Once an Arafat Man: The True Story of How a PLO Sniper Found a New Life by Tass Saada

Author:Tass Saada [Saada, Tass]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biographies
ISBN: 9781414327501
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers
Published: 2008-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11: New Day

AS I READ FARTHER IN THE BOOK OF GENESIS, I was surprised by what was missing. I didn’t find much in the early chapters about Jews. In fact, I had to get all the way to chapter 32 before reaching the story of how God changed Jacob’s name to Israel. Even then it was simply this one man’s name for the rest of the book. Not until the next book, Exodus, did the Bible start talking about Israelites as a clan or ethnic group.

Long before then, I had run into some fascinating information about my people, the Palestinians. Our ancestor, I knew, was Ishmael—the firstborn son of Abram. Ishmael’s mother was Hagar, the Egyptian servant whom Abram had no doubt acquired during his and his wife Sarai’s short stay in that country.

I had heard of at least some Christians who called Ishmael everything from a bastard to a brat, and had even nastier things to say about his mother. But that is not what I read in the actual Bible. Here I read that the elderly couple, desperate for an heir, invited Hagar into the marriage. Sarai specifically “gave her to her husband to be his wife,” it said. (Genesis 16:3, italics added) Nothing downplayed Hagar as a concubine, a temptress, or a one-night stand. She was, by common agreement, a fully validated wife. Any children would be entirely legitimate according to the customs of that day.

When tensions arose during Hagar’s pregnancy, so much so that she fled into the desert, she was not left to fend for herself. No less than “the angel of the LORD” (Genesis 16:7) came to her aid. Who was this heavenly being? I did some research and found out that many commentators view this as an early appearance of Christ—the first in human history that we know of. What an honor for my ancestral mother!

The angel instructed her to go back home and then promised, “I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count.” (Genesis 16:10) I leaned back in my chair and thought of all the people who trace back to this woman—not just us Palestinians, but all the Arabs. What a massive population we had become, just as the divine messenger had predicted!

Soon the angel was even telling Hagar the gender of her unborn child (“You will have a son”) and what to name him (“You shall name him Ishmael, for the LORD has heard of your misery,” Genesis 16:11). Indeed, I knew the Arabic word ishma even today means “to hear.” This was, in fact, God’s debut into the business of naming (or renaming) people, a practice he would carry on later with such important figures as Abram, Sarai, Jacob, Jesus, and Simon the fisherman. But Ishmael was the first to get a God-picked name.

Hagar obeyed the Lord’s messenger that day. She didn’t resist or ignore the instruction, even if she harbored fears about returning to Sarai’s house. She proved herself to be a willing follower of God.

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