Hagar was Egyptian by birth (see Gen 16:1). How she became a servant of the Mesopotamian Sarai (eventually known as Sarah, the wife of Abraham, the patriarch of the nation of Israel), no one can say for sure. More than a decade after God’s promise to make Abraham the father of a great nation, Sarah was still childless. Finally, in her mid-seventies, with equal parts frustration and desperation, Sarah “took Hagar, her Egyptian slave, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife for him. . . . He slept