Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Today, it's going to be longer than usual because this text is packed, and I'm still going to

barely skim the surface. So buckle up, and if you're listening faster than

one X, you might want to slow this down to normal speed. In fact, you may even want to listen to

this one twice. Yesterday, we ended with God making a covenant with Abram, and today we picked up to read

a little bit of Sarah's story. By this point, she's at least 75 years old, and she still has not had a child, even though God had promised

Abraham a child when he visibly appeared to him. So she does what many of us do when we feel

like God is holding out on us. She takes matters into our own hands. In those days, servants were

considered possessions, which, let me pause here to say this very important thing. This is one of those

things in scripture that is descriptive, not prescriptive. It's telling us what is happening, not what should happen. This is not

condoning treating people like possessions. But in that ancient culture, that's what was happening.

And basically, anything a servant owned, the master owned. So the child of a servant was considered

the property of the master.

Sarai used that cultural norm as her logic behind making her servant have sex with her husband.

Because then, if the servant had a child, Sarai owned it. Sarah was tired of waiting. She wanted to

take a shortcut. Have you ever been there? Let me give you cause to reconsider. Sarai's fear and

impatience has yielded millennia of war and destruction that's still happening around the world

today. What am I talking about? Sarai's servant Hagar became pregnant with the child she would

name Ishmael, and Ishmael is widely considered to be the line through which

Islam began, because Muhammad's ancestry is traced back to Ishmael. Years later, when Sarai and Abram finally

had their first child together, whose name was Isaac, he begins the line of Abram from which the Israelites

descend. Genetically, the Israelites of the Old Testament are the Jewish people of today.

...