Image of the Week: And the Boy Drank
© D. Yael Bernhard
This painting from my new calendar, The Jewish Eye 5782/2022 Calendar of Art, depicts the climax of the story of Hagar and Ishmael from the Book of Genesis. In the story, Hagar is first taken by Abraham as a concubine due to the fact that his wife Sarah is barren; then, when Sarah miraculously conceives a child as a very old woman, Hagar is cast out into the wilderness, together with the child she conceived by Abraham. The difference in cultural context so long ago cannot be overestimated in considering this cruel fate, which was not uncommon in the ancient Near East. Indeed, Abraham's very reluctance to banish his mistress and son is a step away from child sacrifice toward the very beginning of human rights.
Curiously, Ishmael is described in one part of the story as a toddler, and in another as a teenage boy. The story emerges from a time when quantities and time were still fluid. Young Ishmael's age is as nebulous as that of Methuselah, the oldest person in the Bible. Numbers were not yet fixed, and may have been symbolic of sets or esoteric meanings – a subject of much debate among Biblical scholars.
I chose to depict the younger Ishmael in order to heighten the plight of mother and child. How much easier it is to grasp the innocence of a toddler, who would quickly perish in the desert wilderness! Hagar's despair serves to heighten her relief when an angel of God comes to her aid, pointing the weeping woman toward water. Hagar quickly fills her water pouch . . . and the boy drank, and was saved – and the saving power of the angel of God amplified. These acts of divine intervention may have played a different role in the imagination of our ancestors, whose lives were subject to perils they could not explain – and that we, in our comfortable modern existence, cannot understand.
Oh the relief of a mother, to see her helpless child lifted from the jaws of death! This is the moment I chose to depict in my painting. Yet Hagar's relief is also mingled with sorrow, for Ishmael was saved by the very same God who banished his mother to begin with. The story reminds us that while the suffering and survival of an individual is certainly worthy of compassion, something larger and inescapable is served by Hagar's difficult expulsion from Abraham's life. It is the unfolding of a vast blueprint believed by our ancestors to be drawn by the finger of God. Only Isaac, the biological child of Abraham and Sarah, was fated to carry forward his parents' lineage – not the child of Hagar, who is not of the same bloodline.
But the plight of young Ishmael does not go unheard. The name itself, translated from Hebrew, means "God has heard." Ishmael's path lies elsewhere, in the land of Paran, where he will father his own people. It is said there are parallels between the Ishmael of the Bible and the Ishmael of Herman Melville's Moby Dick . . . one banished to the desert and the other to the sea. Both are cruelly orphaned, and miraculously rescued.
My depiction of the angel that reaches out to save Hagar and Ishmael is modeled after an angel I saw in a Renaissance painting that struck me as particularly lovely. Hagar and Ishmael form a triangle, and the angel is parallel to the diagonal side of that triangle, relating to it but not touching it.
Mothers and children are one of my favorite subjects, and I enjoyed working on this painting very much. Every child deserves to have an angel watching over him.
The Jewish Eye 5782 Calendar of Art is available in my webstore and on Amazon. If you order it from Amazon, please consider writing a review!
You can view the entire calendar here.
A good week to all –
D Yael Bernhard
http://dyaelbernhard.com
children's books • fine art • illustration