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Did Ishmael, the firstborn son of the patriarch Abraham, molest his five-year-old half-brother, Isaac?
The disappearance of four words in an early version of the biblical text raises the intriguing if troubling prospect that the Bible records an incident of incestuous child molestation, a notion so shocking that it may have been literally written out of the Bible by the rabbinic censors.
Abraham and Sarah are childless, as we read in Genesis, and so Sarah sends her husband to the bed of her handmaiden, an Egyptian woman named Hagar, who eventually bears him a son named Ishmael (Genesis 16:4–16).
As Ishmael is growing up, God makes a remarkable promise to the 99-year-old Abraham and his 90-year-old wife: Sarah will bear a son who will replace Ishmael as the inheritor of Abraham’s divine blessing (Genesis 17:19). So remarkable is the news that Sarah laughs out loud; her son’s name, Isaac, is a bit of Hebrew wordplay that means “I laughed” (Genesis 18:12, 21:3).
And now the Bible presents a deeply enigmatic scene in which we find the 15-year-old Ishmael at play with his 5-year-old half-brother at a feast celebrating the fact that Isaac has been weaned (at last!) from the breast. But the festivities are ruined for Sarah because she oversees Ishmael doing something to Isaac, something so disturbing that Sarah promptly demands that Ishmael and his mother be cast out in the wilderness.
Exactly what does Sarah see, exactly what does Ishmael do, that prompts such anger and outrage in Sarah?
All we are told in conventional English translations of the Bible is that Sarah sees Ishmael “mocking” young Isaac—and we are asked to believe that thanks to a single adolescent taunt, Sarah drives mother and son into the desert to die.
Unless, that is, she saw something much worse.
A clue to the mystery of Sarah’s murderous rage is to be found in the Hebrew word used in the Bible to describe what Ishmael does to Isaac: t’sahak.
One of the meanings of t’sahak is “laugh”—a play on Isaac’s name (Yitzhak)—and that’s the one on which translators, old and new, have relied, suggesting that Ishmael merely “mocked” or “laughed at” Isaac. What the translators are reluctant to let us know is that another meaning of t’sahak is “fondle” and that the original Hebrew text of the Bible may indicate that what Sarah actually saw was some sort of sex play between Ishmael and his little brother.
Indeed, the very same Hebrew word appears only a few lines later in Genesis to describe Isaac fondling Rebekah outside the window of Abimelech, king of the Philistines (Genesis 26:8).
The mystery of what Sarah saw deepens when we notice that an entire phrase has been dropped from the passage in some versions of the Bible. The authoritative Hebrew text of the Bible—the Masoretic text—includes only a truncated description of what Ishmael is doing when Sarah sees him. “Sarah noticed that [Ishmael] was playing” (Genesis 21:9). But the early Greek version of the Bible called the Septuagint and the Latin version called the Vulgate, which were translated from Hebrew manuscripts, some perhaps even more original than the Masoretic text, give the same verse as “Sarah noticed that [Ishmael] was playing with her son Isaac.”
What are we to make of the missing words in the Hebrew Bible? Some Bible critics have been bold enough to suggest that the pious editors of the Masoretic text sought to play down the disturbing sexuality of the scene by leaving out the key phrase “with her son Isaac.” The Septuagint and the Vulgate, it is suggested, preserve the original, complete and unexpurgated text.1
The very suggestion that the Hebrew Bible masks an incident of incestuous child molestation is simply too hot for most scholars to handle. The rabbis explained away the whole episode by suggesting that Ishmael liked to play with a bow and arrows and “was in the habit of aiming his missiles in the direction of Isaac, saying at the same time that he was but jesting.”2 Even when some Bible commentators are willing to concede that “mocking” is not a justifiable translation of the Hebrew word, they still insist that the encounter between Ishmael and Isaac is wholly innocent: “His ‘playing’ with Isaac need mean no more than that the older boy was trying to amuse his little brother,” wrote Ephraim Speiser, one of the most venerated modern Bible scholars. “There 049is nothing in the text to suggest that he was abusing him, a motive deduced by many troubled readers in their effort to account for Sarah’s anger.”3
But we might reach a different conclusion, if only out of regard for the simple human decency of the matriarch Sarah. After all, Hagar and Ishmael nearly perish in the wilderness. Unless we regard Sarah as so jealous of her son’s birthright that she would literally kill for him—or as an out-and-out paranoid, as one Bible scholar has suggested4—then we must look for a more plausible explanation for her punishing rage than the mockery of a younger sibling by his older brother.5 And the four words that have somehow disappeared from the Masoretic text of the Bible provide an intriguing explanation for what Sarah sees: Ishmael is taking a liberty with his little brother that his stepmother finds too shocking to tolerate.
Did Ishmael, the firstborn son of the patriarch Abraham, molest his five-year-old half-brother, Isaac?
