The Hebrew Bible calls Hagar a "maidservant." The Targum Jonathan, an ancient Aramaic translation of the Torah composed in the land of Israel, calls her a daughter of Pharaoh. That single addition transforms the entire story of Genesis 16.
According to this Aramaic retelling, Pharaoh gave Hagar to Abram as a handmaid after being "struck by the Word from before the Lord"—a reference to the plagues God inflicted on Pharaoh's house when he took Sarah (Genesis 12:17). In other words, Hagar was not just any servant. She was Egyptian royalty, given as reparation for a divine punishment.
When Sarah cannot conceive, she does not simply hand over a slave. She "sets Hagar free" and gives her to Abram as a wife. The Targum emphasizes this legal act of manumission twice—Hagar's status changes before the marriage. But once Hagar conceives, she despises Sarah, and Sarah's complaint to Abram is far more dramatic here than in the Hebrew original. She declares that she left her father's house trusting Abram would do her justice. She freed her handmaid and gave her to him. And now she invokes God as witness, insisting they will have no need of "the progeny of Hagar the daughter of Pharaoh bar Nimrod, who threw thee into the furnace of fire." That last phrase casually drops another tradition—that Pharaoh descended from Nimrod, who tried to kill Abraham by casting him into a fiery furnace.
But the most stunning addition comes when Hagar flees into the desert. After the angel speaks to her, Hagar responds with a theological declaration found nowhere in the plain Hebrew text. She says: "Thou art He who livest and art eternal, who seest but art not seen!" She then names the well where "the Living and Eternal One was revealed" and declares that "the glory of the Shekhina of the Lord" appeared to her in a vision (Genesis 16:13-14).
A foreign woman, alone in the wilderness, fleeing her mistress—and the Targum says she received a direct vision of the Shekhina. The translators did not downplay her experience. They elevated it.