God's Stories #3: The Promise (Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar)
God's Stories #3: The Promise (Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar)
This Arabic take on the story of Abraham has a lot of love for Hagar, Ishmael, and even Isaac, but not so much for Sarah.
There is a lot that could be said about The Promise, which tells the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar. But I’ll try to make some relatively brief points:
This is quite possibly the longest film in the ‘God’s Stories’ series. I don’t have access to the film about David, so I can’t rule out the possibility that that film is longer. But of the eight films I do have access to: one, The Sin, is only 47 minutes; four are about an hour long; two are about two hours each; and The Promise is a whopping 144 minutes. That says something, I think, about how important this film’s subject is to the people who made this series.
Producer-director Robert Savo is an Arab whose films, I think it’s fair to say, reflect a basically Christian understanding of the Bible. (At any rate, they don’t reflect the Muslim perspective that one finds in the films about Abraham, Joseph, Jesus, and so on that have come from Iran.) This puts his movie about Abraham in a really interesting personal and cultural context: Traditionally, it is believed that Arabs are descended from Abraham through his firstborn son Ishmael—and Islam, a religion that originated in Arabia, traces some of its key traditions to Ishmael too. Christians, however, trace their spiritual roots through Judaism back to Abraham’s second son, Isaac. So if you’re an Arab and a Christian—a genetic descendant of Ishmael and a spiritual descendant of Isaac, as it were—how do you approach the story of Abraham and his two sons?
Suffice it to say that Savo is sympathetic to both boys—though he has more time to develop sympathy for Ishmael simply because Ishmael is 14 years older than Isaac. Ishmael has time to establish himself as a character before Isaac is even born. But Isaac, too, has his virtues. Years after Ishmael has been expelled from Abraham’s camp, God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and Isaac accepts his fate when he realizes what his father is about to do. He doesn’t try to weasel out of it. He shows bravery and submits to God’s will as an Old Testament figure should—and because he submits to God’s will, he hears God’s voice when God tells Abraham to call off the sacrifice. Savo knows you don’t have to make one brother look bad in order to make the other brother look good.
The mothers, on the other hand… This is where things get really interesting. Savo, as an Arab, is a descendant of Abraham’s concubine Hagar, and his film is enormously sympathetic to her. He is not, however, anywhere near as sympathetic to Abraham’s wife Sarah. Repeatedly, his film makes it clear that God made a promise to Abraham, and Abraham believed in God’s promise… and Sarah, as the wife of Abraham and the mother of Isaac, was ultimately a beneficiary of that promise. But her lack of faith causes problems every step of the way—right up until the film’s final scenes.
Frankly, the book of Genesis does give Savo ample material to work with. It is because of Sarah that Abraham fathers a child through Hagar, and it is because of Sarah that Abraham ultimately sends Hagar and her child away to what would almost certainly have been their deaths if God hadn’t guaranteed their survival ahead of time. No matter how much later writers, like the authors of Hebrews and I Peter, might have tried to portray Sarah as a submissive woman of faith, the fact remains that her behaviour in Genesis is pretty nasty.
But Savo draws even sharper contrasts between Sarah and Hagar. Sarah, as depicted in this film, never quite “gets” Abraham’s turn towards monotheism. Before they move to Canaan, Abraham tells her about God’s promise that they will have a child, and she says she wants to supplement the promise by going to the local temple and observing some fertility rites. Hagar, in contrast, prays to her gods on Sarah’s behalf but ultimately smashes her idols without any prompting, because she can tell they aren’t doing any good. Hagar also has an inquisitiveness about Abraham’s faith that Sarah lacks—an inquisitiveness that is rewarded when Hagar happens to witness the miraculous ritual by which Abraham and God seal their covenant with one another. Sarah complains repeatedly that God talks only to Abraham, never to her—to which Abraham replies that Sarah wouldn’t be able to hear God “over the storm that rages in your heart”—but the loud booming voice of God speaks to Hagar twice.
Meanwhile, Sarah keeps pushing Abraham into modifying or deviating from God’s plan: It is her idea to move to Egypt, after God told them to settle in Canaan; and, of course, it is her idea for Abraham to father a child through Hagar, instead of waiting for a child to come through Sarah. Sarah is constantly skeptical of God’s agency; she keeps justifying her ideas as a way to “help” God, and when Abraham says God saved her from Pharaoh’s house, she replies that Pharaoh did more to save her, just by letting her go. She’s not above arguing that some of her more dubious ideas were part of God’s plan, but at times she’s also downright dismissive, like when Abraham stays up all night, praying for Sodom and Gomorrah, and she says his efforts didn’t change a thing.
