Abstract
Contrary to long-established interpretations, Paul’s verdict against the slave woman Hagar and her son in Gal 4:30 is not the expulsion of “Jewishness” by “Christianity,” nor the affirmation of slavery and racism, gender hierarchies, or Islamophobia. What Paul wants to “drive out” is the accommodation of subjugated bodies and souls to the law of the colonial conquerors, as it is programmatically displayed in contemporary Roman iconography. “In Christ-ness” as radical solidarity with the “Other” includes the non-Jewish nations/Gentiles who for Paul are an essential part of Abrahamic Jewish-messianic identity.
Introduction
But what does the scripture say: “Drive out the slave woman and her son, for the child of the slave will not share the inheritance with the child of the free woman.” (Gal 4:30, my translation)
1
Few statements in the New Testament have had such detrimental and long-lasting consequences in the history of Christian interpretation. Read by many as the exultant coda of the Hagar-Sarah allegory in Gal 4:21–31 (and of Galatians as a whole), “drive out the slave woman” has served as a powerful prooftext of scripturally-authorized hostility against the social, racial, religious, and sexual “Other.” From early on, the “slave woman” (who corresponds to Jerusalem and Mount Sinai according to 4:25) was equated with Judaism as an inferior and outdated religion that needed to be expelled and replaced by Christianity, the true and exclusive heir of God’s promise to Israel. The harmful power of this argument was aggravated by the fact that in 4:21–31, Paul mostly does not speak as himself but through the voice and authority of “scripture” that needs to be heard (4:21). No less than three times in the eleven verses, and including two lengthy verbatim citations, he quotes “what is written” (gegraptai gar/hē graphē; 4:22, 27, 29) as the normative “law” (nomos; 4:21). This amounts to a condensed summary of biblical theology around the themes of Genesis, Exodus, exile, and new exodus. “Drive out the slave woman” is Sarah’s word and verdict in Gen 21:10, yet it changes into the “word of scripture” (ti legei hē graphē; Gal 4:30, my translation) in Paul; as climactic imperative of 4:21–31 it has behind it the full force of the Abraham narrative (“Abraham had two sons”; 4:22), Israel’s covenantal history (“for these women are two covenants”; 4:24), the exodus story (“Hagar is Mount Sinai”; 4:25), and the exilic hopes of a new exodus as expressed in Second Isaiah (4:27 = Isa 54:1).
In a devastating way, this has made the allegory of Hagar and Sarah a most versatile blueprint not only for Christian anti-Judaism, but also for supersessionist interpretations of the Hebrew Scriptures, and of Paul himself. In many medieval churches in Europe, this reading of “Hagar” as Judaism left-behind materialized itself in depictions of a glorious “Ekklesia” opposite a mourning, defeated, and blindfolded “Synagogue” with the broken tablets of the Sinai law in her hands, signifying the triumph of “Sarah”/Christianity.
2
With considerable restraint, Shaye J. D. Cohen states in his brief comments on Galatians in The Jewish Annotated New Testament:
Paul’s negative assessment of the Torah and those who follow it is striking. . . . This letter, prompted by the specific situation of the churches in Galatia, contains some of the most enduring and influential formulations of Christian faith. Later Christians learned from this letter that Judaism, that is, the observance of the commandments of the Torah and the refusal to believe in Jesus as the son of God, had and has no value.
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Hagar as Other
Yet Judaism was not the only “other” stigmatized and outmaneuvered by Paul’s fierce rejection of “Hagar.” During the Reformation, the antithetical force of “Sarah” against “Hagar” at the core of the Galatians controversy turned into “gospel” versus “law” and became the foundation of Protestant “faith-righteousness” in opposition to the “work-righteousness” of Catholicism, Anabaptism, and socially rebellious movements like the German peasants. 4 Within the context of African American slavery, “Hagar” in both her Genesis and her Galatian versions stood for the legitimacy of sexual exploitation and servile motherhood enforced in multiple forms upon black female bodies by their male and female masters. In antiquity this was common practice as well, mentioned by Paul without any critical comment (Gal 4:22; cf. Gen 16:1–3). 5 It included the right to dispose of slaves no longer needed or wanted (Gen 21:10 = Gal 4:30), or at least the justification of severe punishment imposed for slave insubordination and “uppity behavior,” as in Hagar’s case after the slave woman has become pregnant and “looked with contempt” at her barren mistress—possibly in a futile attempt to replace her as Abraham’s main wife (Gen 16:4, 6).
