‘Reckless Eyeballing’: Written and Oral Narratives in Genesis 16.4-5

‘Reckless Eyeballing’

The attempt to ameliorate the events that occur between Sarai and Hagar can lead to the issue of finding appropriate causality between the Hagar’s actions and the severe treatment she receives from Sarai. In this reconstruction Hagar is guilty of a form of ‘reckless eyeballing.’ Indeed, some might recall that in the oral accounts of African American history, reckless eyeballing included a variety of offenses that black Americans could commit from ‘looking lustfully’ on a white woman, the offence of which Emmett Till was accused and for which he was brutally lynched in 1955, to looking ‘spitefully’ or maliciously at a white American. Most particularly in the oral histories of black people in the United States, accounts of reckless eyeballing could result in a range of reprisals, from the loss of livelihood to brutal death.

Connecting Hagar to the trope of reckless eyeballing is apposite because in the recorded account of Genesis 16 and 21 Hagar and her son Ishmael are positioned as the Other, or, borrowing Spivak’s (1988) terminology, as ‘the subaltern’ in the household of the patriarch Abram. Indeed, following the above definition both Hagar and Ishmael are guilty of the offense of ‘reckless eyeballing’ – Hagar as rendered in Sarai’s account to Abram in Gen. 16. 4-6 and later Ishmael in his ‘play’ with his younger brother Isaac on the occasion of the feast of Isaac’s weaning (Gen. 21. 8-11). The set up for repetition with revision becomes clear in that an Egyptian girl is enslaved under the first patriarch while, as the biblical books unravel, the descendants of the patriarchs will become the slaves of the Egyptians. If our sense of justice lies with the oppressed (i.e. with Hagar and Ishmael) should those sympathies continue on into subsequent generations once that group becomes the superpower, as the Egyptians become by the end of Genesis and later on in the book of Exodus? Setting this thorny issue aside until later in the paper, I will argue that the trope of reckless eyeballing opens a space upon which a discussion of the look that passes between Hagar and Sarai can be based, leaving sufficient room for the varying polar interpretations of it that have been attempted.

When scholars weigh in on the question of the nature of the power dynamic between Abram, Sarai, and Hagar, however, they frequently point to the look that passes from the slave Hagar to her mistress Sarai as causal of the severe treatment that Hagar receives from her mistress, and as indicative of the disquieting relations that existed between the two women. While Trible (1984: 9) first attempted to reconstruct Hagar’s narrative ‘from the fragments that remain’ and raised the issue of re-assessing Genesis 16 and 21 from the perspective of Hagar, Williams (1993) advanced this position a great deal further by arguing that, for African-American women readers, the experience of the slave woman Hagar was more paradigmatic of their experience than that of her mistress Sarai. In this instance, the look could be interpreted as ‘sass,’ Braxton’s (1989) term for the subversive manner in which black women challenged slave holders during slavery. Hence, in Williams’ reconstruction, the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery as practiced in the United States elides into that as practiced by the ancient Hebrews.

This raises the issue of the textual evidence for the varying interpretations of Gen. 16. 4-6. At the heart of this debate lies the most appropriate translation of the verb in verse 4. Typically, scholars read the verb qalal in verse 4–as ‘to look upon with contempt,’ as in the NRSV translation, or, more benignly, as ‘to treat lightly’, which O’Connor (1997: 26) argues is a more appropriate translation of the Hebrew. The editor of the NRSV translation of Genesis writes in the note to lines 4-5 that ‘[t]he translation looked with contempt implies that Hagar disdained her mistress, whereas the verb (“qll,” “to treat lightly”) only implies that Hagar did not look up to her mistress the way she once did. Having had a child, Hagar is now derisively seen by her mistress as an “uppity slave”’ (New Oxford Annotated Bible, 2001: 33). Trible’s take on this passage is apposite. As she explains,

The Hebrew expression “her mistress was slight (or trifling) in her eyes” inspires various interpretations. Many translators alter the syntax to make Hagar the subject of the verb. They also attribute to the verb (qll) the legitimate, though not necessary, meaning of contempt or disdain. Accordingly, one reads, “when she saw that she had conceived, she despised her mistress” (NEB); or “when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress” (RSV). Yet the verb with its correct subject also offers the less harsh reading that is present in the translation, “Her mistress was lowered in her esteem” (NJV) (1984:12).

Indeed, it is the recovery of Hagar in the narrative, Trible argues, that ‘shapes and challenges faith’ (1984: 27).

Other scholars seeking to recover a heroic unwritten narrative of Hagar situate her within the context of the wilderness narratives, seeing Hagar’s account as a precursor to that of Moses in Exod. 2.1-10. Dozeman is arguably one of the leading proponents of this view, reconstructing Hagar as the progenitor of a great and powerful nation, her progeny becoming the major superpower during Israel’s exile. Yet he notes that ‘the reader of Torah has a choice of whether to focus on the heroic role of Hagar or the character and life-style of Ishmael’ (1998: 43).

