Genesis 21 - Simple English

1The LORD came to Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did for Sarah what he had promised.

2Sarah became pregnant, and she bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the very time God had told him.

3Abraham named his son, the one Sarah bore to him, Isaac.

4Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him.

5Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.

6Sarah said, "God has made me laugh, and all who hear will laugh with me."

7She also said, "Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age."

8The child grew and stopped nursing. On the day Isaac was weaned, Abraham made a great feast.

9Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom Hagar had borne to Abraham, mocking.

10So she said to Abraham, "Send this slave woman and her son away. The son of this slave woman will not share the inheritance with my son, with Isaac."

11This troubled Abraham very much, because of his son.

12But God said to Abraham, "Do not be troubled about the boy and about your slave woman. Listen to Sarah's voice in everything she says to you, for your descendants will be named through Isaac."

13"I will also make a nation of the slave woman's son, because he is your offspring."

14Abraham got up early in the morning. He took bread and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar, putting them on her shoulder, and he gave her the child and sent her away. She left and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba.

15When the water in the skin was gone, she put the child under one of the bushes.

16Then she went and sat down across from him, a good way off, about as far as a bow can shoot. For she said, "Let me not watch the child die." So she sat across from him, and lifted up her voice and wept.

17God heard the voice of the boy. The angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven and said to her, "What is wrong, Hagar? Do not be afraid. God has heard the voice of the boy where he lies."

18"Get up, lift the boy up, and hold him with your hand, for I will make him a great nation."

19Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.

20God was with the boy, and he grew up. He lived in the wilderness and became an archer.

21He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother got him a wife from the land of Egypt.

22At that time Abimelech and Phichol, the commander of his army, said to Abraham, "God is with you in everything you do."

23"So swear to me here by God that you will not deal falsely with me, or with my son, or with my son's son. Show me the same kindness I have shown you, and show it to the land where you have lived as a stranger."

24Abraham said, "I will swear."

25Then Abraham complained to Abimelech about a well of water that Abimelech's servants had seized by force.

26Abimelech said, "I do not know who did this. You did not tell me, and I have not heard of it until today."

27So Abraham took sheep and oxen and gave them to Abimelech, and the two of them made a covenant.

28Abraham set seven ewe lambs of the flock by themselves.

29Abimelech said to Abraham, "What do these seven ewe lambs mean, which you have set by themselves?"

30He said, "You are to take these seven ewe lambs from my hand, so that they may be a witness for me that I dug this well."

31So he called that place Beersheba, because there the two of them swore an oath.

32So they made a covenant at Beersheba. Then Abimelech got up, with Phichol the commander of his army, and they went back to the land of the Philistines.

33Abraham planted a grove of trees in Beersheba, and there he called on the name of the LORD, the everlasting God.

34And Abraham lived as a stranger in the land of the Philistines for many days.