And then there is Sarah’s treatment of Ishmael… I have known since I was a child that Sarah offered Hagar to Abraham because any child that Hagar had would legally be Sarah’s, but it hadn’t really dawned on me until I watched this film that the relationship between Sarah and Ishmael would have gone far beyond a legal technicality. From Sarah’s point of view, Hagar is basically just a pregnancy surrogate, and Ishmael really is her child: after he is born, Sarah raises him in her tent and dotes on him, sewing hunting clothes for him, baking date cakes for him, and basically taking pride in him the way that any mother would. How much of this is genuine love, and how much of it is driven by Sarah’s need to maintain her status over Hagar, who can say. But the greater intimacy between Sarah and Ishmael makes her ultimate rejection of him, once she has the biological child she always wanted, just that much more of a betrayal.
And you really do feel for Ishmael, because he really does regard Sarah as his mother. Ishmael is also genuinely excited when Isaac is born: “My baby brother! Your name is like laughter. You and I will laugh together!” he exclaims. The brothers get along great, and Hagar is happy to see them play together. But Sarah—suspicious, capricious, unpredictable Sarah—doesn’t want that teenaged boy anywhere near her baby. When Abraham finally sends Hagar and Ishmael away at Sarah’s insistence, Ishmael asks for a chance to say goodbye to his mother, and the moment is heartbreaking in a way that I don’t think I’ve felt while watching any other version of this story. The grief that Abraham and Ishmael feel over losing each other: this I know. The grief that Ishmael feels over losing Sarah, who is the cause of all his pain: that felt new.
Whew. Most of those bullet points are pretty interconnected. Here are some other thoughts, of a more disconnected sort:
When Abraham and his entourage go to Egypt and the Pharaoh expresses interest in Sarah, Abraham says she’s his sister—which is technically true, because she’s his half-sister, but it’s not, of course, the whole story. Abraham’s deception is usually portrayed as an act of self-preservation—if the Pharaoh knew Sarah was married, he would kill her husband while adding her to his harem—but this film offers an extra explanation: the Egyptians think virgins are a blessing but barren wives bring a curse to the land, and if they knew that Sarah was married and that she didn’t have any children, then they might put two and two together and consider her a threat. Ironically, Pharaoh and his household are stricken with disease anyway—and, yes, they are cursed because of Sarah, as Genesis 12:17 puts it—but they let her and Abraham go.
Except for Abraham’s sojourn in Egypt, we don’t really get much sense of the world outside of Abraham’s tents. There is no meeting with Melchizedek, no dealing with Abimelek, and no rescue of the Sodomites from the invading kings. For that matter, we never see Sodom and Gomorrah, except from afar, when Abraham looks at the cities burning in the distance.
Before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham tells Lot he doesn’t want to be near the cities because “they’re polluted with the stench of idol worship and evil.” Lot replies, “That’s city life. When men meet, there is always both good and bad.” Later, when the cities are destroyed, Sarah says the inhabitants were wicked and had it coming, while Abraham says he never liked cities before and now he likes them even less… but Ishmael, knowing that God had promised to spare the cities if there were ten righteous men living in them, says maybe their family should have lived there; surely there would have been enough righteous men in their family to save the cities from destruction? Sarah, however, replies—not implausibly, to be fair—that their family would have ceased to be righteous after living in the city for a while. Abraham concludes: “Only God knows the heart of man, so let us guard ourselves lest we suffer the same fate!” The questions raised here are interesting ones: To what degree do people doom the world by isolating themselves from it? To what degree do people save the world just by being a positive presence in it? And when is it more important to cut yourself off from bad influences?
Lot says he married a woman from Sodom, and he wants his daughters to marry men from the city, too. Abraham says Lot could have gone to their kinsman Nahor to find husbands for his daughters—which is something of a gender-swap, as the usual pattern in Genesis is to send away for brides, not husbands.
After the destruction of Sodom, Abraham’s servant Eliezer learns that Lot is still alive… but he says Lot can’t come back to live with them because he’s too ashamed. And what is Lot ashamed of…? Eliezer says it’s sometimes best for servants to keep secrets. (Readers of Genesis will know what Lot and his daughters were reduced to, after the destruction of Sodom.)
Some movies establish the context for God’s covenant with Abraham by showing how covenants functioned in day-to-day life back then. In this film, Abraham and Lot kill a goat as part of an agreement between them, and after they kill the goat, they eat it. “It’s as if they were internalizing the pact,” says one of the servants. Sarah compares the agreement to a marriage.
