“One of the things that first leapt out at me … is that it would have been perfectly normal and ordinary and expected for Abraham … to have taken a second wife. But he never did.” – René Echevarria is an American screenwriter and producer.
Echevarria’s comment is worth a closer look — because the The Faithful’s creative team and the article’s framing both contain a significant biblical error that has real theological implications.
The claim that Abraham “never took a second wife” is simply not what the Bible says. Genesis 25:1 is unambiguous: “Abraham took another wife, whose name was Keturah.”
וַיֹּ֧סֶף (and again) אַבְרָהָ֛ם (Abraham) וַיִּקַּ֥ח (and took) אִשָּׁ֖ה (a wife) וּשְׁמָ֥הּ (and her name was) קְטוּרָֽה (Keturah)
She bore him six sons — Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. This isn’t a minor footnote. Midian alone becomes the father of the Midianites, a people who appear throughout the rest of the Old Testament narrative.
The show’s creative team has either missed this entirely or chosen to ignore it for dramatic purposes. Either way, when a television production shapes how millions of people understand scripture, the details matter.
“The Faithful’ series adapts Genesis, focusing on biblical women without softening Scripture,” creators say.
Now here’s where it gets theologically serious.
Some ancient Jewish traditions — particularly the Midrash (Genesis Rabbah) and the medieval rabbi Rashi — identify Keturah as Hagar, suggesting Abraham sought her out after Sarah’s death and remarried her. It’s a romantically satisfying idea. But it creates a significant problem that we need to address.
The Apostle Paul in Galatians 4:21-31 uses Hagar and Sarah as load-bearing theological architecture — not casual illustration. For Paul, these two women represent two irreconcilable covenants:
- Hagar = slavery, law, the earthly Jerusalem, flesh
- Sarah = freedom, promise, grace, the heavenly Jerusalem
Paul even quotes God’s own words from Genesis: “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.” Paul’s entire argument about law versus grace in Galatians depends on this distinction being permanent and categorical. You cannot hold both covenants. You are a child of one or the other.
If Abraham remarried Hagar after Sarah’s death — collapsing the very distinction God established and Paul built his theology upon — the typology unravels. The clean theological boundary between slavery and freedom, law and grace, gets muddied at the biographical level of the very characters Paul chose to illustrate it. It also places Abraham in direct disobedience to God’s command to “cast out” Hagar.
This is why the Hagar-equals-Keturah identification, however ancient and well-intentioned, is probably wrong — and why a television show that plays loosely with these characters isn’t just making a harmless creative choice. It’s reshaping the audience’s understanding of figures whose biblical roles carry enormous theological weight.
The stronger textual case is straightforward:
- Genesis introduces Keturah as a new character with no signal that she is someone we’ve met
- Josephus, writing in the first century, treats them as entirely separate women
- The Midrash identification appears motivated more by a desire to give Hagar a sympathetic ending than by exegetical evidence
- Paul’s categorical distinction between the two women in Galatians holds cleanly only if they remain two distinct people
Hagar’s story is already one of the most moving in all of scripture — a vulnerable Egyptian slave caught in circumstances beyond her control, twice alone in the desert, yet twice visited by God himself. She is the only person in Genesis who gives God a personal name: El Roi — “the God who sees me.” Her story doesn’t need a happy romantic ending grafted onto it to be profound.
But when creative teams — whether ancient rabbis or modern television writers — reshape these narratives without regard for their downstream theological consequences, the casualties aren’t just historical accuracy. The casualties are the people in the pews and living rooms who will carry those reshaped versions into their understanding of Paul, of covenant, of law, and grace.
Small matter? On the surface, perhaps. But the gospel Paul preached in Galatians — freedom from the law through grace — hangs in part on two women in a tent in ancient Canaan, remaining who the text says they are.
That’s worth getting right.