Hagar's Horrible Story

Meet Hagar:

The girl, not the kid.

She gets the award for "Most Unfortunate Genesis Character," which is impressive when you consider that the snake from Eden got its limbs ripped off and Lot had his angel-raping city destroyed by fire from the sky.  But while most characters suffer one or two misfortunes, poor Hagar'slife is just one big unfortunate mess.  When she was born, God apparently shone down upon the shiny new bundle of joy and said, "Yup, fuck that chick."  Then, as if that weren't bad enough, her parents gave her the same name as an incompetent viking in a mediocre comic strip.  So yeah, life pretty much sucked for her from the get-go.

 When we meet her, Hagar is the handmaiden of Sarai, whom you may remember as the evil harpy woman Abram was desperately trying to get rid of in an earlier post.  Through the story of Hagar, we learn that Sarai is even more of a keeper than we originally thought her to be.  See, by this point Sarai is seventy-six years old and she's finally accepted that she's not going to be having any babies any time soon.  The problem is, God has promised them so many kids they'll found their own nation, and they're getting a little up there in their years without any luck in the baby-making department.  So Sarai (again, seventy-six) turns to her husband one day, presumably while knitting and watching the ancient equivalent of Wheel of Fortune (which is like a stoning or something, I guess), and says:

"Behold now, the LORD hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her." - Genesis 16:2

So yeah, she gives him permission to bone her maid so they can have them some babies.  Keep in mind that Abram is eighty-six years old at this point.  Then notice how there's no reference to anybody asking Hagar if she'd like to get knocked up by a man who is so old he's partially fossilized.  Commence screaming.

Have you gotten it out of your system?  Okay, good.  Abram forcably takes Hagar to be his second wife and inevitably she becomes pregnant.  The Bible pretty much judges the worth of a woman by her ability to breed, and so she gets a bit of an ego from it, eventually believing her status to be equal to Sarai's.  Sarai, being the heartless kindly old matron she is ... puts the girl in her place by doing something so awful she runs away.

"And when Sarai dealt hardly with her, she fled from her face." - Genesis 16:6

Poor Hagar, having dared to believe she was something more than a serving wench only to be torn down by Abram's screeching shrew of a wife, runs off into the wilderness.  No doubt she's cursing the awful people who did this to her and regretting ever leaving her family in Egypt to try and persue that circus career, or whatever leads a young Egyptian girl like Hagar to become a handmaid for some obscure, dusty old biddy in the desert.  Then this happens:

"And the angel of the LORD found her by a fountain of water in the wildnerness, by the fountain on the way to Shur.  And he said, Hagar, Sarai's maid, whence camest thou?  and whither wilt thou go?  And she said, I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai." - Genesis 16:8

Really, God?  You're going to play the angel card?  You're going to convince this poor girl to return to a home where her husband considers her lower than dirt so she can give the self-important jerk a son?  Ha!  I'd like to see you convince her!

"And the angel of the LORD said unto her, Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands.  And the angel of the LORD said unto her, I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude."

Babies, babies - it's always babies!  I'll give you tonnes and tonnes of babies if you agree to go back!  I'll give you tonnes of babies if you worship me!  It's like you think women enjoy being pregnant or something, God.  You're such a man.

For some reason it actually does work (I suspect fear of being smote was involved, and that tends to go a long way) and Hagar does return to Abram.  She has her baby and names him Ishmael, as God directs.

If you're thinking that that wasn't so bad, that there have been worse stories of individual misfortune thus far, well, that's because it's not done.  Oh, it begins and ends at Genesis 16 and then moves on to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, tricking you into thinking you read something that wasn't really all that terrible in comparison to what's around it.  But it's just faked you out.  Yes, the freaking Bible has faked you out.  Hagar's story picks up again in Genesis 21, after Sodom is smitten for being rape-happy, Lot sexes up his daughters and Abram and Sarai have undergone their name changes to Abraham and Sarah.  And then it gets awful.


The second part of the story, like so many tales of the Bible, begins with God being a jerk:

"And the LORD visited Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did unto Sarah as he had spoken.  For Sarah conceived and bare Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken to him." - Genesis 21:1-2

God decides all of a sudden that Sarah, now so old that if she lived in the modern world she'd constantly have to swat away archaeologists, is going to have a baby and so he "opens her womb," meaning that he makes it possible to conceive.  Let the implications of that sink in for a moment.  God has promised Abraham and Sarah a lot of babies, but for some reason he hasn't allowed Sarah to conceive.  Sarah and Abraham, getting antsy, decide to knock Hagar up to try and get the ball rolling.  God, knowing full well that they're doing it because he hasn't made a move to fulfill his promise yet, lets it happen.  If he wants Abraham and Sarah to wait until they were antiques before having their first baby, he could close Hagar's womb and prevent her from conceiving at all.  But he doesn't.  He lets this happen.

