The Bible names twelve sons and a God who heard a crying boy. Assyrian scribes name desert tribes. Arab tradition names a people. Here is what each can tell you, and what none of them can.
Who are the descendants of Ishmael today? Nobody can say with genealogical certainty. The Bible lists twelve sons who became Arabian tribes, and Assyrian records confirm that some of those tribes were real.
Arab and Islamic tradition has long traced many Arabs, and the Prophet Muhammad's family, back to Ishmael. That is a tradition held with deep respect, not a lineage anyone can prove, and the New Testament never makes bloodline the point.
What follows is the evidence, a God who shows up for a mother and a boy in the desert, and two misreadings that need to be named.
In Genesis 17:20 God tells Abraham that Ishmael will be the father of twelve rulers and a great nation. Genesis 25 shows the promise kept, and the list reads like a map as much as a family tree.
“These are the names of the sons of Ishmael, listed in the order of their birth: Nebaioth the firstborn of Ishmael, Kedar, Adbeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Dumah, Massa, Hadad, Tema, Jetur, Naphish and Kedemah.”
Genesis 25:13 to 15Verse 16 calls them twelve tribal rulers "according to their settlements and camps." These are names of peoples and places as much as individual men, which is how ancient genealogies often worked.
Paired with Kedar in Isaiah 60:7 as a flock keeping people. Often linked with the Nabataeans who later built Petra, though the spellings do not match well and scholars still debate the connection.
The tents of Kedar appear in Psalm 120:5 and Song of Songs 1:5, and Isaiah 21:16 to 17 remembers its archers. Kedar is the name ancient scribes wrote down most often.
Most scholars place Dumah at the oasis of Dumat al-Jandal in northern Arabia and Tema at Tayma. Both were caravan oases.
Adbeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Massa, Hadad, Jetur, Naphish and Kedemah leave little behind. Jetur is sometimes tied to the later Itureans.
Genesis 25:9 adds that Isaac and Ishmael buried their father together. The brothers sermons love to set against each other stood at the same grave. For the wider story of the man they buried, see Abraham in the Bible.
Assyrian kings kept careful records of who paid them tribute and who fought them, and the Qedarites, the people of Kedar, show up again and again. The Livius overview of Qedar walks through the main references.
The Qedarites pay him tribute. Arabian tribes were part of the empire's political world, not legends on its edges.
He leads his armies against the Qedarites. They were strong enough to be worth a campaign.
He negotiates with Arab rulers over captured statues of their gods
Qedar and the Nebayot, the Nebaioth of Genesis, unite against Assyria. The first two names on Ishmael's list stand side by side.
The last king of Babylon spends about a decade living at the oasis of Tayma, the Tema of Genesis 25.
The records confirm that the names were real peoples in the right region at the right time. They do not, and cannot, draw an unbroken line from those tribes to any family alive today.
Twenty-six centuries of migration, marriage and conquest lie between Ashurbanipal and us. Anyone who tells you a particular modern nation is Ishmael's by blood is claiming more than the evidence can carry.
Classical Arab tradition divided the Arabs into two great families. The southern Arabs were traced to Qahtan, whom some writers identified with Joktan in Genesis 10. The northern Arabs were traced through a forefather named Adnan back to Ishmael.
Islamic tradition builds on this. The Qur'an honors Ishmael, Isma'il, as a prophet and describes him helping Abraham raise the foundations of the Kaaba in Mecca (Surah 2:127). Traditional genealogies trace the Prophet Muhammad's tribe, the Quraysh, through Adnan to Ishmael.
That tradition is held sincerely and deserves to be described accurately and respectfully. It is also tradition in the historical sense: the genealogies were written down many centuries after Ishmael, and historians cannot verify the early links.
The tradition itself says the southern Arabs come from a different line. Arab is a language and a culture shared by many peoples, not one bloodline.
Most Muslims in the world live outside the Arab world, in countries like Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Ishmael and Islam are not the same question.
Arabs were in Jerusalem at Pentecost and heard the gospel in their own language (Acts 2:11). Arabic speaking churches in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and the Holy Land have worshiped Jesus for many centuries. Arab Christians are our family.
For how the New Testament widens God's family, see who the Gentiles are today.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Before any tribe, map or tradition, Ishmael was a boy whose name meant something. His mother Hagar was an Egyptian slave, given to Abraham by Sarah to produce an heir, and she ran from mistreatment into the desert pregnant and alone (Genesis 16). The angel of the Lord found her by a spring.
Genesis 16:11. "You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery." The name joins the verb to hear with El, God. Every time someone called the boy, they said God hears.
Genesis 16:13. Hagar names the Lord "the God who sees me." An enslaved foreign woman is one of the very few people in Scripture who gives God a name.
Genesis 16:14. The spring is named Beer-lahai-roi after the encounter. We have a whole study on Beer-lahai-roi and what it meant to her.
Genesis 21. Years later, sent away a second time, the boy is dying of thirst under a bush, and God hears him too.
“God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, ‘What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation.’”
Genesis 21:17 to 18Then God opened her eyes to a well, and He was with the boy as he grew up. Ishmael stood outside the covenant line that ran through Isaac, and he was never outside God's care.
Some people read Hagar's story from the inside: used, discarded, told they were the wrong child. The text does not treat Hagar as a footnote. God goes looking for her twice, speaks to her by name, and hears a boy nobody else was listening to.
If that is where you are, let us pray with you. You are not beneath His notice.
“He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone's hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”
Genesis 16:12This is the verse most often dragged into conversations about Arabs and Muslims. Read in its setting, it is part of a promise to a runaway slave. The wild donkey, the onager, was the animal of the open steppe that nobody could harness, and Job 39:5 to 8 uses it as a picture of freedom from the driver's shout. Hagar has just fled slavery. She is told her son will be a man no one owns, living on his own terms at odds with the settled world around him.
