Is The Biblical Story of Ishmael Fabricated ?
Genesis 21:14-21 tells of the story. When Isaac was to be weaned (5 years old), Sarah noticed Ishmael (19 years) poking fun at her son (poking fun doesnt simply mean childish play but bible references means persecuting!). So Sarah, perceiving danger for her son, urged Abraham to drive out the slave girl and Ishmael. Ishmael’s name, “God heard” his cry for help, provided the necessary water, and allowed him to live to become an archer. As a nomadic inhabitant of the Paran Wilderness, he fulfilled the prophecy that said of him: “He will become a zebra of a man. His hand will be against everyone, and the hand of everyone will be against him; and before the face of all his brothers he will tabernacle.” (Ge 21:17-21; 16:12) Hagar found an Egyptian wife for her son, and he in time fathered 12 sons, chieftains and family heads of the promised “great nation” of Ishmaelites. Ishmael also had at least one daughter, Mahalath, who married Esau.
You are right The new american bible has admitted it already: 14 Early the next morning Abraham got some bread and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. Then, placing the child on her back, he sent her away. As she roamed aimlessly in the wilderness of Beer-sheba, 2 Placing the child on her back: the phrase is translated from an emended form of the Hebrew text. In the current faulty Hebrew text, Abraham put the bread and the waterskin on Hagar’s back, while her son apparently walked beside her. This reading seems to be a scribal attempt at harmonizing the present passage with the data of the Priestly source, in which Ishmael would have been at least fourteen years old when Isaac was born; compare ⇒ Genesis 16:16 with ⇒ Genesis 21:5; cf ⇒ Genesis 17:25. But in the present Elohist story Ishmael is obviously a little boy, not much older than Isaac; cf ⇒ Genesis 15:18.