Not accidentally, a defining moment in the development of womanist theology in the United States was a gripping re-negotiation of the biblical figure of “Hagar” by Delores Williams. Drawing on the work of her colleague Phyllis Trible on the Hagar/Ishmael narratives as a “text of terror,” 6 Williams turned the tables on the established interpretation by identifying with the abused, exploited, and expelled slave woman, “mammy,” and single mother Hagar. A woman from the margins, Hagar in Williams’ reading—like countless of her later African American sisters—was resilient and resourceful enough to carve out a living for herself and her son in the wilderness, far away from the enslaving master order of Abraham and Sarah. Returning to her own native roots as she finds an Egyptian wife for Ishmael (Gen 21:21), Hagar becomes a stand-in for black women’s power, solidarity, and survival skills. 7
In a similar way Hagar, and specifically Ishmael, have been given a home in Muslim traditions where Abraham (the first Muslim) and his son Ishmael become the founders of the Kaaba in Mekka according to Qur’an 2:121. While Hagar’s name is not mentioned in the Qur’an itself, she is the foremother of Islam and remembered in the ritual of the hajj: pilgrims to Mekka re-enact her despair and rescue as she searches for water in the wilderness (cf. Gen 21:15–19) by walking back and forth between the hills of Safa and Marwa before entering the city. 8 Hagar thus has become a key figure in the tripartite, conflict-ridden encounter between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam over the past two millennia and right into our own time—a history that over large parts was written in blood and tears. In most unsettling ways, as a “Jew” and “Muslim” to Christianity, she is also an “Arab” 9 and “Palestinian” to the Jewish tradition today. 10 Reading Hagar in the contemporary world has become a crucial test-case for the potential of Scripture to mobilize spiritual forces of reconciliation, healing, and redemption in our multiply troubled relationships towards our religious, racial, social, gendered, and cultural Other. 11
In terms of scriptural understanding, what links Muslim interpretations to their womanist counterparts is an appropriation of “Hagar” that obviously reads the biblical Genesis stories against their grain. However, as a closer reading shows, both can draw on somewhat perplexing elements in Genesis 16 and 21 that strikingly counteract the apparent pro-Sarah/Isaac logic of the scriptural narrative itself. Hagar, a marginal woman and foreigner, in Gen 16:13 becomes the first and only person in the whole Bible who actually names God, a God who “sees” (El-roi: Heb. ɔēl-rŏɔȋ) the suffering and humiliation of the runaway slave from the hands of her oppressors—and a God who furthermore promises her a new future, with astonishing intertextual echoes from the exodus narrative. Although God’s angel eventually sends Hagar back into the house of Abraham and Sarah (16:9), the situation has changed. The slave woman—a body mandated into sexual compliance and reproduction without her consent ever being asked (Gen 16:3–4)—will give birth to her own, free son. He is also the first unborn child in the Bible whose name is given by God in an annunciation: “You shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has heard your misery” (Gen 16:11). 12 Despite a clear allegiance to Sarah and Hagar, God here shows a striking commitment to Hagar as well. Can the God of the Bible be “God with us,” without being “God against the others”? The issue of reconciliation between Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, God and the other nations excluded from the promise, might be one of the unresolved questions in the deep structure of Genesis that is taken up again by Paul. 13
At first sight, however, reconciliation does not seem to be Paul’s topic at all. Where the Genesis material on Hagar and Ishmael resists an all too clear-cut opposition of “us” versus “them,” the allegory of the two women and their sons in Galatians looks different. All traces of solidarity and ambiguity that might open spaces for alternative readings apparently are erased. Galatians 4:21–31 comes across as an uncompromising, polarizing text that leaves no third option: either Hagar or Sarah; either Ishmael or Isaac; either “Jerusalem now” or “heavenly Jerusalem”; either (old) Mosaic covenant from Mount Sinai or (new) covenant; either slavery or freedom; either flesh or spirit—there is no third option. Therefore: “Drive out the slave woman and her son. . . .” In light of the heavy burden of anti-Judaism, racism, classism, and sexism this text carries, the decisive question for a current reading would be: who or what is it, actually, that Paul so furiously wants to “drive out”? Does he really expunge all signposts of a pro-Other reading that are embedded into the Genesis version of Hagar’s story, leaving no hope for a reconciliation between the two fighting women? Or could it be that his allegory of Hagar and her son has been misread? A brief textual exploration, filtered through the visual lens of antagonistic women in first-century iconography, might help us “re-imagine” Paul’s Hagar and Ishmael as they have rarely been seen.
