When God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the imperative is expressed haltingly. We read (Genesis 22:2): ‘Take, please, your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac’. Why doesn’t the text simply say, ‘Take, please, your son’? Curious about this circumlocution, the Sages elaborated on the dialogue between God and Abraham (B’reishit Rabbah 55:7):

‘And He said to Abraham, “Take, please, your son.”

Abraham: “I have two sons, and I do not know which of them you command me to take.”

God: “Your only son.”

Abraham: “The one is the only son of his mother, and the other is the only son of his mother.”

God: “Whom you love.”

Abraham: “I love this one and I love that one.”

God: “Isaac.”’

Abraham’s eldest son, Ishmael, may have already been expelled from the household with his mother, Sarah’s handmaid, Hagar (Genesis 21: 10ff.), but Abraham still has two sons, whom he loves. And although God instructs Abraham to ‘listen’ to Sarah, when she tells Abraham to ‘drive out this slave-woman and her son’… ‘for in Isaac shall seed be called for you.’ (21:10-12), the Eternal One has not forgotten Ishmael. Echoing Hagar’s earlier experience in the wilderness when she was pregnant, recounted in parashat Lech-L’cha (Genesis 16), we read that when the banished Hagar cries out in distress, ‘God heard the voice of the lad; and the messenger of God called to Hagar out of heaven and said to her: “What’s wrong Hagar? Do not fear; for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him fast by the hand, for I will make him a great nation.”’(21:17-18). Ishmael is not mentioned by name in Genesis 21; earlier, in Genesis 16, the messenger of the Eternal tells the pregnant Hagar that when she bears her child she shall call him, ‘Yishma’el, because the Eternal has heard your affliction.’ (16:11). Yishma’el means ‘God shall hear’. The Eternal One is the God of Ishmael as well as the God of Isaac, and so, Ishmael, too, receives a Divine promise.