Biblion Bible Commentary
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Two Covenants
Galatians 4:24-26
24 These things contain an allegory, for these are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children to bondage, which is Hagar. · WEB
Paul says outright that he is reading the story allegorically, and the verb he uses for it occurs exactly once in Scripture.
These things contain an allegory. The verb is allegoreo G238, and it occurs one time in the New Testament — here. That single occurrence is worth holding onto, because it means the one place Scripture argues this way announces that it is doing so.
What follows is the reading. Two covenants: one from Mt Sinai , bearing children to bondage, which is Hagar. The slave mother stands for the arrangement that produces slaves.
Verse 25 makes the identification concrete and startling. This Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and answers to the Jerusalem that exists now, for she is in bondage with her children. A Jewish writer aligns Sinai and the present Jerusalem with the slave woman — the geography of his own inheritance placed on the side of bondage. Nothing in the letter is more provocative, and the target is not the city or the mountain but the system being urged on Galatia in their name.
Verse 26 supplies the counterpart: the Jerusalem that is above is free, which is the mother of us all. Freedom is given a genealogy, and the readers are told which mother they have.
The correspondence runs from persons to covenants to cities, and Paul does not extend it further. Hagar and Sarah are not decoded item by item, and the historical facts stand — the two sons were two real sons. What is claimed is a pattern with apostolic warrant behind it, and where such warrant is absent a narrative carries its plain sense.
held with reason What this mark means