Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

388 Hebrews IV. 2.
Ver. 2.—The first words are clear. We too, as well as those
who lived in the time of Moses, have received a blessed message, a
promise that we shall be introduced into a promised land of rest.
Nay, we have received this in a higher and better sense than tiiey.
The word which has been given to us is infinitely better than the
word which the Israelites received by Moses. In the first jdace :
the word spoken by Moses could not bring the hearers to the faith ;
it remained something external to them, it proifered a promise
indeed, and annexed a condition to it, but it imparted no strength
to fulfil *this condition (ver. 2-5 comp. ver. 12, 13); and secondly,
the promise contained in that word even in respect of its import,
was not the true and right promise, for it was an earthly rest that
was there proffered, whereas it is a sjiiritual and eternal rest that
is now promised to us (ver. 6-10).
Let us look, now, at the first of these two arguments which
begins with the words, ver. 2., aAA' ovk dxpeXrjoev, and is afterwards
repeated more fully in ver. 12, 13. It is not to be wondered at,
that a false interpretation of ver. 1 should have led the majority of
commentators into an entire misunderstanding also of ver. 2. They
conceive that here (as in chap. ii. 16-19) it is still the subjective unbelief
of the Jews that is adduced as the reason of their not having
attained to the rest, whereas, in the passage before us, it is rather
the objective imperfection of the Old Testament revelation that is given
as the ground of the imperfect fulfilment of the j)romises. Only
thus, too, can the connecting particle dXXd be accounted for. In
the words koX yap ta/iei', etc., the new covenant is only placed on a
level with the old, and in the
purely objective point of view, that in
the one, as in the other, a gracious message is given. The statement
now made that the word of God in the old covenant did not
profit or was inefficacious, stands in an antithetical relation to that
which precedes it. (Had the writer meant to say, that the Israelites
under the old covenant were unbeUeving, as also many under the
new covenant are inclined to unbelief, he would have used only the
connecting particle cJe, or better still k(u—/itV.)
But the view which we have given of the train of thought finds
its justification chiefly in the words themselves. The reading of
these words, however, wavers, and that in three points.
Firstly, in
one portion of the codd. the attic form ovyKtKpafiev ... is found, in
the other the later form avyKEKepaoiiev . . . ; that the latter is the
true reading, while the form owes its origin to a correction, is selfevident.
Secondly, a single cursive manuscript (Griesbach Nro. 71)
has aKovaOtlni, instead of uKovoaai ; and more recent critics, on the
authority of the Vulgate, have conjectured a reading aKovojiaai (dat.
plur. of uKovapa); liere again it is self-evident that the reading
aKovoaai, confirmed by aU sources, considered merely as the more dif-