Paul has just dared the Galatians who want to be under law to listen to the law (v. 21). Verse 22 is the evidence he produces, and everything in it is chosen for the argument that follows.

Three things carry the weight:

1. γέγραπται γὰρ ὅτι — the standard citation formula, but with ὅτι introducing a loose summary rather than a verbatim quotation. Paul is not quoting a verse; he is stating what the Genesis narrative, taken whole, records.
2. δύο υἱούς — Abraham in fact fathered eight sons in Genesis (Ishmael, Isaac, and six by Keturah, Gen 25:1-2). ‘Two’ is not a slip: Paul restricts the field to the two whose mothers’ legal status differs, because status is the whole point.
3. παιδίσκη / ἐλευθέρα — the two women are identified not by name but by legal condition, slave and free. Neither Hagar nor Sarah is named in this clause, and Sarah is never named in the entire allegory. Paul has converted a family narrative into a contrast of standing, which is exactly the contrast he has been running since 4:1-7 (heir vs. slave) and which he will drive to its conclusion in 4:31.

The rendering choices that matter are therefore: keeping the perfect γέγραπται as a standing verdict, keeping υἱούς as ‘sons’ rather than the softer ‘children,’ and refusing to substitute the names ‘Hagar’ and ‘Sarah’ for the status-words Paul actually wrote.

Built onbdag · na28

The perfect passive of γράφω is the fixed early-Christian formula for appeal to Scripture (Gal 3:10, 13; 4:22, 27; Rom 1:17; 1 Cor 1:19). The perfect is not a past tense: it reports a completed act of writing whose result stands in force at the moment of speaking. BDAG notes the documentary background — γέγραπται is the language of a contract or decree that remains legally operative.

Hence it stands written rather than ‘it is written’ where the register permits. English ‘it is written’ is idiomatic and preserves the timeless force, but it hides the perfect; ‘it was written’ would be positively wrong.

The ὅτι that follows is the point of interest. Paul’s usual practice with γέγραπται is either bare quotation (Gal 3:10) or ὅτι introducing verbatim words (Gal 3:13). Here what follows is not a Genesis sentence at all but Paul’s own summary of Gen 16 and 21. The ὅτι is therefore a plain complementizer — ‘that’ — reporting the content of Scripture rather than its wording. Nothing in Paul’s use of the formula requires verbatim citation; the appeal is to what the text records.

Built onbdag · bdf

The postpositive γάρ ties v. 22 to the challenge of v. 21 (τὸν νόμον οὐκ ἀκούετε; — ‘do you not hear the law?’). It must be rendered: the connective is the joint of the argument, and per the epistolary-particle rule an untranslated γάρ silently removes the claim that Scripture is being adduced as proof.

Note also that Paul uses ὁ νόμος in v. 21 in two senses within one sentence: first the law as the regime the Galatians want to enter, then the law as the Pentateuch that testifies against them. Verse 22’s γάρ depends on the second sense. The wordplay is deliberate and should not be smoothed by rendering one of them ‘Scripture.’

Built onbdf

δύο is a selection, not a census. Genesis gives Abraham eight sons; Paul names two. He is not misremembering — he has already worked through the Abraham narrative at length in ch. 3, and 4:24-31 shows detailed knowledge of Gen 16, 17, and 21. The restriction to two is the argumentative move: only Ishmael and Isaac have mothers whose legal status is contrasted in the text itself, and only those two are placed in a dispute over inheritance (Gen 21:10, quoted at Gal 4:30).

υἱούς is the load-bearing noun. Paul had τέκνα available and uses it later in the passage (4:25, 27, 28, 31); here he writes υἱός, the term he has been building since 4:5 (υἱοθεσία), 4:6 (τὸ πνεῦμα τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ), and 4:7 (οὐκέτι εἶ δοῦλος ἀλλὰ υἱός). Rendering it ‘children’ would be inclusive but would sever the chain, since it is sonship that carries inheritance in the argument of 4:1-7. The masculine is referential here — Ishmael and Isaac are male individuals — so no gender question arises.

ἔσχεν is a complexive aorist gathering the whole narrative into one statement: ‘had,’ or more woodenly ‘came to have.’

Built onbdag · bdf

Formally a diminutive of παῖς, but by the Koine period the diminutive force is spent and the word simply denotes a female slave. In the LXX it is the standard rendering of Hebrew שִׁפְחָה and אָמָה and is the word used of Hagar throughout Gen 16 and 21 — Paul is picking up the vocabulary of the source text, not coining a description.

The register question is real. Slave-girl keeps the diminutive shape and the servile status; slave woman is the more natural modern English and loses only the (spent) diminutive. What must not happen is a softening to ‘maidservant’ or ‘handmaid’: per the anti-prejudice and anti-anachronism rules, the ancient institution is translated at face value. Hagar is owned property, and the whole force of the passage — εἰς δουλείαν γεννῶσα (v. 24), δουλεύει (v. 25), ἔκβαλε τὴν παιδίσκην (v. 30) — depends on the reader hearing that.

Equally, the rendering should not amplify. παιδίσκη is a neutral status-term in Greek, not a term of abuse; the harshness in this passage comes from what Paul does with the status, not from the word.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

Substantival feminine of ἐλεύθερος: the free woman. English requires a supplied noun; bracket it in the literal tier.

