SARAH AND HAGAR neither speak to each other nor refer to each other by name, but their intertwined lives reflect both the systemic abuse women face and the combination of personal struggle and divine aid required to survive.
So that “it may go well for” him in Egypt, Abram asks Sarai to say she is his sister, and so the wife is taken into Pharaoh’s house (Genesis 12). So that she may “have a son [or: child] through her” (16:2), Sarai places Hagar in Abram’s bed. What the patriarch does to his wife, so the mistress does to her slave.
Like Sarai, the Egyptian Hagar—whose name echoes the word ger (“stranger”)—is taken from her home to Canaan. This cycle of displacement and enslavement will continue: Hagar’s descendants (the Ishmaelites) will sell Joseph into Egyptian slavery (37:27–28), and Hoar’s people (the Egyptians) will “afflict” Sarah’s descendants (Exodus 1:11–12) as Sarah “afflicted” Hagar (Genesis 16:6).
In Canaan, the women become rivals rather than companions. Rather than be “built up” through Hagar (see at 16:2), the post-menopausal Sarai “became light” (16:4) in the slave’s eyes; Hagar grows weightier—both physically through pregnancy and emotionally as she recognizes her opportunity for advancement in Abram’s household.
Abused by Sarai and ignored by Abram, Hagar flees to the wilderness. There an angel attends not to the Hebrew patriarch, but to the Egyptian slave: although sent back to her mistress, Hagar goes with the knowledge that “יהוה has heard (shama)” her affliction (16:11).
Similarly, Sarai herself—a foreign female trapped (enslaved?) in Pharaoh’s house—receives divine aid. Her parallels to Hagar suggest that God acts not simply “because of Sarai” but specifically “upon Sarai’s word” (al d’var Sarai, 12:17). Her crying out when Abram fails to act—for it is unclear how, or even if, Abram would extricate his wife—is what prompts God to send the plague (another Exodus foreshadowing) upon Pharaoh.
We later learn that the sons of Sarai and Hagar, although destined to be at odds (16:12), unite to bury their father (25:9): the cycle of abuse can be broken if children refuse to continue the system of abuse that entrapped their parents.
—Amy-Jill Levine