Now by this time, even though God keeps promising Abraham and Sarah lots of children, they still haven’t had any and they’re getting worried. Sarah says that, since she can’t seem to have any kids, Abraham should sleep with her servant girl to start a family and he very graciously accepts that directive.
He sleeps with Hagar and she does become pregnant, but then I guess she gets all uppity around Sarah because she’s having a kid and Sarah isn’t. Sarah comes to Abraham blaming him for Hagar’s behavior and Abraham tells her basically, “Hey, she’s your servant, you need to deal with this if you have a problem.” So Sarah starts beating Hagar and generally being a jerk to her until she runs away.
The angel of the Lord comes to her while she’s out and tells her to go back and that she’s having a son and she needs to name him Ishmael, which means God hears, because God heard her plight.
Ishmael gets kind of a left-handed blessing from God, who says that he’ll be the father of many tribes, but he’ll be a wild-donkey, always “living to the east of his brothers.” I guess each of those was an idiom at the time that meant he’d always be fighting his neighbors.
I heard that the history of Islam runs through Ishmael, that Muslims believe that they are descended from the line of Ishmael instead of Isaac. Abraham is revered in Islam just like in Judaism and Christianity, but they say that the true line progresses through Abraham’s first son.
After all this happens God comes to Abraham again and tells him (again) that he’ll have lots of kids. This time Abraham sounds more skeptical, laughing and saying he and Sarah are too old to have kids. Then he asks instead for a blessing on Ishmael, assuming he will be his only son. God does bless Ishmael, but insists that he and Sarah will also have a son. The catch is that everyone in the household has to cut off the tip of their dicks. Every man in the family as well as all the slaves and anyone bought into the family. When new people are born or bought, they have to be circumcised within eight days.
The next time the Lord visited Abraham there were three visitors. It’s a little vague about the exact mechanics, but the text seems to imply that one of the visitors was the angel of the lord and the other two were the two angels who were (spoiler alert) about to go destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.
God, as a change of pace, promises Abraham that he’ll have lots of descendants. Sarah overheard this time though and laughed, which God confronted them about and Sarah denied. In chapter 15 God had credited it to Abraham as righteousness that he believed Him when God told him he’d have many descendants, so I assume Sarah’s laughter irked Him. Abraham just had pretty much the same reaction in the last chapter though so maybe it’s just that God’s patience is starting to wear thin with them.
God says he’s going to scout out Sodom and Gomorrah because he’s been hearing rumors about how awful it is there. Abraham argues with him about it though and convinces him that if there are fifty good men in the city then God shouldn’t destroy it for their sake. Then he haggles all the way down to ten people, so God agrees that he won’t destroy the city if there are ten good people in it.
The tough part of this section is that obviously God knows already exactly how many good men are in Sodom and Gomorrah, and he already knows whether he’s going to destroy them or not. I think the official party line here is that He’s not really arguing with Abraham in good faith, and that he already knows where this conversation is going and that’s what he intended the entire time. C.S. Lewis wrote some about how prayer is more for our own benefit than for God’s. That seems a reasonable interpretation to me. I don’t know why it was necessary to have that conversation at all, but I’m sure it accomplished something.
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