Paul’s Allegorical Hagar: Roman Exile without Exodus
Dichotomies undoubtedly are the structuring principle of Gal 4:21–31. The whole text is built in two lines of interrelated, mutually-exclusive opposites. On the narrative level, this polarity is derived from Abraham’s “two sons, one out of [ek] the slave woman and one out of [ek] the free woman” (4:22, my translation). The son “(out) of the slave woman is born according to the flesh [kata sarka], the one (out) of the free woman through [dia] the promise” (4:23, my translation). In 4:29, these contrasting birth modes are brought up again, this time as the opposition of birth “according to the flesh” versus birth “according to the Spirit” (kata pneuma), the latter synonymous with “children of the promise, according to Isaac” (kata Isaak; 4:28, my translation). The two opposing groups thus comprise:
That means that we are not just dealing with a narrative juxtaposition of two opposing collective actors, but rather with a profoundly theological polarity that structures Paul’s letter to the Galatians from beginning to end, including his entire justification theology: freedom versus slavery, spirit versus flesh, promise (faith/gospel) versus law (works).
At this point, Paul explicitly leaves the level of the Genesis narrative, moving to the “now” time (nyn) of his own letter (4:25, 29) and a manner of scriptural application that he calls “allegory” (4:24). The two groups he has established so far need to be read “allegorically,” i.e., at present they refer to something “other” (allēgoroumena, from allos = other, different; and agoreuein = speak publicly) than what is implied in the plain literal sense of the original Hagar/Sarah texts. 16 Without delving into the debate of what “allegory” here exactly means, 17 we will have to take this “speaking in an other mode” seriously, as Paul emphasizes it so clearly. He alerts his readers that Hagar and Sarah as literary and scriptural characters stand for something else that is related to the context “now.” In this logic, what is “driven out” would not be Hagar the slave woman and her son themselves but rather what is allegorically attached to them. This seems to make a subtle difference at first, yet it has the potential to entirely change the reading of Paul’s Hagar-story.
What the two women (hautai; 4:24) allegorically represent, first of all, are two covenants (duo diathēkai). One of them, Hagar, is from Mount Sinai and gives birth into slavery (eis douleian). 18 She corresponds (systoichei; 4:25) to the “Jerusalem now,” for she is in slavery (douleuei) with her children. Her oppositional counterpart is the “free woman,” corresponding to the “Jerusalem above” as “our mother” (4:26). Paul cites Isa 54:1 to point out that this motherhood is not biological but theological, namely, the embodiment of the promise for the barren, desolate, unmarried mother Zion who is liberated from her exile by God’s intervention and thus rejoices in bursts of song (Gal 4:27). With this intertextual overlay, “Sarah” and “Hagar” are not individual slave or free women any longer, nor is the reality (and normalcy) of a slave-holding society addressed per se. 19 Rather, the two figures stand allegorically for two contrasting political and theological conditions that are applicable to Israel as a whole and form the “backbone” of the entire biblical tradition: exile and exodus.
In this reading, “Hagar” the slave woman allegorically points to the national enslavement that is the reality of Jerusalem and Judaism in Paul’s time (“now,” 4:25). In contrast, “Sarah” becomes the embodiment of a collective liberation movement, with clear connotations of a new exodus from exile that is embedded in the intertextuality with Second Isaiah.
20
If “Sarah” stands for exodus from exile, “Hagar” is the representation of exile without exodus, or even of exodus into exile. The covenant (and law) from Mount Sinai —and then away from (apo) Mount Sinai
21
—that she allegorically represents (4:25) was meant to be the exodus covenant leading from “Egypt” into freedom, yet it was broken and therefore perverted into the birthing medium of Babylonian slavery, that is, of curse. With a quotation from Deut 27:26, Paul earlier in Gal 3:10–12 already had evoked the two other mountains that, at the end of Deuteronomy, signify this drama of blessing turned into curse: Mount Gerizim as attached to law-obedience and blessing versus Mount Ebal standing for law-breaking and curse (Deuteronomy 27–28).
