1: Sarai, Abram's wife, hadn't yet produced a child. She had an Egyptian maid named Hagar.
2: Sarai said to Abram, "GOD has not seen fit to let me have a child. Sleep with my maid. Maybe I can get a family from her." Abram agreed to do what Sarai said.
3: So Sarai, Abram's wife, took her Egyptian maid Hagar and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife. Abram had been living ten years in Canaan when this took place.
4: He slept with Hagar and she got pregnant. When she learned she was pregnant, she looked down on her mistress.
5: Sarai told Abram, "It's all your fault that I'm suffering this abuse. I put my maid in bed with you and the minute she knows she's pregnant, she treats me like I'm nothing. May GOD decide which of us is right."
6: "You decide," said Abram. "Your maid is your business." Sarai was abusive to Hagar and she ran away.
7: An angel of GOD found her beside a spring in the desert; it was the spring on the road to Shur.
8: He said, "Hagar, maid of Sarai, what are you doing here?" She said, "I'm running away from Sarai my mistress."
9: The angel of GOD said, "Go back to your mistress. Put up with her abuse."
10: He continued, "I'm going to give you a big family, children past counting.
11: From this pregnancy, you'll get a son: Name him Ishmael; for GOD heard you, GOD answered you.
12: He'll be a bucking bronco of a man, a real fighter, fighting and being fought, Always stirring up trouble, always at odds with his family."
13: She answered GOD by name, praying to the God who spoke to her, "You're the God who sees me!Yes! He saw me; and then I saw him!"
14: That's how that desert spring got named "God-Alive-Sees-Me Spring." That spring is still there, between Kadesh and Bered.
15: Hagar gave Abram a son. Abram named him Ishmael.
16: Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar gave him his son, Ishmael. [JC]