One of the interesting things about Robert Savo’s Jesus movie, The Savior, is how it highlights the circumcision of Jesus—so of course Savo dwells a little, in this film, on the fact that circumcision, as a religious practice, goes all the way back to Abraham. And he makes this part of the story surprisingly amusing. When Hagar hears that every man and boy in the camp is about to be circumcised, she asks if Abraham can spare Ishmael, who is already in his early teens. “How will he have children?” she asks. Sarah asks why circumcision is only for men—are women not good enough, she asks, presumably rhetorically—and Abraham replies that “women are more highly honoured for bringing children into the world.” Meanwhile, as the men of the camp prepare for their moment under the knife, they crack jokes about it; when one man asks who will guard the camp that night, another replies, “All of us. Who can sleep now?” (Alas, that logic didn’t work for the men of Shechem…)
It’s striking how the female characters speak so matter-of-factly about their bodies. Sarah tells Abraham she wants a child so she can “hear his cry when he is hungry for my breasts.” Hagar reminds Sarah that Ishmael came from her womb and drank her milk. When Sarah is pregnant with Isaac, she remarks that her breasts are growing again, and “even Abraham noticed.” And when Sarah rejects Ishmael, Hagar remarks that being weaned from love is harder than being weaned from the breast. In a film that focuses so intensely on the emotional connections between people, it’s interesting to see how conscious the characters are of their physical, even biological, connections too.
Sarah—who is supposed to be 90 years old when she gives birth to Isaac—seems awfully young throughout the film. She could easily be Abraham’s daughter, even though she’s only supposed to be ten years younger than him. And it’s weird to hear her say how “old” and “wrinkled” she’s become when she doesn’t exactly look all that old and wrinkled. (The make-up artists do grey her hair towards the end, though.)
Speaking of the makeup, the facial hair on the men looks a little fake at times, particularly where Abraham’s nephew Lot is concerned.
Sarah’s desperate need to have a child of her own affects the behaviour of people around her. Lot avoids bringing his daughters to visit, because he doesn’t want to make Sarah jealous over the fact that he has children and she does not. And one of Sarah’s other servant women—named Anat, like the Semitic goddess—tells Hagar it was hard to be pregnant around Sarah.
I have written in the past about cinematic depictions of the three visitors from Genesis 18. The three visitors are basically angels, though one of them appears to be God himself, and it’s interesting to see how different films have handled this mystery. In The Bible: In the Beginning…, the three visitors all have the same face (though two are bearded and one is not). In Testament: The Bible in Animation, all three faces are hidden. In The Bible Collection’s Abraham, one of the visitors—the one who seems to be God—keeps his face hidden, but the other two visitors do not. In The History Channel’s The Bible, all three visitors show their faces to Abraham, but one of their faces is hidden from the viewer, and he is dressed in different colours, too. And now, in The Promise, all three visitors cover the lower half of their faces, and the visitor who seems to be God wears clothes with a different colour pattern than the other two visitors.
We don’t get a very strong sense of what makes Isaac special, beyond the fact that God promised to give Abraham a child with Sarah. When Isaac is still quite young, Abraham tells Sarah she’s been spoiling the boy, and he says the boy needs to be tougher. When Isaac is a young adult, he worries that Abraham still loves Ishmael more, because Abraham doesn’t go hunting with him the way he used to go hunting with Ishmael; to this, Abraham’s servant Eliezer replies that Isaac must be his own person, and not try to be just like his older brother.
Eliezer and a few other servants accompany Abraham and Isaac on their journey to Mt Moriah, and they figure out quite easily that Abraham is planning to sacrifice Isaac. Eliezer seems bothered by this, but one of the other servants says every god demands human sacrifice eventually, so why not Abraham’s? Of course, many scholars have said that one of the points of this story seems to be that God was impressing on Abraham that he wasn’t like the other gods in this regard. To a first-generation monotheist like Abraham, it wouldn’t necessarily have been a given that human sacrifice was out of bounds.
The actor who plays Abraham often reminded me of Paul Sorvino.
And that, I think, about covers it! The next film in this series will revisit the fraternal relationship between Isaac and Ishmael, even as it introduces Isaac’s sons.
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Several years ago I contributed a chapter on movies about Abraham and the other Genesis patriarchs to a book called The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible and Its Reception in Film. I have also written reviews of Abraham-themed movies like The Bible: In the Beginning… (dir. John Huston, 1966), Abraham (dir. Joseph Sargent, 1993), Year One (dir. Harold Ramis, 2009), and The Bible (dir. Crispin Reece, 2013).
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Bits of The Promise appear in this super-trailer for the ‘God’s Stories’ series:
The Promise also has its own trailer, though it’s four years old and probably reflects an earlier version of the film, before the recent upgrades: