The verse is the second leg of a two-part scriptural proof. Verse 10 established from Deut 27:26 that those whose standing rests on works of law are under a curse. Verse 11 now establishes from Hab 2:4 that justification does not come about in the sphere of law at all, and v. 12 completes the argument with Lev 18:5.

Four things carry the weight here:

1. A fronted content-clause with a verbless predicate. The Greek says, in effect, “That-in-law-no-one-is-justified-before-God [is] plain.” The whole first clause is the subject of the adjective δῆλον, and no copula is written.
2. Two ὅτι particles with different functions — the first a complementizer, the second causal, introducing the citation. English must distinguish them.
3. ἐν νόμῳ anarthrous and spherical — the domain within which righteousness is sought — matching τὴν ἐν νόμῳ δικαιοσύνην at Phil 3:6 and ἐν νόμῳ at Gal 5:4.
4. The citation’s own ambiguity. In Hab 2:4 LXX, ἐκ πίστεως may attach to the subject (“the one who is righteous by faith will live”) or to the verb (“the righteous one will live by faith”). Greek word order permits both; the dispute is ancient and unresolved, and the English must not resolve it.

The citation is given without an introductory formula — no γέγραπται, no λέγει ἡ γραφή — unlike v. 10 and v. 13, both of which supply one. The bare ὅτι makes the quoted words function as the ground of the verdict rather than as a documented proof-text.

The verse contains two instances of ὅτι doing different work, and the sentence cannot be read without separating them.

The first is a complementizer heading a content clause which, by fronting, becomes the grammatical subject of the predicate adjective δῆλον: ὅτι … οὐδεὶς δικαιοῦται … δῆλον = “that no one is justified … [is] plain.” The construction is ordinary Koine (compare 1 Cor 15:27; 1 Tim 6:7), and the fronting of the whole clause before its predicate is topicalizing: the proposition is laid out first and pronounced on at the end.

The second ὅτι is causal, giving the ground on which the matter is plain. Two further construals have been defended:

Rendering the second particle “for” rather than “because” is permissible in formal registers, but a bare colon (adopting the recitative reading) resolves the question in the reading text and is excluded.

Proposed — pending reviewF. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982)

δῆλος denotes what is manifest, out in the open, evident to inspection — not what has been demonstrated by argument (that would be ἀποδεδειγμένον) nor what is merely probable. Four NT occurrences (Matt 26:73; 1 Cor 15:27; Gal 3:11; 1 Tim 6:7), and in three of the four it stands as a verbless neuter predicate with the copula elided, which is the standard idiom.

The adjective is doing load-bearing work. Paul does not say that his conclusion follows from Hab 2:4 but that it is plain — a claim about visibility, not inference. Renderings that convert it into argumentation (“it is proved that,” “it can be demonstrated that”) overstate the lexeme, and renderings that convert it into assertion (“clearly, no one is justified”) adverbialize a predicate adjective and lose the sentence’s structure, in which the whole proposition is held up and then pronounced upon.

The elided copula is supplied and bracketed in the literal tier per standing policy on verbless clauses. The scribal addition of ἐστίν in part of the tradition shows the direction of smoothing to be avoided.

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Anarthrous νόμῳ with ἐν. Per standing corpus policy the article is withheld in every tier: law is presented as a regime or principle, not as the named Mosaic document, and supplying “the law” narrows a categorical claim.

The preposition is spherical, not instrumental: the domain within which a righteousness is defined and sought. This matches τὴν ἐν νόμῳ δικαιοσύνην (Phil 3:6) and ἐν νόμῳ δικαιοῦσθε (Gal 5:4), and it stands over against ἐκ πίστεως in the citation, where ἐκ marks source. Paul had ἐξ ἔργων νόμου available — he uses it in v. 10 and three times at Gal 2:16 — and wrote a different phrase here.

“By law” is permitted in smooth registers with the instrumental tipping recorded; it should not be the base rendering, since it blurs a distinction the sentence maintains across two clauses.

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παρά + dative marks the standpoint from which an assessment is made — the dativus iudicantis in prepositional dress. Fixed by Rom 2:11 (οὐ γάρ ἐστιν προσωπολημψία παρὰ τῷ θεῷ), 1 Cor 3:19, 1 Pet 2:4, and Jas 1:27, and corresponding to the LXX idiom at Ps 142:2.

Two renderings are current. “Before God” is traditional (Vulgate apud Deum) but modern English “before” has drifted toward the locative and reads as the place where the justifying would occur. “In the judgment of God” or “in God’s sight” makes the assessment-sense explicit. Both are retained — “before God” in the reading text, where the forensic register of δικαιόω supplies the sense, and “in the judgment of God” in the study tier.

