Hagar (הָגָר) is an Egyptian woman — from Mizraim's line, of Ham — who enters Abraham's household as the personal maidservant of Sarai. When Sarai remains childless after ten years in Canaan, she gives Hagar to Avraham as a secondary wife, following the custom of the time by which a maidservant's children would be counted as the mistress's. When Hagar conceives, she looks on Sarai with contempt — and Sarai's harsh treatment drives her to flee into the wilderness.
In the wilderness, an angel of God finds Hagar at a spring on the road to Shur and speaks to her directly — one of the few recorded instances in the Torah of an angel addressing a woman by name. The angel promises that her son will be named Yishmael ("God will hear") and that his descendants will be too numerous to count. Hagar responds by naming God: El Roi — "the God who sees me" — making her the only person in all of Scripture to give God a name. The well is called Be'er Lachai Ro'i, "the well of the Living One who sees me."
After Yitzchak is born and weaned, Sarah sees Yishmael mocking and demands that Avraham expel Hagar and her son. God tells Avraham to listen to Sarah, promising to make a great nation of Yishmael. Avraham sends them away with bread and water into the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water runs out and Hagar sets the child under a bush and moves away so as not to watch him die, God hears the boy's cry and opens her eyes to a well. God repeats the promise of a great nation, and Yishmael grows up in the wilderness of Paran, becomes an archer, and his mother takes him a wife from Egypt. Through Yishmael, Hagar is the matriarch of the twelve princes of Arabia.
