“You are now 9 pregnant
and are about to give birth 10 to a son.
You are to name him Ishmael, 11
for the Lord has heard your painful groans. 12
1 tn Heb “she will become nations.”
2 tn Heb “peoples.”
3 tn Heb “Let it not be evil in your eyes.”
4 tn Heb “listen to her voice.” The idiomatic expression means “obey; comply.” Here her advice, though harsh, is necessary and conforms to the will of God. Later (see Gen 25), when Abraham has other sons, he sends them all away as well.
5 tn The imperfect verbal form here draws attention to an action that is underway.
6 tn Or perhaps “will be named”; Heb “for in Isaac offspring will be called to you.” The exact meaning of the statement is not clear, but it does indicate that God’s covenantal promises to Abraham will be realized through Isaac, not Ishmael.
7 tn Or “she conceived.”
8 tn Heb “was.”
9 tn The particle הִנֵּה (hinneh) focuses on her immediate situation: “Here you are pregnant.”
10 tn The active participle refers here to something that is about to happen.
11 sn The name Ishmael consists of the imperfect or jussive form of the Hebrew verb with the theophoric element added as the subject. It means “God hears” or “may God hear.”
12 tn Heb “affliction,” which must refer here to Hagar’s painful groans of anguish.
13 tn Heb “look.” The particle הִנֵּה (hinneh) introduces the foundational clause for the imperative to follow.
14 tn Heb “enter to.” The expression is a euphemism for sexual relations (also in v. 4).
15 tn Heb “perhaps I will be built from her.” Sarai hopes to have a family established through this surrogate mother.
16 tn Heb “listened to the voice of,” which is an idiom meaning “obeyed.”
17 tn Heb “and the gift passed over upon his face.”
18 tn The disjunctive clause is circumstantial/temporal.
19 tc There are several variants at this point in the text, most of them involving the addition of προσλαβοῦ (proslabou, “receive, accept”) at various locations in the verse. But all such variants seem to be motivated by the harsh syntax of the verse without this verb. Without the verb, the meaning is that Onesimus is Paul’s “very heart,” though this is an awkward expression especially because of τουτ᾿ ἔστιν (tout’ estin, “this is, who is”) in the middle cluttering the construction. Nowhere else in the NT is σπλάγχνα (splancna, here translated “heart”) used in apposition to people. It is thus natural that scribes would want to fill out the text here, and they did so apparently with a verb that was ready at hand (borrowed from v. 17). With the verb the sentence is converted into an object-complement construction: “I have sent him back to you; accept him, that is, as my very heart.” But both the fact that some important witnesses (א* A F G 33 pc) lack the verb, and that its location floats in the various constructions that have it, suggest that the original text did not have προσλαβοῦ.
20 tn That is, “who means a great deal to me”; Grk “whom I have sent to you, him, this one is my heart.”