COME AS A CHILD LESSON 68 HAGAR BECOMES KETURAH

(Written by Sheila Gail Landgraf)

So, the story hiding within the story is that Abraham married Keturah shortly after Isaac married Rebekah. 

 There is much fascination around the thoughts as to who Keturah really was.  It seems that Abraham was 140 when he married her; that would mean that they were husband and wife for thirty-five years, since Abraham died at a ripe old age of 175.  

We see Keturah mentioned in the scriptures of the Torah as the one Abraham married after Isaac’s wedding, as if she were a whole new person in the story, but many believe she had a past history with Abraham.  Some think she was actually Hagar with a new name. It seems that the Midrash also leans toward the theory that Hagar was Keturah, and her name was changed due to the fine qualities that she had developed over a lifetime of living on her own.
 

One has to stop here to remember that God changed the names of Abraham and Sarah, and it seems highly possible that this would also have been the case with Hagar.  Yet, none of this is explained exactly, so all we can do based on the solid scriptures is speculate.  It is almost as if things were deliberately vague regarding Keturah.  
 

In the questions around Keturah there is also that nagging question of whether or not Abraham actually married and/or divorced Hagar in the first place, or if she was simply a concubine and he just sent her away.

The Midrash teaches that Abraham DID divorce Hagar when he sent her away (which would indicate that he was actually legally married to her also.) It states that as she sat by the well and cried out to God that she demanded for God to look down on her shame and bring her justice.  This same story teaches that God heard her prayer and much later granted her this justice by speaking to Abraham after Sarah’s death and commanding him to take back his divorced wife, Hagar.
 

It is also hinted in the Torah scriptures and repeated in the Midrash that Isaac too actually initiated this action of his father’s remarriage.  The story notes that Isaac, having just married Rebekah, said to himself “I have taken a wife, while my father is without a spouse.  What did he decide to do about this?  He went and brought Keturah to Abraham.  The one who had inadvertently caused them to be separated in the first place, now brought them together again.  

This traditional teaching is based on Genesis 24:62 that reads “Isaac had just come back from the vicinity of Be’er-la-hai-ro’i”.  So; many think that it is highly possible that was when Isaac brought Hagar back to live with Abraham again, probably hoping she would keep him company and he would not be so lonely since Sarah had died.  We know that same area is where she had established a life when she left Abraham’s camp, and it was where she had been living for most of her days since her time with Abraham.  It was also where several of her experiences with God had taken place, and where her eyes had been opened, hence how the place had been given its name.  (Genesis 16:14)  A lot had happened to Hagar at this well.  Perhaps Hagar had learned even more by living beside this well than the scriptures tell us.  There seems to be a drastic change between the first woman we knew as Hagar and the woman we meet later named Keturah.  God had done a work in Hagar and this had changed her name.

Let’s ponder this and go a bit deeper with it.  When Abraham sent Hagar

and Ishmael away on the day of Isaac’s weaning, it is certainly very possible that he did give her a certificate of divorce.  Sarah had been very angry and wanted Abraham to be rid of this servant and her son forever.  She wanted it to be legal so there could be no question that Isaac was the only heir of Abraham.
 

Hagar was left alone in the wilderness to care for her son without anyone helping her for years and years.  Some think Abraham had mercy on her and sent her in the direction of the well, knowing that if she found water, she would be saved.  Still, she was lost and on her own without the identity of Abraham's name for years and years.  It is said that he sent help to her, but had promised Sarah that his foot would never step down from his camel on Ishmael’s property.  So when he visited with Ishmael, it was not inside Ishmael’s home.  It was by indirect contact or infrequent face to face encounters for many years.
 

Let’s even take these thoughts about Abraham and Hagar’s divorce a step further and ask another question:  Was this not a very similar situation to the time when God sent Israel away with a divorce and dispersed them into the world and they became lost without any sign of their true identity?
 

God had married Israel at Mt. Sinai on Pentecost when the cloud had settled over the mountain like a wedding canopy. God gave the people His covenant in writing on stone called The Ten Commandments.  Moses, acting in the place of the priest, had written out the marriage certificate, the Ketubah, containing all of the words, and all the people who had cleansed their clothes and consecrated themselves for two days, stood before God on the third day and agreed to this marriage covenant.   