Keep this in mind.

Sarah has a son as well, Isaac, and naturally that makes things a little awkward in the family circle.  After all, Isaac is the son God promised Abraham and Sarah, whilst Ishmael is their attempt to get that promise fulfilled early.  It's exactly what happens when the elder sibling feels usurped by the younger, who sudden becomes everybody's darling, except worse because that younger sibling is also the fulfillment of a literal divine promise.  Ishmael, being a teenager now, reacts with the strongest weapon in a teenager's arsenal: passive-aggressiveness.

"And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which had been born unto Abraham, mocking." - Genesis 21:9.

So, all offended that this teenager dare sass her precious little holy baby, Sarah goes to her husband and tells him to straight-up banish Hagar and Ishmael, the child that - and I can't stress this enough - she suggested they have in the first place.  She's like the archetypal evil stepmother on a literally Biblical scale.  God, proving again that he's a jerk on a massive scale, approves the banishment:

"And God said unto Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad, and because of thy bondwoman; in all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice; for in Isaac shall thy seed be called." - Genesis 21:12

With that, Abraham loads Hagar up with some bread and a bottle of water and sends her on her way.  Remember - and I can't stress this enough either - that this whole thing would have been perfectly preventable if God hadn't been such a procrastinator and had given Abraham and Sarah a son at a reasonable age!

What comes next is positively heartbreaking (and I'm not a mushy person).  Hagar leaves the home of this awful family for the second time with hardly enough food to sustain herself and her child.  Eventually, she runs out of water:

"And the water was spent in the bottle, and she cast the child under one of the shrubs.  And she went, and sat her down over against him a good way off, as it were a bowshot; for she said, Let me not see the death of the child.  And she sat over against him, and lift up her voice, and wept." - Genesis 21:15-16

She puts her son (whom she is carrying despite him being 14, but we'll overlook that) in a shrub and goes to sit far away so she doesn't have to watch him starve to death. Then she cries her eyes out.  This whole situation is actually so sad it moves God.  God actually gets his holy butt off of his cloud and floats down to offer aid.  Aww, there's going to be a happy ending after all!

"And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her, What aileth thee, Hagar?  fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand; for I will make him a great nation." - Genesis 21:17-18

... What is with you and giving people a shit tonne of babies, God?  Do Hagar and Ishmael get a home?  A place to belong?  You know - food?

"And God was with the lad; and he grew, and dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer." - Genesis 21:20.

So, no.  But hey, at least he gets babies.

After reading this story, I was left wondering what the point of it was.  Ishmael doesn't really serve any purpose to the narrative beyond getting booted out of his father's inheritance to make way for Isaac, so how does this tale remain relevant in the modern world? 

The answer, as with Canaan's story, is racism.  Think of the world today, particularly what's going on in the Middle East.  Now guess who, according to legend, is a descendent of Ishmael?  I'll give you a hint: Ishmael and Isaac never got along.  Now, if Isaac represents the Jews, Ishmael represents ...

Muslims!  Yeah, according to Islam, Muhammad was a direct descendent of Ishmael, who, according to the Qu'ran, was God's promised child, not Isaac.  I probably don't need to explain any more, but you can bet idiots quote this story all the damn time as an excuse for why Muslims (often misidentified as Arabs) and Jews (and, by extension, Christians) are allowed to hate on each other.

Good thing religion preaches so much peace and love in between all these terrible racism-varifying stories or we might be a bunch of intolerant bigots on our hands, huh?  Oh, wait ...

The Sin of Sodom

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is one of those terrible myths of mass destruction that conservative religious folk like to whip out as a cautionary tale, waving it grotesquely around in the faces of us dirty liberals until we finally agree with them just so they'll tuck it away.  Why, with all of our sick, heretical ideas like religious tolerance, gay rights, legal abortions, racial equality and separation of church and state, we're practically asking God to take a big, fiery crap on us.  In fact, according to some (crazy) people, we've already unleashed the floodgates of diarrhea hellfire and it's only a matter of time before God gets serious.

