Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

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462 Hebrews VII. 18, 19.
and beginner of a new life, inasraucli as he has assumed the nature
of men, and shewn himself to be the true and perfect high priest,
inasmuch as he proved his divine power in his vicarious sufferings,
and in the \-ictory of the resurrection.
In vers. 18, 19 the author now draws from the proposition laid
down in ver. 12 and proved in ver. 13-17, viz., that the ^losaic law
was destined to be annulled by the Messiah—this last inference :
that this law was a mere pedagogical preparatory stage, and therefore
not the final perfect consummation of the divine revelations.
The mode of argumentation is retrogressive. That annulling
{(lOtTTjaig), the actual fact of which was already shewn in ver. 13-17,
is explained only on the presupposition of the daOevig Kal dvo)(peUg.
The author might have logically connected in the scholastic form
the separate ideas of vers. 18, 19 in the following way: " But (atque
ovv) now the annulling of a commandment only then takes place
when the commandment in question has shewn itself to be iceak and
unj)rofitahle. Consequently (ergo, dpa) that law must have been
weak and unprofitable, must have left its task unfinished, and must
only have been an introduction to a better hope." But, as always in
such cases of reasoning in this inverted order, he despises this
scholastico-pedantic form, and chooses the easier form of the
explicative yap.
The principal sentence and the last inference lies in the words
ov6l.v yap treXetioaev 6 vofioq, tTTetoayioyTj 6s KpetTTOVog tX~i6og. At
tTTsiaaycjyi'i we have not to supply yiverai from ver. 18 (as is done by
Theodoret, Luther, Gerhard, Bengel, Tholuck, Block, Olshausen,
and others): for the words in respect of their import, form no antithesis
to dOtTTjoig iiiv yap ylverai— (what sort of antithesis would this
be: "An annulling of a law is wont to take place only on account of
the weakness and unprofitableness of that law ; but an introduction
of a better hope takes place."— 'Nothing is said as to how or why
this introduction takes place !) Nor are we to supply tre/Mioaev
(with Schlichting, Michaelis, Semler, Ernesti, and others), for then,
first of all, the article must have stood before IneinayMy/j, and further,
it is not possible that a -eXeicjotg can have been cff'ected by the introduction
to a hope. The right construction is that which supplies at
tTTunayi^yi] either T/v (Erasmus, Vatable, Calvin, etc.), so iliat
tTTEiaayoy/'l becomes predicate to vojiog, or eytvero 6c' avrov (i-d/uoy),
"the law has made nothing prefect, but an introduction was given
through it to a better hope." That the omission of such a verb is
not elegant Greek is of small moment ; the supposition that our
author, who usually wTites correctly, has here again written with
somewhat less care, must always be more tolerable than a construction
which yields a senseless idea.**
* Ebrard's construction overlooks the force of i~i in iTreirjay., tlio natural correlation
of/icp and de, etc., and changes a very simple and elegant eentenco into a clums/ and