Hagar

Genesis 16 gives Hagar a set of firsts that the narrative does not draw attention to. She is the first person in the book to be met by the angel of the Lord. She receives an annunciation, a promise that her descendants will be too many to count, phrased in the same terms used to Abraham. Her son is named before his birth, which happens to only a handful of figures in the whole Bible. And she gives God a name, El Roi, the God who sees me, saying that she has seen the one who sees her. Nobody else in the Hebrew Bible does that.

She is also a slave, pregnant by her mistress's arrangement and running from her mistress's cruelty, and the angel sends her back to it. The text does not resolve the two things it has put side by side.

The second wilderness scene, in Genesis 21, is harsher and shorter. Sent away with bread and a skin of water after Isaac's birth, she puts the boy under a bush when the water is gone and sits at a distance because she cannot watch him die. God hears the boy, not her, and opens her eyes to a well that the text implies was there all along.

Paul, in Galatians 4, turns her into an allegory of slavery and of the covenant at Sinai, set against Sarah as freedom. Twentieth century womanist theology took her back. Delores Williams, writing in 1993, read Hagar as the figure of the enslaved woman who survives in the wilderness with a child and no protector, and made her the central biblical figure for Black women's religious experience in the United States.

The Islamic account is told most fully in hadith rather than in the Quran, and the fullest version is transmitted from Ibn Abbas in the collection of al-Bukhari. Ibrahim brings Hajar and the infant Ismail to a bare valley where nothing grows, leaves a bag of dates and a skin of water, and turns to go. She asks him whether God has commanded this, and when he says yes, she answers that then God will not abandon them, and lets him go.

When the water is finished and the child is in distress she climbs the hill of Safa to look for anyone, sees nobody, crosses the valley floor at a run because the ground dips, climbs Marwa, and repeats it seven times. Then she hears a sound and finds water running at the child's feet, and she banks it with sand so it will not drain away. The narration derives the well's name from what she said as she did it.

That water is Zamzam, and the running is the sa'i, one of the required acts of both the hajj and the umrah. Every pilgrim who comes to Mecca retraces a slave woman's search for water for her son, seven times between the two hills, now enclosed within the mosque. The tradition also places her grave in the semicircular area beside the Kaaba, so that the building is oriented around the household she kept alive.

The contrast with the Genesis account is worth stating plainly. The same woman who is sent away in one scripture is, in the other, the reason a rite exists and the ancestress of a people, and her endurance is what the pilgrimage repeats.