The phrase is not synonymous with ἐνώπιον τοῦ θεοῦ (Gal 1:20), which marks the presence in which an act acquires weight, nor with ὑπὸ θεοῦ, which would name God as agent. Paul had both and used neither.

Forensic-declarative on the LXX model (Exod 23:7; Deut 25:1; Isa 5:23; and above all Ps 142:2 LXX, οὐ δικαιωθήσεται ἐνώπιόν σου πᾶς ζῶν, which Paul reworks at Rom 3:20 and Gal 2:16): to pronounce in the right.

Three features of the form here:

• Present tense, gnomic — what characteristically holds, rendered with a simple English present and never a progressive (“no one is being justified”).
• Passive, with the agent unexpressed. Per standing policy no subject is supplied: “God does not justify anyone in law” names what the divine passive withholds, and at Gal 3:11 the following παρὰ τῷ θεῷ already supplies the standpoint without making God the grammatical agent.
• δικ- root concordance. The verb and the substantival ὁ δίκαιος in the citation share one Greek root, and that shared root is the hinge of the argument: the ὁ δίκαιος of Habakkuk is the one who gets δικαιοῦται. English must keep “justified / righteous one” on one visible root; “no one is acquitted … the upright man” destroys the link.

“Declare righteous” is available in the study tier; “make righteous” is excluded as resting on Latin iustificare (= iustum facere) rather than on the Greek.

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οὐδείς is fronted before its verb — categorical and emphatic. It is not the οὐ … πᾶς Semitism of Gal 2:16 (where Hebrew word order produces an apparent “not all”) but the straightforward Greek universal negative, which is why no note about the idiom is needed here.

The pronoun also marks a shift of scope from v. 10. There Paul addressed a defined class (ὅσοι ἐξ ἔργων νόμου εἰσίν); here the denial is unrestricted — no one, in the sphere of law, in the judgment of God. Renderings that restrict it (“no one who relies on the law”) supply a participle the Greek withholds.

Articular masculine singular, generic. Per standing corpus policy (fixed at Jas 5:6) the bare articular adjective is retained, the singular is not pluralized, and the initial is not capitalized.

The non-capitalization matters here. A messianic reading of Hab 2:4 — in which ὁ δίκαιος is Christ, who lives out of his own faithfulness — has been defended on the strength of the early Christian use of ὁ δίκαιος as a title for Jesus (Acts 3:14; 7:52; 22:14; 1 Pet 3:18) and of the fact that Paul’s citation has no possessive pronoun, where Hab 2:4 MT reads בֶּאֱמוּנָתוֹ (“by his faith/faithfulness”) and the main LXX tradition reads ἐκ πίστεώς μου. Paul’s wording, lacking any pronoun, leaves the subject unspecified.

“The just man” is retained in declared liturgical register only; “the upright person” severs the δικ- root and is excluded.

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Proposed — pending reviewJ. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1997)

The central crux. ἐκ πίστεως stands between ὁ δίκαιος and ζήσεται, and Greek word order does not say which it modifies.

The English must reproduce the ambiguity, not resolve it. Placing the phrase between subject and verb — “The righteous one out of faith will live” — keeps it as open in English as in Greek, and is the literal tier’s rendering. The modern tier moves it after the verb, which tips adverbial; this is recorded as a tipping, not presented as a decision. “The one who is righteous by faith will live” and “the righteous will live by faith” each adjudicate and are excluded from the reading text without flagging.

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Proposed — pending reviewRichard N. Longenecker, Galatians, Word Biblical Commentary 41 (Dallas: Word Books, 1990)

Future middle of ζάω. The Koine middle future ζήσεται against the active ζήσω (which Paul writes at Gal 2:19) is a morphological development carrying no semantic weight; record the form, do not render it differently.

Two things about the sense. First, per standing policy the verb stays a verb: “will have life” and “will be alive” convert ongoing existence into a possession or a state. Second, the referent of the life is left open and must stay open.

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Postpositive δέ continuing the proof-chain of vv. 10-12. Per standing corpus policy against manufacturing antitheses, it is rendered “and” or “now,” not “but.”

The point is more than stylistic. Verse 11 does not oppose v. 10; it adds a second scriptural witness to the same conclusion. Rendering “but” sets the two citations against each other, which is exactly what Paul is not doing — the whole structure is cumulative: Deut 27:26 (curse), Hab 2:4 (not in law), Lev 18:5 (law’s own terms are doing, not faith).

The particle is always rendered (§10); its position after the fronted ὅτι is regular, since ὅτι plus the first word of its clause is felt as a unit.

The Greek text of this verse is stable in the critical tradition. Two matters bear recording.

The elided copula. Some later witnesses supply ἐστίν with δῆλον. The shorter verbless form is the harder reading, and the addition is scribal clarification of exactly the kind the corpus consistently declines to follow.

