Hagar was a wife to Abraham, but a handmaid to Sarah (Midrash Aggadah, Bereishit 16:10).

“Sarah, Abraham’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her handmaid” (Genesis 16:3). She took her with words, saying: “Fortunate are you to be united with this holy man!” (Bereishit Rabbah 45:3).

When Hagar parted from Abraham, she worshipped the idols of her father’s house. Later she repented fully and bound herself to good deeds, for which her name was changed to Keturah. After this Abraham sent for and remarried her (Zohar 1:133b).

The complexity of the narrative of Hagar, the Egyptian, and her resultant place in Biblical history cannot be overstated. If Ishmael would become a wanderer - pushed away from his father Abraham and his Israelite inheritance by the jealous Sarah - he came by it naturally, for Hagar, daughter of Pharaoh, and Sarah’s maidservant, endured great suffering and heartbreak in her association with the father and mother of the Jewish people.

Hagar comes to Abraham and Sarah as a gift from Pharaoh, who had been smitten with Sarah’s extraordinary beauty. The gift is seen by Judaism’s most prominent couple as compensation for their infertility. In a conversation with her husband, Sarah asserts: “See, now, the Lord has restrained me from bearing; consort, now, with my maidservant, perhaps I will be built up through her.” Abraham does, but the ambivalence of Sarah’s comment is an ugly portent. Although the story weaves and darts through more prominent events in Israel’s history, the thread of Hagar’s destiny is tenaciously pulled along the way. Banished into the wilderness by her mistress, Hagar is allowed to return and gives birth to Ishmael. Some chapters later, fulfilled by the miraculous birth of Isaac, Sarah, the jealous matriarch, summarily dismisses Hagar and Ishmael. A repentant Abraham secretly follows and assures the inconsolable Hagar that Ishmael will become a great nation. What he promises his mistress is not explicated.

However, according to the rabbis, Hagar is eventually restored to her rightful place in Abraham’s family. After Sarah’s death, Abraham marries Keturah, but this is a Hebraic pseudonym for Hagar. Hagar is given this name because her deeds had become as beautiful as incense (ketoret) and because she remained chaste (in Aramaic, keturah means “restrained”) from the time she was separated from Abraham. And this far less renowned couple will give birth to many children, none of whom would inherit the nation of Israel. Wronged from the start, and subjected to a culture and family she did not really understand, Hagar, having been hurled into the abyss, emerges, a female precursor of Joseph, to obtain her legitimate role in the history of our people. Beginning as Pharaoh’s daughter, she had become Abraham’s second “princess”.