22
At the threshold of the promised land, this polarity already foreshadowed the future re-enslavement of exile (2 Kings 24). The theo-political topology of “Egypt” and “Babylon”—the two pervasive negative poles in the formation of biblical spatiality—looms large behind the allegory of “Hagar.” With it, the contours of “Babel” as a political player at Paul’s time “now” emerge. Ever since Pompey violently took the temple in 63
“Hagar”/Jerusalem in Roman Slavery: A Critical Re-imagination
A “Roman” reading of Hagar (and of Paul in general) has the potential to steer away from the anti-Judaism, anti-Islamism, sexism, and pro-slavery stance that are often either perpetuated or condemned as irrefutably “Pauline” in current interpretations of Gal 4:21–31. Nonetheless, this reading in line with empire-critical and postcolonial approaches in Pauline studies, as well as basic concerns of the “New Perspective on Paul,” is highly contested. 23 One weighty argument, apart from specific theological concerns, is that Paul himself never explicitly talks about the (anti-)Roman connotations of his theology. 24 Acts, on the other hand, gives a forthright picture of the close and often almost fatal interactions between Paul and the imperial order all throughout, but with a more pro-Roman slant. 25 A “hidden transcript” that has Paul address in coded language the theological, social, and political challenges of his day certainly cannot be proved. Yet it can be made plausible not only through the intertextual resonances of his text with the topics of exodus and exile, but also before the background of all-pervasive contemporary iconography in Roman Asia Minor that must have shaped the symbolic universe of Paul’s Galatian correspondence. A “critical re-imagination” of Hagar and Sarah might unearth elements of the text that are a defining part of its commonly understood subtext in a first-century setting, although today we are no longer capable of seeing and reading them “between the lines.” 26
The imperial sanctuary of Aphrodisias, featuring a major building complex and a rich panoply of sculpted relief images, was erected to the south of the Roman province of Asia, not far from the neighboring province of Galatia, during the time of the emperors Tiberius up to Nero. 27 Situated in close proximity to Paul and the Galatian crisis, its iconography makes visible some of the presuppositions and contexts of Galatians that are not explicitly spelled out by Paul—either because the facts were well known anyway or because they were politically too sensitive to be addressed openly. Nonetheless, these imaginary backgrounds are vital to discern whether our text might talk about an exodus out of Roman captivity, rather than out of enslavement by Jewish Torah—and why it would use two women to communicate its message.
At Aphrodisias, the visual paradigm of representing “slavery” and “freedom” as political conditions through female bodies is immediately eye-catching. About fifty women in different national garb were lined up at pedestals that identified them by their ethnicity. They stood for the various nations, tribes, or islands conquered and “pacified” by Rome, a model that goes back to the theatre of Pompey at Rome. 28 As Harry O. Maier perceptively noted, the different ways that hair, dress, and body postures are styled in the language of Roman images communicate varying degrees of subjugation and incorporation of the respective nations into the beneficial realm of Roman law and civilization. One of the women, for example, has her hands bound and her right breast bared, whereas others look more composed and content (fig. 1). 29
Imperial sanctuary of Aphrodisias—subservient nations depicted as women. Life-size marble relief. Ca. 20–60
Although the statue of the “Judeans” is not preserved among these subjugated nation-women, we know for sure that she was one of them. An identical pedestal has been found (fig. 2), bearing an inscription that testifies to the presence of the “people of the Judeans” (ethnous Ioudaiōn) as one of the women-nations displayed in their subservience to Rome at Aphrodisias.
Inscribed pedestal for the (lost) woman that represented the subject nation of the “ethnous Ioudaiōn,” the people of the Judeans. Marble relief. Photo: B. Kahl.
This is a most interesting discovery. No matter whether Paul actually saw these images, we can presuppose that his allegory of Jerusalem/Judea as an enslaved woman at least partially interacts with the Roman visual context of Asia Minor. Furthermore, depictions of conquered nations as women were standard throughout the Roman world, e.g., on coinage. They are part of a complex ideological construct of Roman rule as a gendered hierarchy, garbed into dominant and conquering masculinity that is commonly embodied by the emperor. 30 He may be assisted by a “free” female counterpart denoting the city or people of Rome. Both are depicted as superior to the subservient and enslaved femininity of the conquered barbarian nations that are made subservient to Rome though the victorious military campaigns of the emperor. The iconography that renders this foundational aspect of Roman rule, namely brute violence, is much less benign and cheerful in its depiction of the enslaved women-nations than the ones on the engraved pedestals that we have considered so far.