The form of the Habakkuk citation. Paul’s wording — Ὁ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται, with no possessive pronoun — differs from the dominant LXX reading of Hab 2:4 (ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεώς μου ζήσεται) and from the Hebrew (וְצַדִּיק בֶּאֱמוּנָתוֹ יִחְיֶה, “by his faith/faithfulness”). The pronoun-less form also stands at Rom 1:17 and at Heb 10:38 (in a different word order and with the pronoun retained in part of the tradition).

Whether Paul dropped the pronoun, knew a Greek text that lacked it, or cited from a form already circulating without it cannot be settled. What is certain is the exegetical consequence: with no pronoun, the faith is unspecified — neither explicitly God’s faithfulness (LXX μου) nor explicitly the righteous man’s (MT בֶּאֱמוּנָתוֹ) — and the phrase becomes available as the bare collocation Paul uses throughout the chapter. The omission is not corrected toward either source text (§1, §4): the NT author’s own textual choice is data to preserve.

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The Hebrew of Hab 2:4b reads וְצַדִּיק בֶּאֱמוּנָתוֹ יִחְיֶה — “and a righteous one, by his faithfulness, will live.” אֱמוּנָה denotes steadfastness and reliability, and with the third-person suffix the reference is most naturally the righteous man’s own fidelity in holding to God through the delay announced in v. 3. The context is an oracle about waiting: the vision tarries, and the one who stands firm comes through.

The Greek tradition went two ways with the suffix. The main LXX witnesses read ἐκ πίστεώς μου, which attaches the faithfulness to God — “by my faithfulness” — a construal that reads the suffix as objective or assumes a different Vorlage. Some witnesses have αὐτοῦ, closer to the Hebrew. Paul has neither pronoun.

The Qumran commentary 1QpHab VIII reads the verse of those faithful to the Teacher, taking אֱמוּנָה as the believer’s own fidelity — evidence that the Hebrew was read that way in the Second Temple period and not only after Paul.

Two consequences for the rendering. First, the Greek of Galatians is rendered as written and is not corrected toward the Hebrew or toward the fuller LXX (§1, §2): the Hebrew substrate is footnoted, not restored. Second, the shift of nuance in πίστις — from steadfastness-in-adversity to the faith over against works of law — is real and should be recorded, but it is a matter of how Paul deploys the text, not evidence about what the Hebrew meant in its own setting.

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Proposed — pending reviewLudwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, rev. Walter Baumgartner and Johann Jakob Stamm, trans. M. E. J. Richardson (Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000)

The corpus already treats πίστις Χριστοῦ as a bare genitive to be left open. The present verse has no genitive, so that debate does not apply directly — but the related question of whether πίστις here names human trust or divine/messianic faithfulness is live, and the rendering must not close it.

Three data points. (i) The Hebrew אֱמוּנָה behind the citation leans toward steadfast reliability, which in a human subject is fidelity rather than reliance. (ii) The LXX μου makes it God’s. (iii) Paul’s own ἐκ πίστεως throughout Galatians 3 (vv. 7, 8, 9, 12, 22, 24) consistently names the believing response that marks out Abraham’s sons, and at v. 22 it takes the genitive Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, which is itself contested.

The single gloss “faith” is retained for concordance across all occurrences in the chapter, and the shade of sense is carried in apparatus rather than varied in the text. “Faithfulness” is not substituted here: the chapter’s other eight instances will not bear it, and varying the English would hide that Paul uses one word throughout.

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Chrysostom reads the verse as the second of three proofs and takes ἐκ πίστεως with ζήσεται: the prophet, he says, was speaking of the life that comes by faith, and Paul adduces him to show that the law’s own Scriptures testify against law-righteousness. He is notably untroubled by the syntactic question, treating the collocation as the point.

Jerome, in his commentary on Galatians, registers the difference between Paul’s wording and the Septuagint’s ex fide mea and raises the question of the dropped pronoun — an early instance of the textual observation made above.

Augustine presses ὁ δίκαιος generically and uses the verse in the Pelagian controversy to argue that the righteousness in view is received rather than achieved. His use is reception, not evidence for the Greek.

What the Fathers do not do is treat the verse as a bare prooftext extracted from context: both Chrysostom and Jerome read it inside the three-citation argument of vv. 10-12, which is the right instinct. The verse’s later career as a standalone slogan — detached from Deut 27:26 before it and Lev 18:5 after it — belongs to the Reformation era and after, and is reception (§11), carrying no weight for the rendering.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, in Patrologia Graeca 61 (Paris, 1862) · Jerome, Commentarii in epistulam Pauli ad Galatas, ed. Giacomo Raspanti, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 77A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006)