But just what exactly did Sodom do that was so terrible, so mind-numbingly awful that God felt the need to personally obliterate them?  "It's sodomy, you clueless pinko!" you cry, leaping from your hummer with a Bible in one hand and a half-dead illegal immigrant in the other.  "Homosexuals were taking over!  Don't you know that?  It's got the sin right in the name!"

Actually, it's the sin that's named after the city, hypothetical right-wing extremist, but ... you know what?  Never mind.  Indeed, the knee-jerk reaction is to look at the name and decide that Sodom must have been filled with men having loving, consensual relations with one another all the goddamn time, and that God was just playing favourites when he smote Sodom over, say, Egypt or China or India or Sparta.  He's just kind of a jerk like that.

But no.  That's not the case at all.  The real story, if anyone religious could be bothered  to read it, is so terrible that when I first read it, I poked my eyes out and renounced society to live as a hermit in the wilderness.  (I got better.  Then I realized there are no Skittles in the wilderness, so I came back.)  The real sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is so awful that, were I a celestial being, I'd probably smite the holy bejeezus out of them too.  They'd be lucky that fire and brimstone was all they got off with.  "Enough with the suspense!" you cry.  "Tell us what it is!"  Well, hypothetical reader, the sin of Sodom was ...

Angel gang-rape.

Not "angel" like David Boreanaz, or "angel" like a baseball player from LA.  Angels.  Harps and halos and feathery wings.  The kinds of things that grandmas collect ceramics of.  A group of people wanted to rape those in the butt.  Let the sheer awfulness of that sink in for a minute.

I suppose I should offer some backstory.  To be fair, God has already decided that Sodom is going down in flames when the angels arrive in the city.  (We can only imagine what their previous sins were.)  They're there to escort the only good man in all of Sodom, Lot, out of the city before shit starts going down.  The angels are prepared to spend all night on the streets, but Lot insists they come inside and kick up their holy feet:

"And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom: and Lot seeing them rose up to meet them; and he bowed himself with his face turned toward the ground; And he said, Behold now, my lords, turn in, I pray you, into your servant's house, and tarry all night, and wash your feet, and ye shall rise up early; and go on your ways." - Genesis 19:1-2

There's a bit of back-and-forth about not wanting to inconvenience Lot (maybe they were molting) and Lot insisting that they stay (he could use the feathers to make history's softest down pillow, or something), but eventually the angels agree to come inside.  Then ... this happens:

"But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both young and old, all the people from every quarter: And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night?  bring them out unto us, that we may know them." - Genesis 19:4-5

"Knowing" is the Bible's adorably quaint way of referring to sex.  So basically, this group of people show up at Lot's house in the middle of the night and ask him to bring his newly arrived house guests out into the street so that they can take turns raping them out in the open air.  Now, discerning readers may have noticed that this is a rather large group of people.  In fact, angel rape is such an event in Sodom that "all the people from every quarter" turned out to get in on the action.

Math time!  Let's assume that Sodom is a relatively modest city population-wise (so the numbers don't get too horrifying).  In the ancient Middle East, that's probably about 2000 people.  For a working number, we'll assume that 25% of that 2000 people are children under 15, which is close to what it is now (27%).  That leaves 1500 adults.  Now, only the men of the city are going to be raping, and assuming that the population of men and women are more-or-less equal, that means these angels are about to be raped 750 times each.  And that's a low estimate.  You may poke out your eyes and commence screaming.

For those of you not blind and insane, let's continue.  Oh, you thought that was the end?  Hardly.  So every man in the city shows up at Lot's house demanding forced angelic buttsex.  What the hell do you do in this situation?  Hand them over?  Beg the angry mob to leave?  Point out that what they're trying to do is more cartoonishly evil than burning down a puppy orphanage?  Well, Lot is the only good man in Sodom, so surely he has some wise words to disperse the crowd:

"And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door after him, And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly.  Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes; only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof." - Genesis 19:6-8

Oh, of course.  Lot offers up his two young daughters to the crowd, asking that they rape them instead of his house guests.  ... Wait ...

Yep, this city is fucked up.

Anyway, if any of you haven't yet left this post to mutilate yourselves and/or retire to live in the woods, the mob refuses Lot's offer and the angels have to step in and strike them all blind.  A lovely end to a lovely story.

So the moral of today's tale is this: don't believe everything you hear from right-wing conservative nutjobs about the Bible, and if you see an angel and your first thought is to rape it, you totally deserve to go down in a horrible apocalypse of fire and brimstone.