A single short sentence draws the inference from the Abraham citation of v. 6. Four things carry the weight.

First, the opening verb is formally ambiguous: Γινώσκετε can be indicative (“you know”) or imperative (“know!”), and the Greek offers no way to decide. The difference matters — on one reading Paul appeals to something the Galatians already hold; on the other he presses a conclusion they have not yet drawn.

Second, the subject is a bare prepositional phrase made into a noun: οἱ ἐκ πίστεως, “those out of faith.” Paul has coined a designation, not described a quality. The phrase recurs at v. 9 and stands against ὅσοι ἐξ ἔργων νόμου at v. 10.

Third, the syntax is deliberately broken: the subject is fronted, then picked up again by a demonstrative — those out of faith, these are sons of Abraham. The resumption is emphasis, and the English should keep it rather than tidy it away.

Fourth, the predicate is υἱοί, not τέκνα. Paul is not describing family resemblance but assigning legal standing — the word that will carry the inheritance argument through 3:29 and 4:1-7.

Text-critically the verse is stable; the only notable variation is a secondary addition of the article before Ἀβραάμ.

The present active form Γινώσκετε is identical for the second-person plural indicative and the second-person plural imperative. Greek has no way of marking the difference, and neither do the manuscripts: the earliest majuscules carry no punctuation, so the comma or full stop printed before it in modern editions is editorial judgment and not evidence.

Both readings are ancient and both are defensible.

The corpus policy for morphologically undecidable mood is already fixed (see Ἴστε, Jas 1:19): adopt the critical edition’s punctuation in the reading text, retain the alternative in other tiers, and report that the punctuation rests on discourse analysis rather than on manuscript evidence. NA28 punctuates as an imperative, and that is followed here.

The lexeme itself is the corpus-fixed γινώσκω, “come to know” relationally or by recognition, kept distinct from οἶδα (settled state) and ἐπίσταμαι (be versed in). Where the sense is drawing an inference from evidence just presented, “recognize” is a legitimate reading-tier rendering; “understand” is excluded, since that belongs to συνίημι/νοέω.

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

Inferential ἄρα, postpositive, weaker and more conversational than διό or οὖν. It draws out a consequence that follows from something granted — which is exactly its function in Galatians, where it recurs at 2:21 (in a reductio), 3:29, and 5:11.

Two cautions apply.

First, the accentual distinction between inferential ἄρα and interrogative ἆρα is a modern editorial convention: the earliest majuscules are unaccented. At Gal 3:7 no serious reading takes the particle as interrogative — the ὅτι clause that follows rules it out — but the general discipline holds and is recorded here for consistency with Gal 2:17, Gal 5:11, Gal 6:15, and 1 Pet 5:8.

Second, the particle must be rendered. Dropping it as untranslatable removes the one word that makes v. 7 an inference from v. 6 rather than a fresh assertion. “Then” or “so then” carries it; a bare “therefore” is reserved for οὖν and overstates the logical tightness.

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Article plus prepositional phrase, substantivized: literally “the [ones] out of faith.” Paul uses the formula twice in this paragraph (3:7, 3:9) and it is answered at 3:10 by ὅσοι ἐξ ἔργων νόμου εἰσίν — so the two phrases are a matched pair of designations, not descriptions.

ἐκ is source, per standing corpus policy, and is kept distinct from διά (means, as at 3:14 διὰ τῆς πίστεως) and ἀπό (origin). The literal tier retains “out of” at every occurrence so that the parallel with ἐξ ἔργων νόμου (3:2, 5, 10) and with the ἐκ πίστεως of the Hab 2:4 citation (3:11) stays visible. Rendering “by faith” blurs source into instrumentality and hides a formula Paul repeats five times in this chapter.

πίστις is anarthrous and qualitative. Two live questions attach to the phrase, and neither may be resolved in the rendering.

The two readings are not sharply separable in Greek, and English “those out of faith” holds both. Excluded from the reading text: “those who have faith” and “those who believe” (both substitute a verb for a prepositional designation and delete ἐκ), “men of faith” (narrows gender beyond what the masculine plural warrants, §3), and “those who rely on faith” (imports a verb of reliance from the πέποιθα family).

Whether the πίστις in view is the believer’s own trust or Christ’s faithfulness is the standing πίστις Χριστοῦ question in a different form. Here there is no dependent genitive, so the subjective-genitive debate does not arise directly; but the chapter’s ἐκ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ at 3:22 shows the question is live in the paragraph, and the bare noun is retained for that reason.