While these scholars re-imagine Hagar’s narrative by positioning her as a kind of heroic victim who overcomes the challenges of her victimization, Reis (2000: 83) re-constructs the dynamic between the patriarch, his wife, and her slave quite differently. She argues that ‘outrage’ does not capture the sense of the Hebrew word at the beginning of Sarai’s dialogue with Abram in Gen. 16.5. Reis avers that the Hebrew word translated as ‘The outrage done me is your responsibility. I put my handmaid in your bosom, and she saw she conceived and I diminished in her eyes’ is actually ‘stronger than “outrage” can express’ and is, in fact, the same word for ‘an offense so grave that God destroys a world because of it.’ In Reis’ reconstruction, not only is Sarai the victim, but she is victim of a crime so heinous that because of it God destroyed the world. As she explains, ‘it is the sin of Noah’s generation that precipitates the flood’ (2000: 83). According to Reis (2000: 83-84), Zornberg ‘defines it [“outrage”] as violent robbery with undertones of sexual rapacity’ while Sarna calls it ‘the flagrant subversion of the ordered processes of law’ (2000: 83-84). As Reis puts it, ‘[r]obbery, injustice and sexual rapacity are all connotations of the word … and all of these meanings are relevant to this scenario. With this new understanding of the text, Sarai’s outburst is no longer “unreasonable”; her fury no longer “seems overdone”. This is no “mildly incriminating incident”. Sarai has justification for her rancor, a replete and rational reason to upbraid Abram’ (2000: 86).

Indeed, in Reis’ account of Hagar’s unwritten narrative, it is Hagar, not Sarai or Abram, who initiates the sexual relationship. Moreover, as Reis reads the implications of Hagar’s reckless eyeballing in verse 4, she limns Hagar not as an abused child, but as a kind of sex radical, returning to Abram’s tent long after she becomes impregnated. This, according to Reis, is the basis of Hagar’s ‘newfound disrespect for Sarai’s rights’ (2000: 86). Countering the view of Hagar as victim of the sexual caprices of her mistress and master, Reis positions Hagar as an agent overstepping her bounds: ‘In Abram’s bed, there is warmth, attention, affection, intimacy and tenderness. There she is not a servant but a desirable woman… The handmaid, wrongly but understandably, looks to Abram for comfort and for the satisfaction of her sexual appetite, but the husband must look to his true wife, Sarai’ (2000: 86). While Reis’s reconstruction lies along the opposite side of the spectrum of most of the recent scholarship of Gen.16.4-5, she, too, notes that the ‘Bible’s characteristic compactness’ precludes further embellishment of the written text (2000: 87). Yet the reader notes, in contrast, the plethora of such details in other biblical accounts, for instance, in the prostitute icon in Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Additionally, she proposes a reconstruction of Gen. 21.10 in which Sarah, whose name is changed from Sarai to ‘Sarah’ in Gen. 17.15, sees a drunken Ishmael playing with her son Isaac that results in her insistence that Hagar and Ishmael must leave (Reis, 2000: 97). Albeit, it would appear that the more insightful claim by Reis is that ‘[t]he biblical narrator is skillful in deciding what to include and equally skillful in deciding what to omit’ (2000: 85).

Some of what the biblical narrator may have omitted has been suggested in the groundbreaking work of Meyers (1988). Meyers uses archaeology, artifacts, and accounts in Near Eastern traditions to reconstruct the role of women in the kind of pre-monarchal society into which Sarai and Hagar lived. Meyers has persuasively argued that in pre-monarchal Hebrew society women held a more egalitarian status alongside men than women during the monarchal period. She attempts to uncover the ‘pre-monarchic’ or ‘pristine’ Eve, whom she labels as an Everywoman of pre-monarchal culture. As she puts it, ‘[r]ecognizing the nature of pre-monarchic Israel as a peasant or folk society is critical for looking at relationships between males and females’ (1988: 168).

It is into such a society that the slave Hagar enters as a ‘stranger,’ as, indeed, the pun on her name suggests. Meyers notes that in pre-monarchic Israel there was a distinction between a ‘household’ and a ‘family’:

Strictly speaking, “family” is a kinship term, whereas “household” is a somewhat more flexible term connoting both residency and social function. The latter is more intense; household can, notably in an agrarian setting, include a set of related people and also residential quarters, outbuildings, granaries, wells, tools and equipment, livestock, fields, and orchards. It can also include people not related by kinship, such as captives, servants, and temporary residents or “sojourners” (1988: 130).

In these ‘prestate societies,’ Meyers avers, it is the household that is ‘the fundamental institution and the primary locus of power.’ Within this framework, she opines, women ‘may even have [had] a predominant role, at least within the broad parameters of household life’ (1988: 176). Yet much of this reconstruction of a powerful Eve, too, must be based on speculation given that ‘the traces of that pristine balance of gender relationships have been nearly erased by the documents left by succeeding generations’ (1988: 189). And, while this would account for Sarai’s more assertive role in her relationship with Abram, would it also speak to the experience of foreign-born slave girls?

