Galatians 4:24
Galatians 4:2424These things serve as illustrations, for the women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children into slavery: This is Hagar.
plays only a small role in JW publications, usually cited to show that some Old Testament narratives can be read symbolically. JWs do not ordinarily build a theology on the verse itself, and the Watchtower has no distinctive interpretation of Sarah and Hagar as covenant figures. The verse mostly comes up when an apologist points out that Greek does have a plain word for "speak allegorically" — allēgoreō — and the JW is asked why Jesus did not use it at the Last Supper.
This verse is one of the Greek New Testament's clearest demonstrations that an explicit verb for symbolic speech was available when authors wanted it. Paul writes hatina estin allēgoroumena — "these things are spoken allegorically" — using the participle of allēgoreō. He flags the symbolism explicitly rather than leaving the reader to infer it from the bare copula "is." The contrast with the Last Supper passages is the point: if Jesus had wanted the bread and wine to be unmistakably symbolic, the Greek language gave him the word to say so.
The NWT renders allēgoroumena as "may be taken as a symbolic drama" — defensible as a paraphrase since Paul is plainly flagging allegory — and again uses "mean" for estin: "these women mean two covenants." The looser handling of estin matches the wider NWT pattern of swapping "is" for "means" wherever an identity statement could be read symbolically. Here the symbolism is genuinely explicit, so the substitution is less freighted; the verse matters most as evidence that Paul could and did flag allegory openly when he meant it.