Yeah, well, I think the plan is going to be to just jump in.
I pulled out the concordance and wrote down every reference listed for 'desert' in the NIV and started looking them up.
I disregarded any that were purely geographical...IE, something describing boundaries that listed a desert. I was looking for primarily for stuff that happened in or because of a desert. It's kind of a slow process; I'm currently up to Numbers. It looks like the trip from Egypt to the Promised land is probably going to require multiple posts. I'll know what I want to do with that once I finish looking up all the references through Deuteronomy.
But, for today, I'm going to talk about the desert in Genesis. There are only 5 references...and 3 of them involve Hagar/Ishmael. That's kind of interesting.
First, Hagar ran away because Sarai, her mistress who had never been harsh to her, suddenly turned unreasonable. She made it as far as the spring by the road to Shur, in the desert (Gen 16:7).
I could probably camp right here., because the whole story of Sarai/Sarah and Hagar is very intriguing to me, and this is the incident that inspired the name of the whole blog, after all... but I'm going to try and focus on what happened in the desert...away from the oasis where there was some degree of security and comfort.
Look at the phrasing in verse 7 -- The angel of the LORD found Hagar. Ok, semantics...usually when the scripture says 'The angel of the LORD', it's generally accepted to mean a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus, as opposed to 'an angel from the LORD', which could be any of the heavenly host sent on a task. So we will go with that. It was Jesus, before he was Jesus... and he FOUND her. He wasn't out for a evening walkabout in the desert...he went to her on purpose. Looking for her. Seeking her. She was involved in a man's plan to bring about God's will...instead of God's plan...and yet God cared for her and sent her back. He could have let her die in the desert, and her child with her, to stop the division and conflict that had already started, but he didn't. It was Abraham's child, and he mattered; Hagar was a slave who may not even have been completely willing to play the surrogate mother role...and she mattered. He saved her life, but told her to change her attitude (...go back to your mistress and submit to her - vs.9) as it was her attitude that had provoked Sarai to treat her harshly. The Angel didn't condemn her for what she had done, but he did instruct her to do better.
So Hagar went back, with the promise that she would be the ancestress of descendants too numerous to count...and a puzzling, if not downright disturbing, prophecy about Ishmael. How well did she implemented her instructions? Well, she did at least superficially, anyway. But Ishmael grew up contrary. Sarah caught him doing something that disturbed her so deeply she asked Abraham to send him and his mother away. Abraham sought God on it and God confirmed Sarah's request.. So we see the next desert reference in 21:14 --
Early the next morning Abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the desert of Beersheba.
Hagar wandered until the skin of water was gone. She and Ishmael,who had to have been somewhere between 14 and 19 years old, were near death when the angel of God spoke to her again...this time, from heaven...and renewed the promise to make Ishmael into a great nation. Encouraged, Hagar suddenly perceived a nearby well, so she filled the skin, gave Ishmael a drink and they survived. They may have just hung out there in the vicinity of the well for a while; verse 20 tells us God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. We see in verse 21 that While he was living in the Desert of Paran, his mother got a wife for him from Egypt.
Hagar met God in the desert. She was desperate, and he found her there, called to her there. Ishmael made the desert his home. He learned to live there. God was with them, watching over them. He had promised Abraham to do so.
There are two more verses in Genesis that specifically reference the desert. In the list of the descendants of Esau, we find a guy named Anah, who was apparently something of a folk hero...
This is the Anah who discovered the hot springs in the desert while he was grazing the donkeys of his father Zibeon. (Gen 36:24) ...although the marginal reading says this could be interpreted 'discovered water' and the King James translates it 'found the mules'. Whichever it was, he was known for doing it when Genesis was finally written down. He found something in the desert so remarkable that folks talked about it for years and years and years.
Finally, for the final verse for our look at 'Desert' in Genesis, we have 37:22 -
"Don't shed any blood. Throw him into this cistern here in the desert, but don't lay a hand on him." Reuben said this to rescue him from them and take him back to his father.
This, of course, happens in the story of Joseph and his jealous brothers. I hadn't thought much about cisterns until going to Israel and seeing the extreme severity of the desert, and hearing of elaborate water works in various places so that any rainwater would be collected in cisterns. We saw some of the cisterns along the western wall excavations; we were told of the cistern system on Masada to insure there would be water on the plateau there. Cisterns were man-made covered pits, often with channels or canals that collected runoff from distant sources and brought the water to the cistern. Some were pretty amazing feats of engineering; but apparently they are quite common in the area...if you know what to look for. I poked around a bit online and found that the Nabataeans invented a waterproof cement well before the Romans that they used to line the cisterns they dug. In any case, the shepherds of a region would know the location of the cisterns so they would know where to find water as they moved the flocks around. It probably was no coincidence that Joseph found his brothers near a cistern, even though the cistern Joseph was thrown into happened to be empty at the time. Reuben wasn't there when Joseph was pulled from the cistern and sold as a slave, so his plan to rescue his half-brother didn't work out. But...Joseph's journey began in the desert. He couldn't know it, but he was on his way to becoming the second in command of Egypt.
One could, I suppose, argue the point that most of the area is desert-like, so any significant things would, of course, happen in the desert in those early years. But those things specifically happened away from settlements, away from civilization. The ESV translates the word 'desert' as 'wilderness', perhaps to emphasize the fact that this was more than just a dry spot...it was a dry, uninhabited place. A hostile place that could kill you if you didn't know what you were about or couldn't find water. Yet, in the desert...Hagar met God and was cared for; Anah found something remarkable, and Joseph began his journey to his destiny.
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