A Mother Gets Custody: The Legal Background to Genesis 21:14-21

This article adopts a law and literature approach toward Genesis 21:14-21, focused on the legal themes within the narrative and how these themes shape the story. Genesis 21:14-21 records the expulsion of Hagar and her son from Abraham’s home. I identify multiple legal idioms and terms within this unit and argue that the narrative uses legal terminology in order to depict the child’s expulsion specifically as a transfer of custody from his father to his mother. In her marginalization from Abraham’s home, Hagar also gains legal rights, and this article examines these shifts in power from a law and literature perspective in order to interrogate Hagar’s parental rights within the biblical text and to demonstrate how they function within the ancestral narrative as a means of formalizing the rupture in Abraham’s household.