Paul has just made an astonishing claim: the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother (v. 26). Verse 27 supplies the scriptural warrant — a verbatim quotation of Isaiah 54:1 LXX, introduced with his standard formula γέγραπται γάρ (‘for it stands written’).

Three things carry the weight:

1. The citation is exact. Paul quotes the whole of Isa 54:1 LXX word for word, with no alteration. He does not need to bend the text; the Greek already says what he needs.
2. The barren woman is the point. Isaiah 54 follows immediately on the Servant’s death (Isa 53) and addresses exiled Zion as a childless, deserted wife who will nonetheless out-populate the woman with a husband. Paul reads that reversal as the pattern of the gospel: the community that looked to have no future — Gentile believers with no Torah pedigree — is the fruitful one.
3. The vocabulary loops back. ὠδίνω (‘be in birth-pangs’) in the quotation is the same verb Paul used of his own labor over the Galatians eight verses earlier (v. 19), and τέκνα is the word he applies to them in v. 28. The quotation is not an ornament; it is stitched into the argument.

The hardest interpretive question is what Paul takes the unnamed second woman to be. The Isaianic contrast is desolate Zion vs. married Zion; in Paul’s allegory the Hagar/Sinai/present-Jerusalem line has the visible standing, and the free woman above has the children. He leaves the identification implicit, and this apparatus does not supply it for him.

The perfect passive γέγραπται is the standard Jewish-Greek citation formula. The perfect matters: not ‘it was written’ (a past act of composition) but ‘it stands written’ — the completed act has a standing, binding result. Paul uses it seven times in Galatians (3:10, 13; 4:22, 27), each time to close an argument rather than open one.

γάρ grounds v. 26. Per §10 the connective is rendered, never dropped: the logic is the Jerusalem above is our mother — because Scripture says the barren woman has the children.

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Paul’s Greek reproduces Isa 54:1 LXX exactly:

Εὐφράνθητι, στεῖρα ἡ οὐ τίκτουσα, ῥῆξον καὶ βόησον, ἡ οὐκ ὠδίνουσα, ὅτι πολλὰ τὰ τέκνα τῆς ἐρήμου μᾶλλον ἢ τῆς ἐχούσης τὸν ἄνδρα.

The only difference from the LXX manuscripts is that the LXX continues (‘said the Lord’), which Paul drops.

The Hebrew (BHS) reads: רָנִּי עֲקָרָה לֹא יָלָדָה פִּצְחִי רִנָּה וְצַהֲלִי לֹא־חָלָה כִּי־רַבִּים בְּנֵי שׁוֹמֵמָה מִבְּנֵי בְעוּלָה אָמַר יְהוָה.

Points of contact and divergence:

• רָנִּי (‘cry out for joy’) → εὐφράνθητι (‘be glad’). The LXX shifts from vocal shout to inner gladness, and then compensates by keeping the shouting in ῥῆξον καὶ βόησον.
• פִּצְחִי רִנָּה (‘break out in a ringing cry’) → ῥῆξον with the object dropped. The Greek is elliptical; English must either supply a bracketed object or accept ‘break out.’
• שׁוֹמֵמָה (‘desolate, laid waste’) → ἡ ἔρημος. Same semantic field.
• בְעוּלָה (‘married one’, lit. ‘one owned/possessed [by a husband]’) → ἡ ἔχουσα τὸν ἄνδρα — a periphrasis, since Greek has no single participle for the Hebrew passive.

Critically, the LXX gives Paul a text that is already about children and mothers in the plural, which is precisely what his Sarah/Hagar allegory needs. Nothing in the Hebrew resists this; the two-mother reading is native to Isaiah 54 in either language.

Paul is arguing from Genesis (vv. 22–23, 30) but proves his case from Isaiah. The move is not arbitrary.

Isaiah 51:2 has already named Sarah as the mother of the nation, and Isaiah 54:1 addresses Zion in exactly Sarah’s terms — barren, then unexpectedly fruitful. The prophetic tradition itself had drawn the line from the barren matriarch to the desolate city. Paul is following a connection Isaiah made, not inventing one.

And the placement in Isaiah matters: 54:1 comes directly after the Servant’s suffering and vindication (52:13–53:12). The barren woman’s fruitfulness is the result of that death. For Paul, whose whole letter turns on Christ’s crucifixion (2:19–21; 3:13), the sequence is not incidental.

Εὐφράνθητι is aorist passive imperative, but passive form here carries intransitive-inceptive force: ‘be glad, come to gladness’ — not ‘be made glad by someone.’ This is standard for verbs of emotion in Koine.

The verb is heavily LXX-liturgical: it renders שָׂמַח and רָנַן across the Psalter (Ps 31:11; 96:11) and is the standard call to festal rejoicing. It is a summons to celebrate, not a description of a mood.

English options: ‘rejoice’ would be the natural word, but the corpus glossary already binds χαίρω → ‘rejoice’ (a decision made across Philippians), and εὐφραίνω must remain distinguishable. ‘Be glad’ is therefore adopted, with ‘rejoice’ reserved for the χαίρω family.

