Cambridge Greek Testament Commentary

Hebrews 13:9

παραφέρεσθε אACDM. The περιφέρεσθε of the rec. (KL) comes from Ephesians 4:14.

9. διδαχαῖς κ.τ.λ. Lit., “With teachings various and strange be ye not swept away.” From the allusion to various kinds of food which immediately follows we infer that these “teachings” were not like the incipient Gnostic speculations against which St Paul and St John had to raise a warning voice (Ephesians 4:14; Colossians 2:8; 1 John 4:1), but the minutiae of the Jewish Halachah with its endless refinements upon, and inferences from, the letter of the Law; possibly doctrines akin to those of the Essenes. This is the sort of teaching of which the Talmud is full, and most of it has no real connexion with true Mosaism.

καλόν. “A beautiful or excellent thing.”

χάριτι. By the favour or mercy of God as a pledge of our real security.

οὐ βρώμασιν. Not by minute and pedantic distinctions between various kinds of clean and unclean food (Hebrews 9:10). The word βρώματα, “kinds of food,” was never applied to sacrifices. On the urgency of the question of “meats” to the early Christians see my Life of St Paul, I. 264.

οὐκ ὠφελήθησαν. These outward rules were of no real advantage to the Jews under the Law. As Christianity extended, the Rabbis gave a more and more hostile elaboration and significance to the Halachoth, which decided about the degrees of uncleanness in different kinds of food, as though salvation itself depended on the scrupulosities and micrologies of Rabbinism. The reader will find some illustrations of these remarks in my Life of St Paul, I. 264. The importance of these or analogous questions to the early Jewish Christians may be estimated by the allusions of St Paul (Romans 14; Colossians 2:16-23; 1 Timothy 4:3, &c.). No doubt these warnings were necessary because the Jewish Christians were liable to the taunt, “You are breaking the law of Moses; you are living Gentile-fashion (ἐθνικῶς) not Jewish-wise (Ἰουδαϊκῶς); you neglect the Kashar (rules which regulate the slaughter of clean and unclean animals, which the Jews scrupulously observe to this day); you feed with those who are polluted by habitually eating swine’s flesh.” These were appeals to “the eternal Pharisaism of the human heart,” and the intensity of Jewish feeling respecting them would have been renewed by the conversions to Christianity. The writer therefore reminds the Hebrews that these distinctions involve no real advantage (Hebrews 7:18-19).

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Hebrews 13:9

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