The emperor here (fig. 3) is shown at the center, a masculine figure in “heroic nudity” that contrasts both the shameful nudity of the female figure at his feet and the carefully dressed and coiffed woman at his left. 31 His right arm is stretched out towards a trophy: a post that displays the armor of a defeated enemy as sign of victory. Underneath the trophy a kneeling woman represents the social body of the defeated—a conquered nation. As sign of her captivity and servitude she has her hands bound on the back; her face shows grief and despair while one of her breasts is bared as sign of sexual availability that marks slaves in contrast to free women. 32 On the opposite end and far above this enslaved woman-nation, her counterpart is positioned: the free woman, namely the Roman people. She is fully garbed in the stately tunic of the citizens of Rome that signals her virtue and chastity together with the inviolability of her body. Her right hand confers the corona civica to the emperor, the crown of oak leaves that is bestowed on a “savior” of Roman citizens from a mortal danger.
Depiction of the triumphant emperor and the Roman people at Aphrodisias, with a kneeling and bound woman-nation at their feet, underneath a trophy of victory. Life-size marble relief. Ca. 20–60
The juxtaposition of “free woman” and “slave woman” is even more directly fleshed out in a fourth image from Aphrodisias that establishes a clear visual link to the “Hagar” of Galatians (fig. 4).
“Roma” (upright) and “Gaia” (reclining, with cornucopia and child) at Aphrodisias. Life-size marble relief. Ca. 20–60
The “free woman” is shown as Roma and in a body posture of superiority and dominance. She held a spear (now lost) in her lifted right hand, while a crown (badly damaged) on her head symbolizes the city wall of Rome. She is Roma, the city at the center of the Roman Empire, as well as the goddess worshiped at Aphrodisias. She is the personification of “freedom” and the universal “mother-city” (metropolis; cf. Gal 4:26: “our mother”) in the dominant ideological and visual matrix of Roman rule. Her counterpart is the clearly subordinate woman at her feet who holds up a bountiful cornucopia overflowing with fruits that she offers her mistress. A baby clings to the cornucopia and is obviously part of the tribute to be made, establishing another striking link to our text. Not only does the subservient woman render the produce of her land and labor to Rome (commonly as taxes and tributes), but also her children are property of her masters. They are “born into slavery” (Gal 4:25, my translation). They have to serve Rome as slaves, soldiers, and taxpayers on a land that the Roman conquerors supposed to be their own.
As the inscription on the pedestal tells us, this woman is not a particular nation; rather, she is Gaia/Earth. According to ancient mythology, Gaia (or Gē) is the primeval rebellious goddess who needs to be subdued in order for urban imperial civilization to thrive. Gaia, in a way, comprises the totality of the conquered nation-women, including their lands and their sons. Yet she is also specifically related to the Galatians. Not too far from Aphrodisias and Galatia, she is depicted in a similar, though much more violent configuration (fig. 5) at the Great Altar in Pergamon, the capital of Roman Asia. 33
Gaia/Gē (with cornucopia) and her dying son Alkyoneus, subdued by Athena and Nike, at the Great Altar of Pergamon. Marble relief. Ca. 166–156
In this image, Gaia is defeated by Athena, the goddess of Greek city and civilization, in alliance with the goddess of victory and all Olympic and various local deities that are shown on other panels of the Pergamon Altar; Gaia’s numerous offspring, including her favorite son Alkyoneus, are displayed as conquered and slaughtered giants. Interestingly, these “giants” happen to be the historical Galatians in mythological disguise.
34
After centuries of clashes with Rome, Greece, and Pergamon, they had been forced into subservience in victorious battles and a bloody massacre between 240 and 165
Free Woman and Jerusalem Above: Roma in Disguise?
