relationship into a template for later Jewish-Arab and Jewish-Muslim tensions.
David J. Zucker, PhD is Rabbi/Chaplain at Shalom Park, Aurora, Colorado, a continuum of care/retirement center. He is the author of Israel's Prophets: An Introduction for Christians and Jews (Paulist, 1994), and American Rabbis: Facts and Fiction (Jason Aronson, 1998). His latest book is The Torah: An Introduction for Christians and Jews (Paulist, 2005).
Cite this article
David J. Zucker. "What Sarah Saw." Jewish Bible Quarterly 36, no. 1 (January – March 2008): 54–62.
David J. Zucker. "What Sarah Saw." Jewish Bible Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1, 2008, pp. 54–62.