Reading the Bible in Islamic Context by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-11-07T16:00:00+00:00

The reception of Ishmael

In the Book of Genesis, the immediate context of Ishmael’s story is that of an extended family: not just Abraham, Hagar, Sarah, Isaac, but also Jacob and Esau, with whom he and Isaac share more than an accidental resemblance. The wider context of his story relates to the choice of who should be the rightful heir to Abraham. These two contexts ensure the unresolved ambiguity of Ishmael’s position: on the one hand, he is an insider, but on the other, an outsider. Yvonne Sherwood articulates clearly the dilemma presented by a close reading of the Ishmael narrative.8

The story of Hagar and Ishmael (Genesis 16 and 21:1–20) is told, Sherwood begins, as the fore-lives of the “true” family of Abraham, namely Isaac and Jacob. They come first; the true family comes second. But why? The story of descendants, which lies at the heart of the story of Genesis, is complicated, Sherwood argues, by a barren wife and the surrogate family of Hagar and Ishmael. The birth of Ishmael is a story of the firstborn that will be repeated in the story of Esau and Jacob. But why present them as the firstborn? Why is the eponymous ancestor of Israel always haunted by a shadow side, a twin, another brother who was there before him? Sherwood continues:

This is what is so intriguing about the story of Hagar and Ishmael, laid out in such detail in Genesis…. There is an effort to record, at length, a story of something that should not have happened in both a moral and chronological sense. The story implies moral wrong and a wrong turn from the neat path of narrative progression – and yet here it is, on record, and told not once but twice…. Jacob and Esau are twins. Born at the same time, they wrestle in the womb and fight to be first down the birth canal.9

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