Was Ishmael a small child or a teenager when Hagar was sent away?

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The passages

The objection

Ishmael was thirteen when he was circumcised, and Isaac was born the next year, so Ishmael was at least fifteen by the time Isaac was weaned and Hagar was sent away. But Genesis 21 seems to describe a small child: Abraham puts him on Hagar’s shoulder, she casts him under a bush, and the angel tells her to lift him up and hold him in her hand. Critics ask how a teenager could be treated like an infant.

The answer

The picture of an infant comes mostly from the way the English, and before it the Greek, puts verse 14. The Septuagint does read ‘he put the child on her shoulder’. But in the Hebrew, as Keil explains, ‘putting it on her shoulder’ describes the bread and the skin of water, and ‘the child’ belongs with the main verbs: Abraham took bread and water, gave them to Hagar, setting them on her shoulder, and sent her away with the boy. The BSB renders it so: Abraham “put them on Hagar’s shoulders, and sent her away with the boy.”

The words used of Ishmael do not mean a baby. Yeled, ‘child’, is used of Joseph at seventeen (“The child is not”, 37:30) and of the grown men who had been brought up with King Rehoboam, “the young men that were grown up with him” (1 Kings 12:8). Na‘ar, ‘lad’, is used of Joseph at seventeen as well (37:2). The verb in 21:15, shalak, ‘to throw, cast’, is the one used when Joseph’s brothers cast him into the pit (37:24); Keil takes it to mean that Hagar let go of the boy suddenly when he collapsed. A youth of fifteen or sixteen, worn out by heat and thirst, could well give way before his hardy mother, and she laid him in the shade of a bush so as not to watch him die. ‘Hold him in thine hand’ is in Hebrew ‘make your hand strong on him’: support him, take him by the hand.

The ages fit together. Ishmael was born when Abraham was 86 (16:16), was 13 at his circumcision (17:25), and was 14 when Isaac was born (21:5). Children were commonly weaned at two or three, so Ishmael was about sixteen or seventeen. A few verses later he “became an archer”, and his mother found him a wife (21:20–21).

An older Ishmael

Gill noted that if Isaac was weaned at three, or at five, Ishmael would have been seventeen or nineteen, and that some Jewish writers made him older still. On any of these figures he was well past childhood.

Two sources

Many critical scholars hold that Genesis 21 comes from a source in which Ishmael was a small child, while the ages in chapters 16 and 17 come from another. Even on that view, the final writer placed the ages before the story, and, read in the Hebrew, the story itself does not require an infant.

Still open

Genesis does not say how old Isaac was when he was weaned, so Ishmael’s exact age is uncertain, somewhere between about fifteen and his late teens.

From the classic commentators

The English version of verses 14-18 is peculiarly infelicitous, and makes a wrong impression. The "child" was not placed upon Hagar's shoulder, nor cast under the shrub, nor held in the hand, as an infant might have been.J. W. Haley, Alleged Discrepancies (1874), p. 418

It does not follow from these words, therefore, that Ishmael is represented as a little child.Keil & Delitzsch, Commentary on Genesis 21:14–16