Sunday School: Hagar, Abram, the marital hall pass and the origin of the Tim Gunn Save
Monotheism did not start with monogamy, as we learn from Sarai and Abram in Genesis 16.
Deus ex machina. That lightning bolt written into the story that kills the enemy army before they invade the city. But for the lightning bolt, ruin was imminent.
Before there was a lightning bolt, or a Tim Gunn Save, there was the angel of the Lord in the Bible.
Genesis 16 tells the story of Hagar, an Egyptian woman, servant to Sarai.
Sarai and Abram — Abraham, before his Road to Damascus moment — were married and had no children.
“The Lord has kept me from having children,” Sarai says to Abram. “Go, sleep with my maid servant; perhaps I can build a family through her.”
Abram was granted the world’s first recorded marital hall pass. Shockingly, Sarai grew angry when Hagar got pregnant.
This is history’s first instance of a wife saying she was fine, being taken at her word, and getting mad because what she said is not what she meant.
“You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering,” Sarai told Abram, as her relationship with Hagar worsened.
“I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”
Abram wanted none of it, and said that was between servant and mistress. Sarai couldn’t control herself. She mistreats Hagar, and Hagar fled, never to be seen again.
Except, sometimes in life, a person deserves better than their story has given them. Sopranos creator David Chase re-cast Dan Grimaldi as Patsi Parisi in season 3 after killing off his twin, Philly, in season 2.
Chase liked the actor, realized he killed him off too early, gave himself a mulligan, and kept him around.
Grimaldi’s character stayed on the show through the end. But for that mulligan, we’d only have a few seconds of dialogue from him.
After many seasons, Project Runway created the Tim Gunn Save to make the show more interesting.
Now named for Gunn’s replacement Christian Siriano, the Tim Gunn Save allowed Gunn, the designers’ mentor, to keep one eliminated contestant per season in the competition.
The person who gets the Tim Gunn Save has to be eliminated twice. Everybody else gets one chance.
Just when you thought you were out, Tim Gunn pulls you back in.
In Genesis 16:7, we see the Biblical roots of the Tim Gunn Save.
After Hagar leaves Sarai, the angel finds her at a desert spring.
The angel asks: “Where have you come from, and where are you going?”
The angel and Hagar reach an understanding: she will return to Sarai, but through her son Ishmael, her “descendants will be too numerous to count.”
As for Ishmael, “he will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand will be against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”
But for the angel of the Lord, Hagar would be a passing mention. And not the mother of a people.
Deus ex machina is generally a storytelling failure. In Genesis 16, the failure was on Sarai and Abram to be basically decent. On Project Runway, failures of taste and focus.
For writers telling stories, it’s their pen that failed.