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

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

barely skim the surface, so buckle up, and if you're listening faster than 1X, you might want to slow this down to normal speed. In fact, you might 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 Sarai'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 her 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 uses that cultural

norm as her logic behind making her servant have sex with her husband. Because then,

if the servant has a child, Sarai owns it. Sarai is tired of waiting. She wants 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 becomes pregnant with a child she will

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

because Muslims trace Muhammad's ancestry back to Ishmael. Years later, when Sarai and Abram finally

have their first child together, whose name is Isaac, he begins the line of

Abraham from which the Israelites descend. Genetically, the Israelites of the Old Testament are the

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