Hagar, Sarai's servant and Ishmael "And he will be a wild man… Living in a wilderness, delighting in hunting and killing wild beasts, and robbing and plundering all that pass by; and such an one Ishmael was, see (Genesis 21:20,21)
God promised him a son and after ten years Abram (later Abraham) was tired of waiting upon the Lord. So, with Sarai's blessing, he slept with her Egyptian servant, Hagar, who soon became pregnant with a son when Abram was 86 years old when Ishmael was born.
Hagar despised Sarai and was cast out to the wilderness.
Abram tried to do it himself, and brought disaster, strife and heartbreak into his household. Had he listened to God, waiting on God's time and on God's word, things might have been a whole lot better. To Hagar God said, "I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count" (Gen 16:10). To Abram God said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars, if indeed you can count them ... So shall your offspring be" (Gen 15:5).
There are also some differences in the promises. It becomes clear that Ishmael is not the child of the promise. Instead, that honor belongs to Isaac, a child yet to be born. Furthermore, Abram is told that through his son Isaac he will be a blessing to all nations (Gen 12:2). This is nowhere said about Hagar's son, Ishmael. Instead, (Gen 16:12) "He will be a wild ass of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone's hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers."
We still see this today in the hatred many of the Arabs (who are descendants of Ishmael) have for the Jews (who are descendants of Isaac). What is especially sad about this hatred is that Arabs and Jews are both physical children of Abram.
The New John Gill Exposition of the Entire Bible states :
And such the Saracens, his posterity, were, and such the wild Arabs are to this day, who descended from him; or "the wild ass of a man" that is: wild, fierce, untamed, not subject to a yoke, and impatient of it, who never could be subdued or brought into bondage, neither by the Assyrians, nor Medes and Persians, nor by the Greeks nor Romans, nor any other people and at this day the Arabs live independent on the Turks, nay, they oblige the Turks to pay a yearly tribute for the passage of their pilgrims to Mecca, and also to pay for their caravans that pass through their country, as travellers into those parts unanimously report. These people having been always free, and never in bondage, always lived as free booters upon others:
"his hand [will be] against every man, and every man's hand against him"signifying, that he would be of a quarrelsome temper and warlike disposition, continually engaged in fighting with his neighbours, and they with him in their own defence; and such the Arabs his posterity always have been, and still are, given to rapine and plunder, harassing their neighbours by continual excursions and robberies, and pillaging passengers of all nations, which they think they have a right to do; their father Ishmael being turned out into the plains and deserts, which were given him as his patrimony, and as they suppose a permission from God to take whatever he could get. And a late traveller into those parts observes , that they are not to be accused of plundering strangers only, or whomsoever they may find unarmed or defenceless; but for those many implacable and hereditary animosities which continually subsist among themselves, literally fulfilling to this day the prophecy of the angel to Hagar,
After Abraham arrives in the Promised Land, he is faced with a dilemma. His wife Sarah is barren, and she wants Abraham to have an offspring. So she suggests that Abraham take a surrogate wife, Hagar, who joined Abraham's camp when he passed through Egypt. Hagar is the daughter of the Pharaoh and she had elected to travel with Abraham as Sarah's maidservant. Great people have great servants. And so Abraham takes Hagar as his second wife and from that relationship is going to come a child by the name of Ishmael.Ishmael does not carry on Abraham's mission. He will go off and found his own lineage; this is all recorded in the Bible, in the Book of Genesis, Chapter 16.When we look back on history, we see that two great monotheistic faiths will branch off from Judaism during the last 2,000 years: Christianity and Islam.
Islam is a religion that originated with the Arab peoples more than 1,300 years ago. The Arabs according to their own tradition and according to the Jewish tradition, are the descendants of Ishmael. One of the great attributes of Arab culture is hospitality. And the Bible tells us that Abraham was famous for hospitality. It seems therefore that even though Ishmael does not carry on Abraham's mission he can't help but be great. Even though his descendents do not become the Jewish people, he carries within himself some of the greatness of his father Abraham. He's blessed. By the way, the Bible says specifically that Ishmael is going to be great and that he's going to be at odds with the rest of the civilized world.
"You shall call his name Ishmael ... And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him... (Genesis 16:11-12)
When it is clear that Ishmael will not carry on the mission, God tells Abraham, who is then 99, that Sarah, who is 90, is going to become pregnant. And this is how Isaac is born, supernaturally.This is one of the unique aspects of Jewish history-from its very beginnings it''s supernatural. By all the laws of nature Abraham and Sarah should have died childless and the Jewish nation never should have come into existence. The Jews certainly shouldn't have survived, yet they did and still are here.
