What Does Hebrews 7:18 Mean?
For the command that goes before is truly set aside, because of its weakness and its uselessness.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
For there is verily a disannulling of the commandment going before for the weakness and unprofitableness thereof.THE KEY
The commandment is set aside because the weakness lies in its own capacity.
THE MEANING
The commandment before you is named as weak and without benefit toward bringing you near to God. Its setting aside opens toward the better hope that can bring you near.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A commandment’s presence does not guarantee that it can bring you near to God; this verse names one whose weakness leaves that work undone.
THE ROOT
ἀθέτησις
athetēsis
GROWS FROM
θε- / θη- (τίθημι, tithēmi family)
To set or place; here, setting aside or nullifying.
The word carries the image of something set in place being set aside. Hebrews uses this same word family for “put away” in 9:26, linking the commandment’s disannulling with the removal of sin.
ALSO GROWS
tithēmi: Place, set, or lay down.
τίθημι
It reveals the underlying image of a placement that can be undone.
atheteō: Reject, nullify, or set aside.
ἀθετέω
This verb names the act carried by the noun translated “disannulling.”
athetēsis: Setting aside or putting away.
ἀθέτησις
The same noun family is used there for putting away sin, echoing the setting aside named in this verse.
ἀσθενές
asthenes
GROWS FROM
σθεν- (sthen-, from σθένος, sthenos)
Strength, vigor, or force; with the privative prefix, lacking strength.
“weakness” in this verse is asthenes. The word names an absence of strength in the commandment itself. The diagnosis is incapacity: it does not have the force to accomplish what is needed.
ALSO GROWS
asthenēs: Lacking strength.
ἀσθενής
It shows the same family describing a person or thing without strength.
astheneia: Weakness, frailty, or illness.
ἀσθένεια
The shared word family makes the verse’s description of the commandment’s incapacity concrete.
ἀνωφελές
anōphelēs
GROWS FROM
ὠφελ-
ōphel-
Benefit, advantage, or usefulness; with negation, without benefit.
“uselessness” in this verse is anōphelēs. The verse names more than a lack of strength: the commandment also yields no benefit toward its purpose. Together, the two words describe incapacity and lack of gain.
ALSO GROWS
ōpheleō: Benefit, help, or be useful.
ὠφελέω
It shows the positive capacity denied by the word translated “unprofitableness.”
ophelos: Use, benefit, or gain.
ὄφελος
This branch makes visible the practical result the commandment does not provide.
THE PATTERN
When a covenantal arrangement reaches its limit, scripture names a new way forward with a different capacity.
Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will cut a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.For what instruction could not do, because it was without strength through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of flesh that misses the mark, and for falling short he condemned falling short in the flesh.In that he says, 'A new covenant,' he has made the first old. And what is wearing thin and growing old is near to passing out of sight.THE THREAD
For then he would have had to suffer often since the laying down of the world, but now once, at the completion of the ages, he has been made visible to set falling short aside through his own sacrifice.Hebrews 9:26 uses the same Greek noun family translated here as “disannulling,” rendering it “put away” for sin. The repeated word lets the setting aside of the weak commandment echo alongside the removal of sin.
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