The very first commandment was “thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”  No sooner were the words written down and read  aloud than the people were building and worshiping a golden calf.  They were committing spiritual adultery almost as soon as they took their wedding vows.  How did God chose to handle this?  Though His heart was broken, after many repeated episodes of the same thing, He gave these rebellious people a writ of divorce.  God cannot dwell with pagans.

We read about this in Jeremiah, Chapter 3.  The prophet speaks in parable and allegory to describe all of this.  He speaks of how Israel had been untrue to God by worshiping other gods.  The two parties had created a covenant together of the most serious kind.  It was an extension of the original covenant God had given to Abraham.  
   

A marriage contract is always based on compete faithfulness of both the bride and the groom.  This was a blood covenant.   Moses had built an altar of twelve stones to represent each of the twelve tribes.  He had read the contract aloud and sprinkled the people with half the blood of the sacrifices and poured the other half of the blood on the altar. 

In those days when a blood covenant was made it meant that if one party broke the covenant it was punishable by death (by the shedding of a party of the covenant’s own blood.)  Yet, serious as it was, in no time at all the people had broken the covenant.
   

The words “thou shalt have no other gods before me” were the same as a groom saying to his bride, “You will have no other husband but Me.”  When the people sinned by worshiping the idol of the golden calf, they committed spiritual adultery.  They were untrue to God.  They lost their purity before Him.  This broke the covenant with God and ended the marriage.  At that point, the people were doomed to die for their sin of adultery and rebelliousness.

How odd to think that the God of Heaven had married a harlot, but that was the case with Israel!
 

We could stay within the bounds of our present story and look at Abraham and Hagar and say “How odd that Abraham would have married an Egyptian slave girl who would eventually rebel against his household!  He divorced her and sent her away when she was rebellious against his house.  Hagar and Ishmael had treated Sarah and Isaac grievously.  Her own rebellion had caused her divorce.
 

The story of Hagar and Abraham continues to reflect the story of God and Israel.  It is not the story of Isaac.  Isaac represents the people who did not rebel against God in spiritual adultery.  It is about another son, the son of Hagar who was very different from the son of Sarah.  Ishmael was wild and rebellious.  Ishmael paid no attention to the laws and rules of Abraham’s household even though when he was but a young boy God had given him mercy and saved him beside a wellspring of water.  Ishmael remained rebellious, but it seems that Hagar had begun to change.

Hagar wandered in the circumstances that Abraham had decided for her until she came to rest by a well where God spoke to her and satisfied her thirst as well as the thirst of her son.  This nourishment from the water of the well and the words from heaven to her here in this place made her realize her worth as a child of God.  Miracles can do that for all of us.  Sometimes things just happen that we know were impossible without God’s total intervention, and those things tend to strengthen our belief and help us to hold on until we are spiritually stronger and able to overcome our circumstances.

  

There at the well provided by God, Hagar found her purpose and destiny.  She became the woman that God had intended for her to be all along.  Her circumstances helped her to understand need and suffering.  This developed a trait of compassion and love for others that had not come naturally to her before.  Now that she had known thirst, she shared the precious water from the well with all those passing by, and they maintained life from it and were grateful.  They paid her good wages for this water and Hagar began to support herself and her son from the bounty of the one good thing that God had given them of their own.
 

We all have one thing in our lives that we know is our greatest blessing from

God.  Usually when we become grateful for that one thing and turn it completely over to God, He multiplies that one thing into a way for us to become survivors and over-comers in a hard, cold and uncaring world.  For people of God living in the modern world today, a way to over-come tribulation and survive is critical.  It is a trait we must learn from Hagar.  We must find out and understand how she came to be Keturah.  Keturah was a woman who was prepared to become a bride.
 

God's love gives our hearts the capacity to grow and reach out to those who have even more needs than we do.  In this unselfish act, we begin to find our blessings and we cultivate love.  That is exactly what had happened to Hagar as she waited by the well and tended to her son.  That is the very thing that turned her into Keturah.  She developed compassion and love for all of mankind.  She forgave Sarah and Abraham for putting her into circumstances beyond her control.  She did not question God's destiny for her life any longer, and she began to fulfill the true destiny that God had designed especially for her to be.
 

A whole new woman appeared; one much different than the one that had left the home of Abraham so many years ago.  The change from Hagar to Keturah prepared her to become acceptable as Abraham’s wife again.
 

