Hebrews 11:3

μὴ ἐκ φαινομένων. This is the true reading. See the note.

3. Πίστει. In this chapter we find fifteen special instances of the work of faith, besides the summary enumeration in the 32nd and following verses.

νοοῦμεν. “We apprehend with the reason.” See Romans 1:20.

κατηρτίσθαι. “Have been established” (Hebrews 13:21; Psalms 73:16, LXX.).

τοὺς αἰῶνας. The word for “worlds” means literally ages (Hebrews 1:2), i.e. the world regarded from the standpoint of human history. The “time-world” necessarily presumes the existence of the space-world also. See Hebrews 1:2.

ῥήματι θεοῦ. “By the utterance of God,” namely by His fiat, as in Genesis 1; Psalms 33:6; Psalms 33:9; 2 Peter 3:5. There is no question here as to the creation of the world by the Logos, for he purposely alters the word λόγῳ used by the LXX. in Psalms 33 into ῥήματι.

εἰς τὸ μὴ ἐκ φαινομένων τὸ βλεπόμενον γεγονέναι. The true reading and literal translation are “so that not from things which appear hath that which is seen come into being,” a somewhat harsh way of expressing that “the visible world did not derive its existence from anything phenomenal.” The translation of the Peshito (“from those things which are not perceived”), of the Vulgate (“ex invisibilibus” and in d, e, f “ex non apparentibus”), seem to imply a reading ἐκ μὴ φαινομένων, which would be an interpretation of the unusual order, but hardly suit the Greek as it stands. In other words, the clause denies the pre-existence of matter. It says that the world was made out of nothing, not out of the primeval chaos. So in 2Ma 7:28 the mother begs her son “to look upon the heaven and earth and all that is therein, and consider that God made them out of things that are not” (ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων). If this view be correct, the writer would seem purposely to avoid Philo’s way of saying that the world was made out of to τὰ μὴ ὄντα, “things conceived as non-existent,” by which he meant the “formless matter” (as in Wis 11:17). He says that the world did not originate from anything phenomenal. This verse, so far from being superfluous, or incongruous with what follows, strikes the keynote of faith by shewing that its first object must be a Divine and Infinite Creator. Thus like Moses in Genesis 1 the verse excludes from the region of faith all Atheism, Pantheism, Polytheism, and Dualism.