16 Now Abram’s wife Sarai hadn’t been able to give him any children, but she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar, 2 so Sarai said to Abram, “Listen, Yahweh has prevented me from having children so please sleep with my slave. Perhaps I can have a family through her.” Abram agreed to what Sarai had suggested. 3 So Sarai, the wife of Abram, took Hagar, her Egyptian slave, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife for him. 4 So he slept with Hagar and she got pregnant, but once she realised that she began to despise her mistress.

5 So Sarai complained to Abram, “This is all your fault. I let you sleep with my slave, but now that she’s pregnant she looks down on me. May Yahweh judge between me and you.”

6 “Listen,” Abram replied, “She’s your slave to do what she’s told. Do whatever you think best.” So Sarai started mistreating Hagar, and so she ran away.

7 Then Yahweh’s messenger found her in the wilderness at a spring—the spring beside the road to Shur, 8 and asked her, “Hagar, Sarai’s slave, where have you come from and where are you going?”

“I am running away from Sarai, my mistress,” she replied.

9 Then Yahweh’s messenger instructed her, “Return to your mistress and do whatever she tells you,” 10 then added, “I’ll give you so many descendants that they won’t even be able to be counted because there’ll be so many.” 11 Then the messenger told her,

“Listen here: you’re pregnant and will give birth to a son,

and you’ll name him ‘Ishma’el’ (which means ‘God hears’)

because Yahweh has heard your cries of misery.

12 He’ll be a wild donkey of a man

and he’ll be hostile to everyone

and everyone will be against him.

He’ll live right in front of his brothers.”

13 Then Hagar realised that it was Yahweh who had spoken to her and said, “You’re ‘The God who sees me’,” because she thought, “Did I really just see the back of the God who sees me?” 14 So that’s why that well between Kadesh and Bered is now called ‘The well of the living one who sees me’.

15 Then Hagar gave birth to a son for Abram, and Abram named him Ishma’el.[ref] 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishma’el for him.