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Rape and Abuse in the Bible

For this topic, I have been aware of the indifference that some men in the Bible have shown to women and how women were not really viewed as people at this time. Or how important it was to produce offspring at this time. It was just the culture that was prevalent. When Abraham was told by God that he was to be the father of many nations, he was shocked and wanted to take matters into his own hands because, at the time, Sarah and Abraham were not reproducing. It came to the point where Sarah believed that Hagar would be better suited to reproduce and fulfill the blessing that God had brought on Abraham. However, Hagar, the slave, was not consulted on this or asked her opinion about how she felt. This is an example of how the culture shaped their opinion. First, there is a part of slavery, they had people to do their work for them without pay. Then it is how they treat the slaves, basically like they aren’t even people, telling them what to do, and the slave has to follow no matter how they feel about the action they were told to do. Between Abraham and Hagar, they were able to bear a son, but soon after Sarah had a son with Abraham too. Now the question was, who is the first son of Abraham?
An interesting aspect of Reimagining Hagar is the visualization of how she looks. We know that she is the slave of Abraham and Sarah, but many people might have visualized her as black, but nowhere in any source of Biblical significance is she physically described as black. Is this a misconception of our culture, or inferred by some aspect of knowledge of slaves at this time?