Returning to the reading earlier in the paper in which a recovery of the slave woman or of the slave girl in Gen. 16.4-5 allows for an alternative reading and against Reis’s, we see that an equally polarizing narrative can be reconstructed. In this reading, Hagar is limned as a clear victim of Sarai and Abram. Indeed, if we recall Williams’s assessment discussed earlier in the paper that the experience of the slave girl Hagar, to some extent, equates to that of black female slaves in the United States, an interpretative space is opened in which the slave narratives and other black women’s discourse about child sexual abuse can be used to offer insight into the erasures in the slave woman’s story in Genesis 16. For instance, arguably the more notable account of the horrors of being a slave girl in the plantation household is that of Jacobs ([1861] 1988), in her 1861 autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. In this text Jacobs decries the fury of a ‘jealous mistress’ and the lechery of a plantation master. To her way of seeing the situation, beauty in a slave girl is no more than a curse. There are additional connections to be made with Hagar in that Jacobs attests to the fact that, in many instances, slave women resorted to non-physical means of protest, such as hateful stares, back-talk, etc. Moreover, if we compound this portrait with the possibility that Hagar, the slave, was, in point of fact, Hagar, the girl slave, a more hideous and deviant narrative of this pre-monarchal household arises. The reader sees the dialectical tension in which the oral and written narratives exist, shifting from the dialogic of Abram as exemplary hero to that of Abram as anti-hero. While the narrative states Abram’s valor, at the same time, it implies that, perhaps, he is not heroic. The narrative that is stated versus the narrative that is implied is, thus, held in dialectical tension. Ironically, by not revealing all, the narrator leaves open to interpretation an unfavorable portrait of Abram and his family.

But does limning Abram and Sarai negatively in this way requite Hagar and restore her agency to the narrative? Must Abram and Sarai be subjected to demonizing in order to restore Hagar’s place at the pre-monarchal societal ‘welcome’ table? Indeed, this argument merely inverses positionality where Hagar supplants Abram as good/exemplary object and posits him as bad object. Pushed to an extreme, the argument situates the patriarch from whom all nations arise as an unheroic child molester. But this reading, too, does not suffice in that it merely, in the words of Diawara, ‘substitutes the historical White man as bad object with a historical Black man [in this case, a historical woman of color] as good object?’ (1991: 9). Moreover, a reading on this end of the spectrum renders problematic Hagar’s generations in that ultimately it limns them as a nation born of molestation and violence even as it re-writes the ‘father of all [our] nations’ as deviant.

What we come to, then, is the view that Stallybrass and White’s two narratives – the written and the re-covered oral one – exist within the text of Gen.16. 4-5 in a dialectical tension, each reflecting upon and dependent on the other for a richer interpretation of the text. The implications of the oral narrative fill out the picture of the presented one in the official, recorded narrative, deconstructing it at crucial turns. The oral history remains more problematic, since, in addition to shedding fresh light on the written text, the openness with which the Hebrew can in crucial places be translated, lends to polarizing interpretations. For some readers, one solution to avoid the more disturbing portrait of child molestation is to treat Hagar as though she were older – a nearly mature woman. But this ignores the translation in the NRSV which refers to her as a ‘girl’ four times in Genesis (Gen. 25.12; 16.1; 16.2; 16.3).

Finally, what really lies in the look, the reckless eyeballing, that passes from Hagar to her mistress Sarai? The text covers over the scene, muffling the voice of Hagar. Against the two extremes, reality/truth likely exists somewhere between the two poles discussed, and at best, we are left with a range of near-plausible reconstructions. Indeed, the reader must inevitably bring her own sensitivities as well as her own sensibilities to the table as she reconstructs the text.

Moreover, a ‘just,’ as well as objective, reading of Gen.16.4-5 seemingly continues to elude scholars. Indeed, many have assumed that Hagar wanted to conceive Abram’s seed. But to thicken the dialectical stew, one might suggest that an equally plausible reading of the look that passes from Hagar to Sarai – the reckless eyeballing – is Hagar’s sense of betrayal by her guardian/mistress Sarai, who having ordered her to have sex with Abram, led to Hagar also having been made to shift from a somewhat ‘innocent’ girlhood to a more wizened womanhood via the process that resulted in her conception of Abram’s seed – a decision affecting her girl’s body and about which she had no say. Relatedly, did Hagar, as an outsider and ‘Other’ to this monotheistic community, want to conceive a child by the powerful patriarch – a birth that would mark her child as a cultural hybrid in a community that valued pure lineage?

Indeed, polarizing interpretations, thus, remain. However, at least to this reader, based on the oral and written narratives of Gen. 16.4-5, it seems that while growing up as a member of the household of Abram, it was likely that for Hagar, in the words of poet/playwright/novelist Shange, it was ‘not so good to be born a girl’ (1979: 28-30).