What Does Genesis 16:15 Mean?

So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. The return from the desert, the obedience to the divine command to go back to the household, and the birth of the child are all compressed into a single verse. Hagar went back, as she was told; the pregnancy continued; Ishmael was born. Abram gave the name Ishmael, the name the angel specified to Hagar at Beer Lahai Roi, showing that the divine announcement reached Abram through Hagar's account of the encounter. The name God gave to the child through the servant was honored by the patriarch.

The act of naming by the father is the formal acknowledgment of paternity and the acceptance of the child into the household. Abram names Ishmael as his son; his decision to use the God-given name rather than another name of his own choosing is a gesture of reverence for the divine announcement. The child who was conceived as a human solution to a divine promise's delay is received into the household with the name that testified to God's presence in the desert with the child's mother. The very existence of Ishmael carries the double testimony of human impatience and divine faithfulness.

The birth of Ishmael is the end of the plan's first phase and the beginning of a family complication that will occupy Genesis through chapter 21. The son born to provide Abram with an heir before Sarai could conceive will become the son who must be sent away when the covenant heir finally arrives. The fourteen years between Ishmael's birth and Isaac's birth are fourteen years that Abram lived with both the son of the human plan and the continuing absence of the son of the divine promise. That sustained tension is the cost of the chapter 16 decision, and its resolution will require the greatest act of trust the patriarch was ever called to perform.