Onesimus Our Brother: Reading Religion, Race, and Culture in Philemon (Paul in Critical Contexts)

by Matthew V. Johnson

Lewis, as Hagar and countless other expatriate African women, had overcome humiliation and rejection, had struggled and suffered, had come to know the wilderness as a place of tears and promise. God calls to her in the wilderness and grants to her issue a compensatory covenant. It is this compensatory covenant that Paul declares hopelessly servile in the fourth chapter of his epistle to the Galatians. Paul gives an allegorical reading to the patriarchal narrative of struggle for inheritance between Ishmael, the son of the slave Hagar, and Isaac, the son of Abraham’s wife Sarah. Isaac is the son of promise. But Paul’s tortured typology leaves off precisely where the implicit, lapidary exegesis of Lewis begins. The center of gravity in Lewis’s representation is in the concluding verses of Hagar’s story. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand; for I will make him a great nation. And God opened her eyes, and she saw the well of water, and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink. And God was with the lad; and he grew, and dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer. And he dwelt in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother took him a wife out of the land of Egypt. (Gen. 21:19-21) In one verse of Scripture, Hagar moves from abandonment to agency: in verse 19 alone, she is the subject of no less than four verbs. The slave woman Hagar receives a promise from God that bestows dignity on her posterity. She reestablishes her Egyptian ancestry by...