Romans 11:17

A Gentile Christian might feel that the very fact that Jews were rejected and Gentiles accepted qualified the assurance with which Paul had just spoken of the future of Israel. It is the disposition to think so, and to presume on one's own favoured position, which the Apostle rebukes in μὴ κατακαυχῶ τῶν κλάδων. εἰ δέ τινες τῶν κ. ἐξεκλάσθησαν : τινες puts the case mildly: cf. Romans 3:3. ἐξεκλάσθησαν, sc., as fruitless. σὺ δὲ ἀγριέλαιος ὤν : σὺ is the presumptuous individual before the Apostle's mind, not the Gentile Church collectively. The ἀγριέλαιος is the olive in its natural uncultivated state. ἐνεκεντρίσθης ἐν αὐτοῖς, sc., among the native branches of the cultivated olive. The process here supposed is one that in horticulture is never performed. The cultivated branch is always engrafted upon the wild stock, and not vice versâ. This Paul knew quite well (see παρὰ φύσιν, Romans 11:24), and the force of his reproof to the presuming Gentile turns on the fact that the process was an unnatural one. [Ordine commutato res magis causis quam causas rebus aptavit (Origen).] It gave the Gentile no room to boast over the rejected Jews. συνκοινωνὸς τῆς ῥίζης τῆς πιότ. τῆς ἐλαίας : there is an argument in συν. At the best, the Gentile only shares with Jews in the virtues of a root which is not Gentile, but Jewish: he has his part in the consecration of the patriarchs, the one historical root of the people of God, and in the blessings God attached to it. For πιότης cf. Judges 9:7. The accumulation of genitives is apparently an imitation of such Hebrew constructions as Isaiah 28:1; Isaiah 28:16 : the meaning is, a partaker in the root of the fat olive tree.