The striking feature is that Sarah is not named — not here and not anywhere in Gal 4:21-31. Hagar is named twice (vv. 24, 25); Sarah never. Paul designates her only by legal standing, and that standing is what he then transfers: ἡ ἄνω Ἰερουσαλὴμ ἐλευθέρα ἐστίν (v. 26), and finally οὐκ ἐσμὲν παιδίσκης τέκνα ἀλλὰ τῆς ἐλευθέρας (v. 31), where again the noun is withheld. The Galatians are not told they are Sarah’s children; they are told they are the free woman’s children. Supplying ‘Sarah’ in the rendering would be helpful and would destroy the argument’s mechanism, which runs entirely on the slave/free axis rather than on genealogy.

So: keep the bare status-adjective in every tier, and let a note carry the identification.

Built onbdag

ἐκ + genitive of the mother is ordinary Greek for descent, and Paul has just used it of Christ four verses earlier: γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικός (4:4). The repetition is probably not accidental — the Son who came ἐκ γυναικός and ὑπὸ νόμον is the one who makes the ἐκ τῆς ἐλευθέρας line possible.

Render ‘out of’ in the wooden tier to display the preposition, ‘by’ or ‘from’ in smooth English. Do not substitute ‘through’ (that is διά, which Paul reserves for the promise at v. 23: διʼ ἐπαγγελίας) or ‘of’ alone where the maternal source is the point. Note that vv. 22-23 set up a deliberate prepositional contrast: both sons are ἐκ a woman, but one is κατὰ σάρκα and the other διʼ ἐπαγγελίας. Keeping the three prepositions distinct in English is what lets the reader see the contrast.

Built onbdf · bdag

The critical text is secure in substance. Two variations are worth recording.

First, ὅτι after γέγραπται is omitted by a number of witnesses. Its presence is the harder reading — a ὅτι introducing a non-verbatim summary invites deletion, and scribes accustomed to γέγραπται + direct quotation would remove it. NA28 prints it without brackets.

Second, the article and word order in the two ἕνα phrases show minor fluctuation in the later tradition, and some witnesses assimilate toward the fuller Genesis phrasing. None of it affects sense.

Third, the name Ἀβραάμ is spelled with a single or double alpha in various minuscules; this is orthographic only.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

There is no single verse being quoted. Paul is summarizing:

• Gen 16:1-4, 15 — Hagar, Sarai’s שִׁפְחָה (LXX παιδίσκη), bears Ishmael.
• Gen 21:2-3 — Sarah bears Isaac.
• Gen 21:9-10 — the conflict, and the demand ‘cast out this slave woman and her son,’ which Paul will quote directly at 4:30. That the LXX of Gen 21:10 uses παιδίσκη is why παιδίσκη rather than δούλη is the word here: Paul is already reaching for v. 30.

The Hebrew is worth noting for what Paul does not say. Genesis calls Hagar שִׁפְחָה (Gen 16:1) and אָמָה (Gen 21:10), and it calls Sarah nothing corresponding to ‘free’ — the ἐλευθέρα/παιδίσκη antithesis as a pair is Paul’s own framing, drawn from the Greco-Roman legal categories of serva and libera which every Galatian reader would have known cold. He is reading Genesis, accurately, through a legal-status lens the Hebrew does not itself supply.

Built onmuraoka-lxx · bdag

The Fathers took v. 22 as the neutral statement of fact on which the allegory of vv. 24-31 is built, and their interest is almost entirely in why Paul chose these terms.

John Chrysostom (Hom. in Gal. 4) presses precisely the point made above: Paul does not say ‘Sarah’ and ‘Hagar’ but ‘the free woman’ and ‘the slave woman,’ because the argument is about condition, not persons — and Chrysostom is emphatic that Paul is not disparaging the Old Covenant but exposing what the Galatians are choosing to re-enter.

Jerome, in his commentary on Galatians, is exercised by the ‘two sons’ against Genesis’ eight, and answers that Paul counts only those born of a wife and a slave-wife within the household, the Keturah sons falling outside the comparison. That is essentially the modern answer.

The Vulgate renders scriptum est enim quoniam Abraham duos filios habuit unum de ancilla et unum de libera. Note quoniam for ὅτι (preserving the complementizer), ancilla for παιδίσκη (a servile term, correctly), and de for both instances of ἐκ. Jerome does not name the women either — the Latin tradition preserved Paul’s reticence, and later vernacular translations that insert ‘Hagar’ and ‘Sarah’ depart from both.

Built onbdag

Verse 22 is the doorway into one of the most heavily used and most often misused passages in Paul.

Two translational disciplines follow. First, v. 22 itself makes no evaluative claim: it says only that Abraham had two sons by women of different status. The rendering must not import the verdict of vv. 24-31 into it. Second, the language of slavery here is legal and social, and per the anti-prejudice rule it is rendered at face value — neither softened into domestic-service vocabulary nor sharpened into invective. Paul’s harshness, where it comes, comes in v. 30, and it should arrive there rather than being distributed backward across the paragraph.

Built onbdag