The point is not that he listened to her rather, it is that he listened to her without discernment of God’s counsel in the matter. Sensible husbands will always listen to their wives when their wives’ wisdom is greater than theirs.
Sarai was often wiser than her husband, and when she later suggests that Ishmael needs to be “cast out” of the home because of his disastrous influence on Isaac, God tells Abraham to listen to her (Gen. Abram listened to his wife - not in itself wrong, of course. Temptation is a hydra-like beast that attacks from many directions and methods. Two lessons emerge, the first of which concerns the nature and reality of temptation. The parallel is exacerbated by the identical use of two more verbs, “took” and “gave.” The suggestion is clear: Moses intends for us to see that Genesis 16 is a re-run of Genesis 3! A fall takes place in the life of the great patriarch. And Abram listened to Sarai’s suggestion that because of her infertility, Abram should sleep with her servant Hagar instead (for the purpose of conceiving a child). And in both instances, the men are said to have listened to their wives! Adam listened to Eve’s suggestion that eating of the tree that God had forbidden would bring rewards.
There is an interesting and devastating parallel in the way Moses recounts the tale of Adam’s fall in the garden of Eden and Abram’s lapse of faith in Genesis 16: both employ the phrase, they “listened to the voice of…” (Gen.
It is a tale of marital strife, of hobbling faith and catastrophic consequence. From it emerges a familial and ethnic strife that lasts to this very day. The birth of Ishmael, son of Abram and Hagar, is a tale that in some sense at least should never have been.
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