Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DISCOVERING SCRIPTURE IN SCRIPTURE t 13
the promise. No, the Lord insists, Ishmael will be the father of a
great nation, but it is the son of Abraham and Sarah who will
inherit. Abraham has himself, Ishmael, and the other males of his
household, kin and slaves, circumcised without further comment
(Gen. 17).
The promise will be offered once again by God before it is finally
fulfilled in Isaac’s birth in chapter 21 of Genesis. Sarah and Hagar
are still at odds, however, and it is at Sarah’s insistence that Hagar
and her son Ishmael are driven out of Abraham’s camp near Beersheba
to wander in the desert, where the child would surely have
died had not God heard Hagar’s prayer and caused the miraculous
appearance of a well. “God was with the child,” the account concludes,
“and he grew up and lived in the wilderness of Pharan”
(21:20–21).
This is almost the last we hear of Ishmael in the Bible. Ishmael
himself marries an Egyptian wife (Gen. 21:20–21), and one of his
daughters marries Esau (Gen. 25:13–15), from whom the Edomites—later
the Idumeans—of the Negev are descended. In Genesis
25:9 Ishmael is somewhat unaccountably present with Isaac to
bury Abraham at Hebron, and there is a list of his sons in Genesis
25:12–18. They dwell somewhere to the east of the Israelites.
Ishmaelites and Arabs
Although at his death, at age 137 (Gen. 25:17), Ishmael disappears
from the Bible, he remained in the consciousness of the Jews. We
cannot follow the full gestation of the story, but we can read its
denouement. The source of Genesis may have thought the Edomites
of the Negev, one of Israel’s inveterate enemies, were the nation
descended from Ishmael, but a later generation of Jews
thought otherwise. The second-century b.c.e. Book of Jubilees,
which is largely a retelling of Genesis from a slightly different perspective,
informs us that Abraham before his death summoned all
his sons and grandchildren, including Ishmael and his twelve offspring,
and bade them to continue to observe circumcision, to