So it seems that after the death of Sarah Abraham found Hagar again, after many years of not knowing her, and he saw how beautiful she had become, both inside and out.  It was said by the people in the land that her deeds were as pleasant as incense, and that is part of the meaning of her new name.  Where she once had been bitter and harsh Abraham now saw her kind ways.  He saw that she had not neglected her only son, but had raised him to be strong.  He was amazed at the business woman that she had grown to be, smartly buying and trading with the merchants that came and went through the land, always selling them the right to use the water in her well; but always keeping the well for her livelihood.  Some think that she also sold spices to the merchants that she had grown and cultivated in her garden, but the well was her main source of income.  Even her garden was watered by it. 

Let’s not forget – it was Abraham’s well.  He never took it from her, but let her use it freely and this provided a living for her while she was away from him. (Does this remind you of  how God sent The Holy Spirit to His people when Jesus had to go back to Heaven?)  

Hagar/Keturah had become quite wealthy and prosperous, and she had kept herself moral and pure.  She had never even looked in the direction of another man after her relationship with Abraham.  She had very strong strong morals and very high standards.  She had made it on her own, with God’s help.  She had relied on no other man to solve her problems and had risen above her harsh circumstances with dignity and grace.  Abraham recognized this change of character and admired the very valuable woman that she had become.  He saw so many new qualities that had come to take root in her life since the days of the Egyptian slave girl from so long ago.  This totally different woman had a new name.  Hagar was gone.  Now they called her Keturah.  So Abraham remarried Keturah and they had six sons.

  

There is another story about a prophet named Hosea that had an experience with a rebellious wife.  Like Abraham’s marriage to Keturah, his marriage was also a picture of God’s marriage to Israel, only an even better comparison.  

Hosea and Gomer (his wayward wife) had three children.  Gomer went out and committed adultery and eventually she found herself standing in the slave market shamefully waiting to be sold as a slave.  God instructed Hosea to go find her and redeem her.  Hosea did this and redeemed her for fifteen shekels of silver and one-half an omer of barley.
  

In a similar fashion, God instructed Yeshua to go find the lost sheep of Israel and to redeem them.  He did this.  He bought them back from the slave market of sin for thirty shekels of silver and his own flesh and blood.

When we read of the death of Abraham, who died at 175 years old, we see a picture of Isaac and Ishmael burying their father together.  How very strange to know that the two sons who were kept apart during the life of Abraham came together in the death of Abraham.  We had a hint of this reconciliation when Isaac brought Keturah back to Abraham after Sarah died.  Maybe this reconciliation of the two sons came even before Abraham died, perhaps some time after the Akadah?  We do not know exactly when, but now we see two very different men coming together in peace in order to bury their father.

 Some believe that in his old age Abraham had worked very hard to reconcile the two grown men to one another as brothers.  Perhaps as he grew older and older Abraham did not want to die with the thought that the two that he loved most on earth were enemies, and this situation had been partially of his own making; because he had divorced Hagar and separated them.
  

When Isaac and Ishmael come together in grief over losing their father, we are reminded of the split between the tribes of Israel that happened much later in history, where the ten tribes were separated from the two tribes and both groups, once separated. wound up being exiled to different places, with ten tribes totally losing their identity within the family of Israel and only two tribes eventually returning from exile to Jerusalem.
 

Many today believe that one day these two parts of the nation of Israel will rediscover their identity as one family and re-unite in the power of The Holy Spirit under a shared belief that Yeshua is Messiah and the true Son of God.  A day may come where they will honor their Father and become One again. 

We know that it is promised that Yeshua,  like the shadow we see of Isaac in our story, will bring His family together once more; and Israel will again become one with God.  It is a day we all hope and pray for, a day when we will all find the peace of God that has been so elusive for so long.  
  

Will that time be like the time at the end of Abraham's life?  Will it too be a long slow process with many twists and turns?  Will it take that long for two brothers of one Father to become friends again and agree on the truth of their family history?

But wait….God had divorced Israel, at least the scriptures indicate that He divorced all but the tribe of Judah.  How could these two divided pieces of one nation ever reunite again?  It would break God’s own law. 

Abraham was able to remarry Keturah (Hagar who had changed), but she had remained faithful and had not gone after other men.  We know that the reason the lost sheep were divorced from God in the first place was that they were committing spiritual adultery, or they were worshiping idols and using pagan practices in their lives.  God could not endure this, hence the writ of divorce.  

It is said in God’s own law (Deuteronomy 24: 1-4), in the Ketubah that was given at Sinai, the document that contained the ten commandments for all to follow on the wedding day; that a man could not remarry a woman he had divorced if she had been wed to another, even if that person died.  