Before Sarah conceives God tells Abraham: "Your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will name him Isaac. I will establish My covenant with him as an eternal covenant to his descendants after him. And as for Ishmael ... I have bless him and I will make him fruitful and will increase him exceedingly. He will become the father of twelve princes and I will make him into a great nation. But I will establish My covenant with Isaac who Sarah will bear to you at this time next year." (Genesis 17:19-21)
So Isaac is the person who will carry on the mission of Abraham, the mission of the Jews. A rivalry will exist between Sarah and Hagar and their children, Isaac and Ishmael. Because of this rivalry Hagar and Ishmael will be sent away. This rivalry will carry on for generations is viewed as the metaphysical root of the modern rivalry between the descendants of Isaac
Children Of Ishmael by Wayne Blank
The Arab people of today are generally the descendants of Ishmael (as they will quite readily tell you), while the Jews (and all of the Israelites of the other tribes, including the so-called "Lost Ten Tribes" are the descendants of Isaac. All Israelites and most Arabs are the actual physical descendants of Abraham.
The descendants of Ishmael today possess a huge territory (about 1,200,000 square miles, much of which includes vast oil fields which the western industrialized world is highly dependent upon) all around the land of Israel, while to the descendants of Isaac, God gave the relatively tiny land of Israel - from Dan to Beersheba, and from The Jordan River to The Mediterranean Sea (approximately 8,000 square miles, only about 1 / 150th of the area given to the descendants of Ishmael). The God-commanded territory of the Israelites includes all of Samaria, all of Judea, and all of Jerusalem - every last square inch of it.
After the Exodus, the Israelites spent forty years in Arabia during the Wilderness Journey. During that time, Moses received The Ten Commandments from Lord at Mount Sinai in Arabia. Arabians opposed Nehemiah's rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 2:19, 4:7, 6:1) ........ King Solomon carried on considerable trade with Arabia (1 Kings 10:15, 2 Chronicles 9:14, 17:11). .......Paul spent time in Arabia after his conversion On The Road To Damascus (Galatians 1:17).
The Origin of Allah and Ka'bah The Ka'bah, which became the Palladium of Islam, was a cube-like building of primitive simplicity, originally roofless, serving as a shelter for a black meteorite which was venerated. At the birth of Islam the structure was that rebuilt in 608 probably by an Abyssinian from the wreckage of a Byzantine or Abyssinian ship destroyed on the shore of the Red Sea. The usual sacred territory (haram) spread around it. Annual pilgrimages were made there and special sacrifices offered. ....... Moslem tradition maintains that the Ka'bah was originally built by Adam according to a celestial prototype and after the Deluge rebuilt by Abraham and Islimael. Its custody remained in the hands of the descendants of Ishmael until banu-Jurlium, and later banu-Khuza'ah took possession of it. Then came the Quraysh, who continued the ancient Ishmaelite line. While engaged in the rebuilding Ishmael supposedly received from Gabriel the Black Stone, still set in the south-east corner of the structure, and was instructed in the ceremonies of the pilgrimage or hajj.
Allah (allah, al-ilah, the goddess) was the principal deity of Makkah. The name is an ancient one. It occurs in two South Arabic inscriptions, one a Minaean found at al-'Ula and the other a Sabaean, but abounds in the form HLH in the Lihyanite inscriptions of the fifth century- B.C. Lihyan, which got the god from Syria, was the first Centre of the worship of this deity in Arabia. The name occurs as Hallah in the Safa inscriptions five centuries before Islam and also in a pre-Islamic Christian Arabic inscription found in umm-al-Jimal, Syria, and ascribed to the sixth century . The name of Muhammad's father was 'Abd-Allah ('Abdullah, the slave or worshipper of Allah). The esteem in which Allah was held by the pre-Islamic Makkans as the creator and supreme provider and the one to be invoked in time of special peril may be inferred from such koranic passages as 31 : 24, 31; 6 : 137, 109; to : 23. Evidently he was the tribal deity of the Quraysh. Where will Allah be throughout eternity? He’ll be in hell, tormenting the infidels whom he decided—long before they were even born—to send there. Muhammad assures us that Allah likes to turn the spit upon which Jews, Christians, and other “infidels” are to be roasted alive. That’s but one of many fundamental differences between Christianity and Islam: in Islam, hell is being in the presence of “Allah or god,” but in Christianity, hell is being separated from God.