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στεῖρα is a feminine adjective used substantivally — ‘barren [woman].’ The cognate σταῖρος/στέριφος family denotes sterility in animals and humans alike.

In the LXX it is the word for the childless matriarchs and for the women whose barrenness God reverses: Sarah (Gen 11:30), Rebekah (Gen 25:21), Hannah (1 Kgdms 2:5), Samson’s mother (Judg 13:2-3), and Elizabeth (Luke 1:7, 36 — where Luke uses the same term). The word is thus not merely clinical; in biblical Greek it carries a whole narrative pattern of divine reversal.

The vocative here is the bare stem. Render ‘barren woman’ rather than ‘barren one’ (too coy) or ‘childless woman’ (loses the LXX concordance link).

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Article + present participle in apposition to the vocative στεῖρα. Two features:

1. Nominative for vocative. The article ἡ and the participle are nominative, standing in apposition to a vocative. This is regular in LXX and NT Greek under Semitic influence (BDF §147) and needs no correction. English renders with ‘you who…’.

2. οὐ, not μή, with the participle. μή is the ordinary participial negative in Koine; οὐ is therefore marked and negates as a matter of asserted fact rather than as a condition or qualification (BDF §430). Isaiah is not saying ‘should you happen not to bear’ but ‘you, who as a matter of fact do not bear.’ The barrenness is stated flatly, and the summons to gladness comes anyway.

The present tense is durative: an ongoing state, not a single failed birth. Per the corpus glossary the οὐ/μή distinction is noted rather than rendered with an English emphasis word.

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ῥῆξον (aorist imperative of ῥήγνυμι) means ‘tear, burst, break.’ Its object has dropped out: the Hebrew has פִּצְחִי רִנָּה, ‘break out [in] a ringing cry,’ and the LXX translator kept the verb but not the noun. So the Greek reads, baldly, ‘break!’ — and the reader supplies the cry from the following βόησον.

This is a genuine ellipsis in the source and per §4 it is displayed rather than repaired: the literal tier reads ‘break forth’; a bracketed ‘[into a cry]’ belongs in the study tier, not the reading text.

βόησον (βοάω) is loud public outcry — the verb of the herald (Isa 40:3 LXX, quoted at Mark 1:3) and of the crowd. Not speech, not song: volume. ‘Shout aloud’ over ‘cry out,’ which in modern English has drifted toward distress.

The two aorists are complexive, viewing the act as a whole. English imperatives carry this naturally.

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ὠδίνουσα, ‘being in birth-pangs.’ The verb (from ὠδίν, ‘labor pain’) is specific to the pains of childbirth and is used metaphorically in the LXX for the anguish of judgment and of new creation (Isa 26:17-18; 66:8; Mic 4:10).

The link to Gal 4:19 is deliberate and load-bearing: τέκνα μου, οὓς πάλιν ὠδίνω — ‘my children, over whom I am again in birth-pangs.’ Paul has cast himself as a woman in labor eight verses earlier, and now quotes a text addressed to a woman who is not in labor and yet has more children than the one who is. The Greek makes the connection audible; English must too. Hence ‘in labor’ / ‘in birth-pangs’ at both places, never ‘travail’ at one and ‘labor’ at the other.

Live metaphor per §8 — the bodily image is the force of it, and abstracting to ‘suffering’ or ‘struggling’ discards what the reader needs.

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ἔρημος substantivized in the feminine. The trap is that the same word, substantivized in the feminine with γῆ or χώρα understood, ordinarily means ‘the desert, the wilderness’ (Matt 3:1; Luke 4:1) — and Paul has just been talking about Sinai and Arabia (v. 25).

But here it renders Hebrew שׁוֹמֵמָה, the feminine participle of שׁמם, ‘be desolate, laid waste,’ used of an abandoned woman (cf. 2 Sam 13:20 of Tamar). The referent is a person, not a place: the deserted wife of Isa 54:1, 6 (‘a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit’). The parallel with τῆς ἐχούσης τὸν ἄνδρα settles it — the contrast is between two women’s marital standing, not between a wasteland and a household.

Render ‘the desolate woman.’ ‘The desolate one’ is acceptable; ‘the deserted wife’ over-specifies by supplying a relation the Greek leaves implicit; ‘the wilderness’ is simply wrong here, though the accidental resonance with Sinai in v. 25 is worth noting as a happy feature of Paul’s Greek rather than as evidence for a geographical sense.

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A nominal sentence with the copula elided: πολλά is a fronted predicate adjective, τὰ τέκνα the articular subject. Not ‘the many children’ (attributive) but ‘many are the children’ (predicative) — the fronting is the emphasis and must be preserved in English word order where possible.

Per the corpus policy on elided copulas, ‘are’ is supplied once and bracketed in the literal tier.