The only way for God to be able to legally remarry the lost sheep of Israel would be for Him to die, thus ending that part of the covenant.  (A covenant that was broken only ended with the death of one party of the covenant.)   If God died and was resurrected to new life it would then be possible for Him to remarry those of Israel that He had previously divorced.  That is exactly what happened.
 

Wonder of all wonders, there was a way and it was legal!  Romans 7:2-3, written in the words of Paul explains it:

“For a woman who has a husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he lives, but if her husband be dead she is loosed from the law of her husband.”

If the first husband dies, the woman would be free to marry another man, even if she had been married to someone else in the meantime (spiritual adultery.)  We know the first husband of Israel was God, and we know He gave most of Israel a writ of divorce.  We know a portion of Israel has been lost and wandering around in the wilderness of the world for years and years (like Hagar) not even realizing their true identity any more.  We also know the only way that God could legally remarry these “lost sheep” was to die first and then be resurrected to new life.
 

That is just what happened!  This was exactly what took place when God came as Jesus Christ and gave His life on a cross for the redemption of sins.  When that happened the lost ten tribes were legally free to remarry if they chose to do so.  

It was Jesus who died, but Yeshua and God are One, are they not?  God paid for His Bride with His life.  He separated a part of himself to come to earth to live in the flesh so that He might live and die for His Bride, Israel to be made whole again.  

Once Israel is made whole, the Gentiles may also be saved by the atonement of this same precious blood of Christ.  In this act the Son reconciled the Father back to his original wife, and it was completely legal and in keeping with the Law.   The first marriage, the one to Sarah was still in tact, but she had died making it legal for God to marry again.  The second marriage to Hagar had received Sarah's blessing, but it had not been God's will.  It was ended with the death of God and made new through the Resurrection.  Jesus said "I make all things new."  It is still the same Ketubah, or marriage contract with a new and deeper covenant and commitment and now, this time,  the bride has a choice.  She is free, no longer a slave.  She can remarry if she chooses to do so. 

Now the decision is in the former wife’s court.  Will she come back to be reconciled with her husband?  God allows for free will.  Will she work with her first and true love to bring ALL under the cloud of covering, the wedding canopy of God?  Will the Bride chose the Groom and start to prepare herself  for the next wedding?  Two thousand years have ticked off from the clock in order for us to come to the time of this decision.  Is the bride becoming prepared?  Is she ready?  In the first wedding the bride spent two days getting ready, washing her clothes and consecrating herself to meet God.  On the third day the wedding took place.  We are approaching the third day of humanity on this earth after the death of Christ on the cross.  Is the bride ready?  Yeshua is going to return!

Yes, it is true that Yeshua came to bring ALL men to God, but He came FIRST

to the lost sheep of Israel.  Until God’s household was in order again the whole family could not be complete and legal.  Because Israel had sinned and caused a divorce to happen Yeshua now had to die to make this remarriage possible.  He has now been resurrected into new life, and He is waiting on his Bride to be ready.

Do you see how much of this story is like the story of Abraham and Hagar/Keturah?  They had already been married once before and were divorced.  Hagar was sent away never to return. Things looked pretty hopeless.  Hagar had gone back to Egypt and back to her old pagan ways for a while, but these things had died in her heart because she had seen the truth right there beside the well and she knew of God.  She remembered how she had lived  in God's ways with Abraham’s house under the covenant blessings, and she once again decided on her own accord to return to the ways of God in her life; only this time she kept God’s laws from within her heart instead of just because that was the proper thing for a servant to do in Abraham’s house.  She was free to make a choice and she made the RIGHT choice.  This is what turned her into Keturah!  This is what made her ready to be reunited with her husband.   

It was like God had been preparing her heart to be re-united with her former husband all along.  His son initiated this and encouraged their reconciliation.  Once the father was again happily married the son could go on with his life and live out the purposes that God had planned for him.
    

This is just a small portion of all the essence of what is contained in the few small paragraphs of scripture that we know of Abraham’s remarriage to Keturah.  Perhaps we will hear of them again later as we now go back and continue to study the love story of Rebekah and Isaac.  Whether we do or not, just know that Abraham died a happy man having lived a fulfilling life before God.  

We hear that at the end of his life Abraham came with the fullness of his days and was gathered to his people.  How many times do you hear of such a happy ending?   And the best part of all is that Abraham's ending, just like any child of God, was only his new beginning in eternity.