Hebrews 2:5

Οὐ γὰρ ἀγγέλοις.… “For not to angels”. With γὰρ the writer proceeds to clinch the exhortation contained in Hebrews 2:1-4, by exhibiting the ground of it. Under the old Covenant angels had been God's messengers, but this mode of mediation has passed away. The οἰκουμένη μέλλουσα is not subject to them. It is the Son as man who now rules and to whom attention must be given. ὑπέταξεν … “did He” that is God subject the world to come of which we are speaking, ἡ οἰκουμένη, not κόσμος, but the inhabited world. So used in Diod. Sic., i. 8 καθʼ ἅπασαν τ. οἰκουμένην, wherever there were men. From the O.T. point of view “the world to come” meant the world under Messianic rule, but in this Epistle the Messianic Kingdom is viewed as not yet fully realised. The world to come is therefore the eternal order of human affairs already introduced and rendering obsolete the temporary and symbolic dispensation. Calvin accurately defines it thus: “Non vocari orbem futurum duntaxat, qualem e resurrectione speramus, sed qui coepit ab exordio regni Christi. Complementum vero suum habebit in ultima redemptione.” It is the present world of men regenerated, death and all that is inimical to human progress abolished; a condition in which all things are subjected to man. The repudiation of angels as lords of the world to come implies the admission that the obsolescent dispensation had been subject to them. So in Deuteronomy 32:8 : ἔστησεν ὅρια ἐθνῶν κατὰ ἀριθμὸν ἀγγέλων θεοῦ, cf. Daniel 10:13-21 and Book of Jubilees, xv. 31. Cf. the pages in which Robertson Smith expands the remark that “to be subordinated” to the angelic dispensation is the same thing as to be “made under the law” (Expositor, 1881, p. 144 ff.). Hermas (Vis., iii. 4, 1) represents the Church as being built by six angels whom he describes as being the first created οἶς παρέδωκεν ὁ Κύριος πᾶσαν τὴν κτίσιν αὐτοῦ, αὔξειν καὶ οἰκοδομεῖν καὶ δεσπόζειν τῆς κτίσεως πάσης.

Hebrews 2:6. διεμαρτύρατο δὲ πού τις λέγων : “but some one in a certain place solemnly testifies, saying”. The indefinite formula of quotation is used not because doubt existed regarding the authorship of the psalm, nor because the writer was citing from memory, but rather as a rhetorical mode of suggesting that his readers knew the passage well enough. So Chrysostom: δεικνύντος ἐστίν, αὐτοὺς σφόδρα ἐμπείρους εἶναι τῶν γραφῶν. Philo frequently uses an indefinite form of quotation: this identical form in De Ebriet., 14 (Wendland, ii. 181) εἶπε γάρ πού τις. Cf. Longinus, De Sub., ix. 2 γέγραφά που. Here only in the Epistle is a quotation from Scripture referred to its human author. τί ἐστιν ἄνθρωπος.… The quotation is from Psalms 8 and extends to ποδῶν αὐτοῦ in Hebrews 2:8. It illustrates the greatness of man in three particulars.

1. ἠλάττωσας αὐτὸν βραχύ τι παρʼ ἀγγέλους.

2. δόξῃ καὶ τιμῇ ἐστεφάνωσας αὐτόν.

3. πάντα ὑπέταξας ὑποκάτω τῶν ποδῶν αὐτοῦ.

And the author goes on to say that in Jesus the two former elements of man's greatness are seen to be fulfilled (He is made a little lower than the angels, and He is crowned with glory and honour), while the third is guaranteed because Jesus has tasted death for every man and so subdued even it, the last enemy, and therefore all things, under his feet.

In Psalms 8 as in so many other poets and prose writers (see Pascal's chapter on The Greatness and Littleness of Man, A. R. Wallace's Man's Place in the Universe and Fisk's Destiny of Man), it is the dignity put upon man which fills the writer with astonishment. When Sophocles in the Antigone celebrates man's greatness, πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει, he excepts death from subjection to man, Ἅιδα μόνον φεῦξιν οὐκ ἐπάξεται. Here the Hebrew poet excepts nothing. But only by Christ was he justified. Man's real place is first won by Christ. μιμνήσκῃ αὐτοῦ “Thou art mindful of him” for good as in Hebrews 13:3. Man, the subject of satire and self-contempt, is the object of God's thought. υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου = ἄνθρωπος of the first clause. In the Heb. אֱנוֹשׁ and בֶן־אָדַם. ἐπισκέπτῃ “visit,” generally as a friend (Matthew 25:36; James 1:27) frequently of physician visiting sick; in judgment, Jeremiah 5:9; Jeremiah 5:29. “The day of visitation,” ἡμέρα ἐπισκοπῆς, in good sense, Luke 19:44; for chastisement, Isaiah 10:3; cf. 1 Peter 2:12. In Jeremiah 15:15 we have the two words μνήσθητί μου καὶ ἐπίσκεψαί με.