Ishmael was after all Avraham’s first-born son and should have inherited two times what was slated for his half-brother. Only Ishmael was such an incorrigible person, who the wise Sarah fingered for a potential murderer of her son, he and his mother were asked to leave.

At Yitzhak’s weaning party, when he was either two or three years old, which made his older half-brother either 16 or 17 years old, who made jokes about his kid brother, the center of attention; and the wise Sarah, the greatest Jewish mother in history, saw him and a shudder likely ran down her spine. She had watched Ishmael grow up from birth and just as the Torah recorded, he turned out to be into a wild ass of a kid. Sarah foresaw that when she and her husband were gone, Ishmael was the type of person capable of murdering her son Isaac. So she said to husband Abraham, “They gotta go.”

Avraham resisted. The kindest man in the world, this was still is first-born son who had his good attributes.

But G-d told him, “Listen to your wife.” In this matter she sees more clearly precisely because this was his first-born son.

So Ishmael and his Hamitic mother Hagar were banished from the tents of Avraham and that had to be for Ishmael like having acid thrown in his face.

And in his bitterness and just general wildness he was profligate with the water given the two of them for the journey. And when it was all gone, because Ishmael and his mother were careless with it, and he is dying of thirst, now his mother abandons him. Walks away, leaves him under a bush to die and walks away because she couldn’t bear to see him suffer. In other words, her feelings were more important to her than the feelings of her dying son.

In any case, poor Ishmael: kicked out of the house by his father, deprived of his inheritance, abandoned in his hour of need by his own mother, this is one angry boy capable of anything…