Hebrews 12:1

Τοιγαροῦν. A very strong particle of inference not found elsewhere in the N. T. except in 1 Thessalonians 4:8.

καὶ ἡμεῖς κ.τ.λ. “Let us also, seeing we are compassed with so great a cloud of witnesses … run with patience.”

νέφος. A classical Greek and Latin, as well as Hebrew, metaphor for a great multitude. Thus Homer speaks of “a cloud of foot-soldiers.” We have the same metaphor in Isaiah 60:8, “who are these that fly as clouds?” (Heb.) Here, as Clemens of Alexandria says, the cloud is imagined to be “holy and translucent.”

μαρτύρων. The word has not yet fully acquired its sense of “martyrs.” It here probably means “witnesses to the sincerity and the reward of faith.” The notion that they are also witnesses of our Christian race lies rather in the word περικείμενον, “surrounding us on all sides,” like the witnesses in a circus or a theatre (1 Corinthians 4:9).

ὄγκον�. Lit., “stripping off at once cumbrance of every kind.” The word “weight” was used, technically, in the language of athletes, to mean “superfluous flesh,” to be reduced by training. The training requisite to make the body supple and sinewy was severe and long-continued. Metaphorically the word comes to mean “pride,” “inflation.”

εὐπερίστατον. The six words “which doth so easily beset us” represent this one Greek word, of which the meaning is uncertain, because it occurs nowhere else. It means literally “well standing round,” or “well stood around.” (1) If taken in the latter sense it is interpreted to mean (α) “thronged,” “eagerly encircled,” and so “much admired” or “much applauded,” and will thus put us on our guard against sins which are popular; or (β) “easily avoidable,” with reference to the verb περιΐστασο, “avoid” (2 Timothy 2:16; Titus 3:9). The objections to these renderings are that the writer is thinking of private sins. More probably it is to be taken in the active sense, as in the A.V. and the R.V., of the sin which either (α) “presses closely about us to attack us”; or (β) which “closely clings (tenaciter inhaerens, Erasmus) to us” like an enfolding robe (στατὸς χιτών). The latter is almost certainly the true meaning, and is suggested by the participle ἀποθέμενοι, “stripping off” (comp. Ephesians 4:22). As an athlete lays aside every heavy or dragging article of dress, so we must strip away from us and throw aside the clinging robe of familiar sin. The metaphor is the same as that of the word ἀπεκδύσασθαι (Colossians 3:9), which is the parallel to ἀποθέοθαι in Ephesians 4:22. The gay garment of sin may at first be lightly put on and lightly laid aside, but it afterwards becomes like the fabled shirt of Nessus, eating into the bones as it were fire.

ἁμαρτίαν, “sin,”—all sin, not, as the A. V. would lead us to suppose, some particular besetting sin.

διʼ ὑπομονῆς. Endurance characterised the faith of all these heroes and patriarchs, and he exhorts us to endure because Christ also endured the cross (ὑπομείνας). Διὰ with the gen. is used in classical Greek also for the temper of mind.

τὸν προκείμενον ἡμῖν�. One of the favourite metaphors of St Paul (Philippians 3:12-14; 1 Corinthians 9:24-25; 2 Timothy 4:7-8).