Hagar, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and why we cannot agree on what the Bible says about slavery

This article examines the history of interpretation of Hagar's story in Genesis 16 within debates over slavery through the narrative frame of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Drawing on modern literary genre theory, I propose that these different readings of Genesis 16 really begin as different conceptions about the kind of thing we are reading: its genre.