In light of these images, Paul’s appeal to “drive out the slave woman” in Gal 4:30 can be heard as a passionate outcry against Roman enslavement of Jews and nations/Gentiles alike. Nonetheless, it is much more than a political appeal alone; rather, it has profoundly theological and spiritual roots that tap into the deepest meaning-making reservoirs of the biblical narrative. One could see the whole of Galatians 3–4 as Paul’s midrashic re-writing of Genesis as a story of human transformation and reconciliation. Israel’s divine (pro)creation from the “nothingness” of barren mothers and the “otherness” of second-born sons morphs into the birth-story of the messianic Israel inclusive of the Other: Jews and nations/Gentiles, “Sarah” and “Hagar” together with their multi-ethnic and multi-religious children, can finally dwell together. 36
This requires some explanation. Paul’s messianic communities are ethnically, culturally, and to some extent also religiously diverse and inclusive. Circumcised Jews and non-circumcised Galatians, or Pisidians, or Lycaonians, can sit at one table and eat together, crossing the boundary of “circumcision versus foreskin” that so far had marked them as separate, mutually exclusive identities. They were a new, diverse commonality of oneness-in-difference that operated through practices of mutuality and solidarity that in Gal 5:6 are programmatically mandated as “love-works” and “faith-works,” in opposition to “law-works” (Gal 3:5). For Paul, this non-exclusive and pluriform community is rooted in God’s “proto-evangelical” (proeuēngelisato) promise to Abraham that “all nations/Gentiles shall be blessed in you” (3:8, my translation). As the original covenant (diathēkē/Latin testamentum), this “testament” could not be canceled by the covenant of the (Sinai) law—430 years younger—with its exclusive focus on Israel (3:15–18). Yet it lay dormant, waiting for the “one” seed of Abraham to emerge that was the singular carrier of the promise for all (3:16). This decisive” seed” (sperma) in its life-giving power was activated when God resurrected God’s crucified son “out of the dead”—the first and signature theological statement Paul makes in Galatians (1:2; 3:14).
“In Christ” Israel and nations thus are integrated through this “one” messianic seed of Abraham as the ethnically and religiously “mixed” children of Abraham through faith. All of them are children of God (4:1–7) and of God’s border-trangressive promise (3:6–9), non-heirs turned into co-heirs (3:29), siblings to one another as children of the barren mother (“Sarah”; 4:26–28). They are all second-born children (like Isaac or Jacob), no longer downgraded but chosen, and all first-born (like Ishmael or Esau) no longer deprived of their inheritance in a community where all have the same birthright in Christ (3:28). 37 Faith as trust in God’s power to bestow universal blessing in a world ruled by universal curse becomes the (pro)creative force that generates a new trans-ethnic family (3:6–8) .
We might try to “translate” that back into the imagery of Aphrodisias. It is as if the enslaved nation-women at the imperial sanctuary suddenly all together “burst out in song” (4:27, my translation), not to celebrate the emperor and his blessings as would be appropriate, but instead the God of one among them, Judea. 38 Rather than to God Caesar, they pledge allegiance to this God alone, as Abraham once did. This, however, was the defeated God of a defeated nation-woman, with a track-record of instigating rebellion, not the least through resurrecting his “son” after his lawful execution on a Roman cross. A complete outsider within the broad spectrum of Greco-Roman religiosity, this God in his outreach so far had been restricted to circumcised Jews who had specific arrangements in worshiping him on their own terms. Extending these licit privileges to non-Jews was illicit. In an iconoclastic subversion of the whole visual and ritual construct of Aphrodisias, Paul commended an approach that rendered to the Jewish God “alone” what rightfully belonged to the Roman Caesar: the worship and subservience of the defeated women-nations and their sons. 39
This is where the allegorical “Hagar” comes in. Her “persecution” 40 of the messianic communities would be driven by an urge to comply with Roman and city law that built on the customary identity-construct of “Jews” versus “nations/Gentiles.” To get the Galatians circumcised makes them Jewish and thus “licit” in their abstention from civic and imperial worship. If they keep their foreskin, they are “nations” required to worship Caesar as universal grantor of blessing, not Abraham’s God. Paul passionately refuses both options. His “opponents” who advocate circumcision can quote the letter of Jewish Torah, but he sees them as slaves and puppets of Roman law. “Hagar” in this context stands for the perpetuation of slavery and idolatry through practices of separation that appear to conform to God’s law, but in reality comply with the Roman master order.
Only “Sarah” offers a viable alternative of freedom that is not “Roma” in Jewish or Christian disguise. She embodies the rebirth of all nation-women as sisters, assembled not in subservience to the universal task-mistress Roma and the emperor but through a God who leads out of “Egypt” (Exod 20:2). Yet their exit from slavery to Rome entails becoming slaves to one another (Gal 5:13) as they “[b]ear one another’s burdens” (6:2) across the split-lines of race, religion, ethnicity, and class (3:28). “Hagar’s” expulsion is the effort to protect the messianic project against the constant pull-back into hostile and violent re-polarizations that Paul sees as the imprint of imperial slavery on the enslaved. If “Hagar” is the image of the conquered meant to please the conquerors, “Sarah” is the radical counter-vision of a new age of human transformation and reconciliation through love of the Other as fulfillment of Torah. Her image was absent from Aphrodisias—but came to life in the community of the Christ-followers.