The First Person in the Bible to Name God Was a Runaway Slave

Did you know the first person in the entire Bible to give God a name wasn't Abraham, Moses, or any patriarch — it was an Egyptian slave woman named Hagar, alone in the wilderness, running from her mistress?

The encounter is in Genesis 16. Sarai (later Sarah), unable to conceive, had given her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abram (later Abraham) as a surrogate. Hagar conceived. Sarai grew resentful and dealt harshly with her. Hagar fled into the wilderness.

By a spring on the road to Shur, the angel of the LORD finds her. He addresses her by name — "Hagar, Sarai's maid, where have you come from? where will you go?" He tells her to return to her mistress. He prophesies the birth of her son Ishmael, the founder of a great nation. The text then makes the Christophany identification explicit: this isn't merely an angelic messenger. The figure speaks in the first person with divine covenant authority: "I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be numbered for multitude" (16:10) — the same multiplication promise God had made to Abram.

Then Hagar does something no one in the previous fifteen chapters of Genesis had done. She gives God a name.

Genesis 16:13 — "So she called the name of the LORD who spoke to her, 'You are a God of seeing,' for she said, 'Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.'" The Hebrew is אֵל רֳאִי (El Roi) — literally "God of seeing" or "the God who sees me." She names the well too — Beer-lahai-roi, "the well of the Living One who sees me" (16:14).

Pause on who this is. Not Abraham. Not Moses. Not a priest. Not a prophet. Hagar — an Egyptian, a woman, a slave, a runaway, pregnant out of cultural disgrace, alone in the desert. Every category of "unseen" in the ancient Near East. And SHE is the first person in scripture to name God.

The name she gives Him isn't a title of power or majesty. It's pastoral. El Roi — the God who sees. The unseen one becomes the seeing one; the invisible one becomes the visible one. He saw her in the wilderness, and she named Him by what she had experienced.

Reformed exegetes (Calvin in his Genesis commentary, Bavinck in Reformed Dogmatics, more recently Vern Poythress) read the "angel of the LORD" appearances throughout Genesis as Christophanies — pre-incarnate appearances of the Second Person of the Trinity. If that reading is right, then the first person in all of Scripture to name God did so by encountering the pre-incarnate Christ in the wilderness, and the name she gave Him was: He sees me.

It's hard not to see this as the pattern Christ would continue: finding the marginalized, the unseen, the cast-off — and being seen, named, and known by them first. The Samaritan woman at the well. The hemorrhaging woman in the crowd. The blind beggar by the road. The same Christ. Same pattern. Hagar saw it first.

This is the seventh and final episode in the current Christophany mini-series — pre-incarnate appearances of Christ throughout the Old Testament.

📖 Passages: Genesis 16:1–16, Genesis 21:14–21, Hebrews 11:11