Catholic Commentary
The Birth of Ishmael and Abram's Age
15Hagar bore a son for Abram. Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael.16Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.
Genesis 16:15–16 records that Hagar bore a son to Abram, who named him Ishmael when Abram was eighty-six years old. The passage establishes Abram's legal paternity of Ishmael within ancient Near Eastern customs while marking the maternal line through Hagar as distinct from Sarai's, foreshadowing the later covenant promise through Isaac.
Ishmael is born not from God's promise, but from Abram's impatience—a real child, fully loved, yet a sign of how even faith can mistake human calculation for divine timing.
Typological and Spiritual Senses:
St. Paul, in Galatians 4:22–31, reads Ishmael and Isaac as a profound allegory: Hagar represents the covenant of Sinai — the law given on a mountain in Arabia — bearing children into slavery, while Sarah represents the Jerusalem that is above, mother of the free. This Pauline allegory does not condemn Ishmael as a person, but uses the mode of his birth — from a slave woman, through human initiative and calculation rather than sheer divine promise — as a type of the legal economy that precedes grace. Abram at eighty-six is a man who has tried to help God along. He has not denied the promise; he has supplemented it. This is precisely the disposition that grace, in the fullness of time, will render obsolete.
The name "Ishmael" also carries a latent eschatological resonance: God hears. Even the child of human scheming is not outside God's hearing. Ishmael will be blessed (Gen 17:20), will father twelve princes, and will stand at his father's side at the burial of Abraham (Gen 25:9). God's providential care extends to every child born — a truth that Catholic social teaching on the dignity of every human life will later make explicit.
Catholic tradition, drawing on both the literal and spiritual senses of Scripture (cf. Dei Verbum §12; CCC §115–119), finds in this passage a profound meditation on the difference between human initiative and divine gift — a theme that runs from Augustine's anti-Pelagian writings through Aquinas and into the modern Magisterium.
St. Augustine (City of God, Book XVI, Ch. 32) regards the birth of Ishmael as belonging to the "earthly city" in the sense that it proceeds from the calculations of the flesh, even while it remains under God's providential governance. Augustine is careful not to disparage Ishmael personally but uses the pattern of his birth to illustrate how human beings, even holy ones like Abram, can confuse the timing and manner of grace. This is not sin in the strictest sense — Abram acts within the social customs of his time and with genuine faith — but it is an anticipation of what Aquinas (ST I-II, q. 109, a. 2) would call the insufficiency of natura alone to attain the ends of grace.
The Catechism teaches that "God's free initiative demands man's free response" (CCC §2002). The birth of Ishmael dramatizes the cost of preempting that dialogue. Abram responds — but to Sarai's initiative, not yet to God's explicit word on how the promise would be fulfilled.
Pope Benedict XVI (Verbum Domini §42) reminds us that the "unity of the two Testaments" must be read Christologically, and the Hagar-Ishmael typology is a prime instance: the Law (Ishmael, Sinai) is not evil but is preparatory, pointing toward the freedom of the children of God achieved in Christ. Every Catholic reading this verse stands, by baptism, on the Isaac side of the allegory — born not of flesh but of promise (cf. Gal 4:28).
The birth of Ishmael speaks to every Catholic who has ever grown impatient with God's timetable and taken the promise into their own hands — launching a career, a relationship, or a vocation according to human prudence while God's word remains unfulfilled or unclear. Abram is not a villain here; he is a man of genuine faith who nonetheless calculated a way forward when the waiting became intolerable.
The spiritual challenge these verses pose is concrete: Can you identify an "Ishmael" in your own life — a good thing, even a blessed thing, that you brought into being through your own engineering rather than through patient discernment of God's timing? The text does not ask you to repudiate that good thing (Abram does not). It asks you to hold it with open hands, to recognize it for what it is, and to remain open to the "Isaac" — the gift that comes not from human logistics but from sheer divine faithfulness.
For parents, for those discerning a vocation, for anyone in a long season of unanswered prayer: Ishmael is born at eighty-six. The waiting is real. But the chronology of verse 16 is also a promise — God is still counting the years.
Commentary
Genesis 16:15 — "Hagar bore a son for Abram. Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael."
The verse unfolds with deliberate, almost legal precision. The double identification of Hagar — "Hagar bore… whom Hagar bore" — is no mere stylistic redundancy. It is a genealogical marker that distinguishes Ishmael's maternal line from the line of Sarai, whose name will be conspicuously absent here. The son is born for Abram (Hebrew: lĕ-ʾaḇrām), indicating legal paternity within the custom of surrogate motherhood practiced in the ancient Near East (cf. the Nuzi tablets and the Code of Hammurabi §146, which provide direct parallels). Abram's fatherhood is uncontested; what is in question is the covenantal identity of this child.
The name Ishmael (Hebrew: Yišmāʿēl, "God hears" or "El hears") was given by the Angel of the Lord to Hagar in the preceding pericope (Gen 16:11): "the LORD has given heed to your affliction." That Abram now bestows this divinely disclosed name is significant — he acknowledges the theophanic encounter reported by Hagar and accepts the name as God-given. The act of naming in the ancient world constituted a claim of authority and relationship. Abram names the child, exercising paternal right, even as the name itself points beyond him to the divine initiative. There is no rejection here, no ambivalence in the text at this stage. Abram receives Ishmael fully.
Genesis 16:16 — "Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram."
The chronological notation is characteristic of the Priestly tradition's careful structuring of patriarchal history (cf. Gen 12:4; 17:1; 21:5), and it serves a precise narrative function: it establishes the gap between this birth and the later birth of Isaac, which occurs when Abram is one hundred years old (Gen 21:5) — a gap of fourteen years. This interval is not empty time. It is the long school of waiting in which the boundary between human effort and divine gift will be made unmistakably clear.
The repetition of the phrase "to Abram" at the end of Genesis 16:16 — "when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram" — mirrors the construction of verse 15 and brackets the unit as a self-contained record of legal paternity. The Septuagint and Vulgate both preserve this doubling, and St. Jerome's Vulgate renders it faithfully: et Agar peperit Abram filium vocavitque nomen eius Ismael. Octoginta sex annorum erat Abram quando peperit ei Agar Ismaelem. The Latin sustains the legal register of the original.