Sarah, still unable to have children, gives her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abraham. Hagar conceives, and tension quickly develops between the two women.

Sarah treats Hagar harshly, and Hagar flees into the wilderness. Near a spring, the angel of the LORD finds her and asks where she has come from and where she is going.

Hagar is told to return, but she also receives a promise that her descendants will become too numerous to count. Her son is to be named Ishmael because God has heard her affliction.

Hagar responds by naming the God who speaks to her as the God who sees her. She returns, and Ishmael is born.

Years later, after Isaac’s birth, conflict again centers on Hagar and Ishmael. Sarah demands that they be sent away. Abraham is distressed, but he is assured that Ishmael too will become a nation because he is Abraham’s son.

Hagar and Ishmael leave with bread and water. When the water is gone, Hagar places the boy at a distance because she cannot bear to watch him die.

God hears the boy. Hagar is told not to fear, and her eyes are opened to a well of water.

Ishmael survives, grows up in the wilderness, becomes an archer, and eventually marries an Egyptian woman. The two wilderness scenes frame Hagar’s story with abandonment and vulnerability, but also with a repeated insistence that God hears and sees.