Hebrews 4:7

πάλιν τινὰ ὁρίζει ἡμέραν. There is no reason whatever for the parenthesis in the A. V., of which the reading, rendering, and punctuation are here alike infelicitous to an extent which destroys for ordinary readers the meaning of the passage. It should be rendered (putting only a comma at the end of Hebrews 4:6), “Again, he fixes a day, To-day, saying in David, so long afterwards, even as has been said before, To-day if ye will hear,” &c. In the stress laid upon the word “to-day” we find a resemblance to Philo, who defines “to-day” as “the infinite and interminable aeon,” and says “Till to-day, that is for ever” (Leg. Allegg. III. 8; De Profug. 11). The argument is that “David” (a general name for “the Psalmist”) had, nearly five centuries after the time of Moses, and three millenniums after the Creation, still spoken of God’s rest as an offer open to mankind. If we regard this as a mere verbal argument, turning on the attribution of deep mystic senses to the words “rest” and “to-day,” and on the trains of inference which are made to depend on these words, we must remember that such a method of dealing with Scripture phraseology was at this period universally current among the Jews. But if we stop at this point all sorts of difficulties arise; for if the “rest” referred to in Psalms 95 was primarily the land of Canaan (as in Deuteronomy 1:34-36; Deuteronomy 12:9, &c.), the oath of God, “they shall not enter into my rest,” only applied to the generation of the wanderings, and He had said “Your little ones … them will I bring in, and they shall know the land which ye have despised,” Numbers 14:31. If, on the other hand, the “rest” meant heaven, it would be against all Scripture analogy to assume that all the Israelites who died in the wilderness were excluded from future happiness. And there are many other difficulties which will at once suggest themselves. The better and simpler way of looking at this, and similar trains of reasoning, is to regard them as particular modes of expressing blessed and eternal truths, and to look on the Scripture language applied to them in the light rather of illustration than of Scriptural proof. Quite apart from this Alexandrian method of finding recondite and mystic senses in the history and language of the Bible, we see the deep and glorious truth that God’s offer of “Rest” in the highest sense—of participation in His own rest—is left open to His people in the eternal to-day of merciful opportunity. The Scripture illustration must be regarded as quite subordinate to the essential truth, and not the essential truth made to depend on the Scripture phraseology. When God says “They shall not enter my rest,” the writer—reading as it were between the lines with the eyes of Christian enlightenment—reads the promise “but others shall enter into my rest,” which was most true.

ἐν Δαυεὶδ λέγων. A common abbreviated form of quotation like “saying in Elijah” for “in the part of Scripture about Elijah” (Romans 11:2). The quotation may mean no more than “in the Book of Psalms.” The 95th Psalm is indeed attributed to David in the LXX.; but the superscriptions of the LXX., as well as those of the Hebrew text, are wholly without authority, and are in some instances entirely erroneous. The date of the Psalm is more probably the close of the Exile. We may here notice the fondness of the writer for the Psalms, of which he quotes no less than eleven in this Epistle (Psalms 2:8, 22, 40, 45, 95, 102, 104, 110, 118, 135.).