τέκνα stays ‘children’ rather than ‘sons.’ Paul has υἱοί available and uses it repeatedly in this chapter (vv. 6, 7, 22, 30) where sonship and inheritance are the point; τέκνον is relational and affectionate, and the quotation’s τέκνα is picked up in v. 28 (ἐπαγγελίας τέκνα ἐστέ). Keeping the two Greek words distinct in English lets the reader see Paul moving between them.

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μᾶλλον ἤ after the predicate adjective πολλά is pleonastic by classical standards: πολλά is not itself comparative, so strictly ‘many … than’ is ungrammatical Greek. It is translation Greek — the LXX rendering Hebrew comparative מִן (מִבְּנֵי בְעוּלָה, ‘than the children of the married woman’) by piling up a comparative adverb and a comparative particle.

BDF treats this as characteristic Septuagintal Greek rather than error. The reader should be able to see it: the literal tier keeps ‘more than,’ which is slightly redundant in English after ‘many are the children’ — and that mild awkwardness is the correct amount of awkwardness.

What the comparison asserts is a greater number, not a superior quality. Do not render ‘better than’ or ‘rather than.’

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‘The one having the husband.’ Two details.

The article τόν. Not ‘a husband’ but ‘the husband’ — the definite article marks a specific, recognized marital relation. Some read it as generic (Greek can use the article for a class), but the contrast is sharper if it points to the acknowledged husband the other woman lacks. Either way the article is retained in English; dropping it flattens the antithesis.

ἀνήρ = ‘husband.’ In this construction ἀνήρ is the marital term, not ‘man’ generically (which here would be ἄνθρωπος). The Hebrew בְעוּלָה makes this certain: a woman ‘possessed’ in marriage. Per §3 the grammatical gender is not in question; the referential sense is spousal.

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ὅτι here is causal (‘because’), not recitative and not complementary. It gives the ground of the fourfold imperative: be glad, break out, shout — because the desolate woman’s children are many.

This matters for how the verse is read theologically. The summons to joy is not a bare command to feel differently about the same facts; it rests on an asserted state of affairs. Rendering ‘for’ is acceptable in liturgical register; ‘because’ makes the grounding explicit in the reading text, per §10.

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The verse is textually stable in the Greek tradition. NA28 prints it without a variant unit in the main apparatus.

Minor scribal activity worth naming:

• Some witnesses add λέγει κύριος (‘says the Lord’) at the end, harmonizing to the full LXX text of Isa 54:1. This is plainly secondary — assimilation to the source, the commonest kind of scribal expansion in a citation. Paul stopped short of the formula.
• A few witnesses read ῥῆξον καὶ βόησον with the order or an added object; again, smoothing of an elliptical construction.
• The spelling στεῖρα / στείρα varies with no semantic consequence.

The stability is itself worth registering: because the text Paul quotes is a well-known LXX verse, scribes had an obvious template to conform it to, and the fact that the tradition largely resisted doing so (beyond the λέγει κύριος addition) is a small piece of positive evidence for careful transmission here.

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Chrysostom (Hom. in Gal. 4) takes the barren woman as the Church of the Gentiles: she had no Torah, no covenant lineage, no visible ground for hope — and yet her children outnumber the synagogue’s. He presses the paradox: the command to rejoice is addressed precisely to the one who by every ordinary measure has nothing to rejoice about.

Jerome (Comm. in Gal.) reads the desolate woman as the Church and the woman with the husband as the synagogue under the law, and notes the Isaianic setting after the Servant’s passion — the fruitfulness follows the cross.

Augustine treats the two women as the two cities and reads Isa 54:1 as prophecy of the heavenly Jerusalem’s fecundity; the Enarrationes repeatedly pair Isa 54:1 with Gal 4:26-27.

What all three share is a reading in which the reversal is the point, and none of them treats the passage as a comment on literal childlessness. That patristic consensus on the figural reading is worth noting — but it is reception, not lexical evidence (§11), and it does not settle the question of whom Paul intends by the married woman.

Three observations, kept close to the text.

1. The gladness is commanded before the evidence is visible. Four imperatives precede the ὅτι clause. The barren woman is told to celebrate on the strength of a declaration about her children, not on the strength of a nursery. This is of a piece with Paul’s whole argument in Galatians: standing rests on promise (3:18, 22), not on demonstrable pedigree.

2. The fruitfulness is not hers. The passive εὐφράνθητι, the elided agent, and the plain fact of στεῖρα together make the point: nothing in the woman accounts for the children. Paul’s Galatian readers, pressed to acquire the marks of covenant membership, are told that the mother who has them is the one who could not produce them.

3. Isaiah 54 follows Isaiah 53. The prophetic sequence — Servant’s death, then the desolate woman’s teeming offspring — is the same sequence Paul has been arguing from 3:13 onward. The quotation is doing more than supplying a proof-text about two mothers; it locates the Gentile mission’s fruitfulness downstream of the cross.

On the intertextual method: Paul calls his reading of Gen 21 ἀλληγορούμενα (v. 24), and the Isaiah citation is what licenses it. This is canonical-intertextual reinterpretation — a later biblical author reusing an earlier text — and per §9 it is registered as biblical theology, not as external doctrinal reception.

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