Genesis 25:18 repeats the idea about his descendants, and the NIV footnote there notes the Hebrew can also be read "lived to the east of" their relatives.
Arabs and Muslims are hostile by nature because Genesis said so, and today's conflicts are Ishmael's curse playing out on a prophecy chart.
A promise of freedom to an enslaved mother about one man and his desert tribes, spoken by the God who had just heard her misery.
Using Genesis 16:12 as a statement about the character of Arab people or Muslims is wrong. It takes a line about one man and pins it on hundreds of millions of people, most of whom have no provable connection to Ishmael at all, and it gets used to excuse contempt for neighbors and whole nations.
We refuse the opposite error too. The verse does describe friction. Friction in one ancient family is not a destiny for any modern people.
And we will not cast any nation as a villain in an end times script. The end of the age prophecies were fulfilled in the first century, in the covenant transition that climaxed in AD 70. Nobody alive today is playing Ishmael's part in a prophecy chart.
Jesus is the full revelation of the Father, and He crossed ethnic lines on purpose: a Samaritan woman at a well, a Canaanite mother, a Roman centurion. Any reading of Genesis that makes us colder toward a people has not been read through Him.
Galatians 4 gets read as if Paul were ranking Arabs below Jews. He is doing nothing of the kind, and he tells you so.
“These things are being taken figuratively: The women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children who are to be slaves: This is Hagar. Now Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children.”
Galatians 4:24 to 25Hagar stands for the Sinai covenant and the Jerusalem of his own day. Sarah stands for the Jerusalem above. In his picture the enslaved line is the law keeping city, and the free children are Jewish and Gentile believers who belong to Christ. Nothing in it is a verdict on Arabs.
Gentile believers in Galatia being pressured to take on circumcision and the law of Moses. The background is laid out in when Galatians was written.
The old covenant and the Jerusalem of that generation, still standing when Paul wrote and destroyed in AD 70. Hebrews 8:13 says the old covenant was obsolete and would soon disappear. It did.
The inheritance comes by promise, through faith in Jesus, and it is open to every people. That is the Abrahamic covenant reaching its goal in the new covenant. A believer from Amman and a believer from Deer Park share one mother in Paul's picture.
In Galatians 4, what does Hagar stand for?
Galatians 4:24 to 25. Paul says the women represent two covenants, and Hagar corresponds to Mount Sinai and the present city of Jerusalem. The allegory surprises its readers on purpose: the law keeping city of his day, not a foreign nation, sits in Hagar's place.
So who are the descendants of Ishmael today? History says the Arabian tribes of Genesis 25 were real. Tradition says many Arabs are their heirs. Honesty says no one can prove the line.
In Jesus the promise to Abraham reached every family on earth. Nobody enters the Kingdom by bloodline, and nobody is shut out by one. The Kingdom is here now, and it has Arab believers in it who have been worshiping Jesus since Pentecost.
What stays constant is the character of God. He heard Hagar's misery. He heard a boy crying under a bush. He opened a mother's eyes to water. That is the Father Jesus revealed, and He has not stopped listening.
Related reading: why Malachi says God hated Esau, the Ishmaelite traders in Joseph in the Bible, and what we hold in what we believe. If you are on Long Island, come visit us.
The Bible names Ishmael's twelve tribal sons, Assyrian records confirm some of those tribes, Arab and Islamic tradition claims his line, no one can prove it by blood, and the God who heard Ishmael is revealed in Jesus as the Father of every family that comes to Him.
Maybe you have Arab or Muslim family or neighbors. Send your question or a prayer request and someone at Sound of Heaven will write back.
The Bible does not name a modern people. Genesis 25:12 to 18 lists Ishmael's twelve sons as tribal rulers who settled from Havilah to Shur, in the deserts east of Egypt. Kedar and Nebaioth appear in Assyrian records as real Arabian tribes. Arab and Islamic tradition traces many Arabs to Ishmael through Adnan. That is a respected tradition, but no one today can prove descent from Ishmael by genealogy, and the New Testament never makes bloodline the point.
Some Arabs trace their ancestry to Ishmael by tradition, and many do not. Classical Arab genealogy traced the northern Arabs through Adnan to Ishmael and the southern Arabs to Qahtan, a different forefather. Over thousands of years tribes migrated and merged, and Arab identity today is mostly language and culture. So it is fair to say Arab tradition claims Ishmael, and unfair to say every Arab is his descendant.
Islamic tradition says yes. Traditional genealogies trace the Prophet Muhammad's tribe, the Quraysh, back through a forefather named Adnan to Ishmael, and the Qur'an honors Ishmael as a prophet who helped Abraham raise the foundations of the Kaaba. Historians cannot verify the earliest links in that genealogy, which were recorded many centuries later. Christians can describe the tradition accurately and respectfully without claiming either to prove or to disprove it.
It pictures the onager, the wild donkey of the desert steppe that nobody could harness. Spoken to Hagar, an enslaved woman who had just fled, it promised her son a free life no one would own, lived at odds with the settled peoples around him. It describes one man and his desert tribes. Using it as a statement about the nature of Arabs or Muslims is a misuse of Scripture, and it is wrong.
Yes, again and again. God named him Ishmael, God hears, before he was born. In Genesis 17:20 God tells Abraham He will bless Ishmael, make him fruitful, and make him the father of twelve rulers and a great nation. In Genesis 21 God hears the boy crying in the desert, opens Hagar's eyes to a well, and stays with him as he grows. The covenant line ran through Isaac, and Ishmael was never outside God's care.