“The God who sees me”
So Hagar gave this name to the LORD who had spoken to her: 'You are the God who sees me,' for she said, 'Here I have seen the One who sees me!' (Genesis 16:13 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A pious exclamation from a minor character.
The cultural key
This quiet moment is remarkable on several counts. Hagar, an Egyptian slave-girl, pregnant, mistreated, and fleeing into the desert, is the lowest-status person imaginable, and yet she becomes the only figure in the entire Bible to give God a name: El-Roi, 'the God who sees me' (or 'the God who sees'). The name is born from her experience of being noticed by God when no one else cared, an abused, invisible servant discovers that the Creator has sought her out in the wilderness and sees her plight. The wordplay runs on 'seeing': the God who sees her, whom she has now seen and lived. That the naming of God is entrusted to a foreign slave woman, not to Abram or Sarai, is itself the point. A modern reader passes over a devotional line; the first hearers caught the scandal of the overlooked outsider naming God after His attention to her.
Recovered meaning
Hagar, a mistreated runaway slave, becomes the only person in Scripture to name God: El-Roi, 'the God who sees me.' The name is her discovery that God notices the invisible and abandoned.