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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 clause is syntactically broken in a way the English should preserve: the subject phrase οἱ ἐκ πίστεως stands first, and is then taken up again by the demonstrative οὗτοι before the predicate arrives. Literally: the ones out of faith — these are Abraham’s sons.

This is the construction the corpus has already catalogued as casus pendens with resumptive demonstrative (Phil 3:7, ἅτινα … ταῦτα; Gal 2:18, ὃ … αὐτὸ τοῦτο; Jas 4:17). It is good Koine with LXX colouring, reproducing the Hebrew pattern of topicalization followed by a resumptive pronoun. The pronoun is emphatic, not pleonastic: it isolates the fronted group and then predicates of them and no others.

Policy therefore requires both the order and the pronoun to survive. Reading tiers may mark the seam with a dash or a comma; what is excluded is deleting the resumption (“those who are of faith are sons of Abraham”), which buys fluency at the cost of the emphasis, or converting it into an English cleft so strong that it asserts exclusivity the Greek only implies.

The modern rendering above uses an English cleft (“it is those who are out of faith who…”) as the closest available equivalent of the Greek emphasis, with the compression recorded here. The literal tier keeps the Greek sequence.

Note also that the enclitic εἰσιν stands between the predicate noun υἱοί and its genitive Ἀβραάμ, which is ordinary Greek word order for an unemphatic copula and carries no interpretive weight.

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υἱοί is anarthrous and predicative — “sons of Abraham,” not “the sons of Abraham.” The qualitative force matters: Paul asserts that those out of faith belong to the class, without yet making the exclusive claim that no one else does (that comes by implication from v. 10 and explicitly at 3:29).

The choice of υἱός over τέκνον is deliberate and is governed by the standing corpus entry. υἱός is the inheritance-bearing term; τέκνον is relational and affectionate. Galatians keeps them apart: τέκνα at 4:19, 25, 27, 28, 31, but υἱός at 3:7, 3:26, 4:4, 4:5 (υἱοθεσία), 4:6, 4:7, 4:22, 4:30. The chain running υἱοί (3:7) → υἱοὶ θεοῦ (3:26) → τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ (4:4) → υἱοθεσία (4:5) → υἱός … κληρονόμος (4:7) is one argument, and a single English root is mandatory at every point or it becomes invisible. Rendering “children of Abraham” here is inclusive but severs the chain and dissolves the legal standing on which 3:29 (κληρονόμοι) depends.

Per §3 the masculine plural stands as written. The referent is certainly mixed — Gal 3:28 makes that explicit four verses on — and that fact is recorded here rather than resolved by neutralizing the text.

Ἀβραάμ is indeclinable throughout the LXX and NT; the genitive function is supplied by the construction. Note that the critical text has no article: the τοῦ Ἀβραάμ read by part of the tradition is a secondary normalization toward the articular form Paul himself uses at 3:14 and 3:29.

On the designation itself: “sons of Abraham” is live Jewish self-description in the period (cf. Luke 19:9; John 8:33, 39; Acts 13:26), where descent is the normal ground of the claim. Paul’s move is not to deny the designation but to reassign its basis — a move he makes by appeal to Gen 15:6 (v. 6) rather than by argument from Gen 17. Per §5, the contested relation between this claim and Israel’s standing according to the flesh is a flashpoint; the rendering must not prejudge it, and the question belongs to Rom 4 and 9-11 rather than to the lexis of this verse.

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The verse is an inference, and what it infers from matters.

Verse 6 quotes Gen 15:6 LXX almost verbatim: καθὼς Ἀβραὰμ ἐπίστευσεν τῷ θεῷ, καὶ ἐλογίσθη αὐτῷ εἰς δικαιοσύνην. The citation supplies three things Paul then exploits: the verb πιστεύω with a dative of the person credited (the construction already fixed in this corpus at Jas 2:23), the accounting verb λογίζομαι, and the Semitizing εἰς δικαιοσύνην.

Verse 7 converts the verbal πίστευσεν into the nominal designation οἱ ἐκ πίστεως. That is the pivot of the paragraph: a statement about what happened to one man becomes a designation for a class. The warrant for the move is supplied immediately afterwards by Gen 12:3 / 18:18 at v. 8 (ἐνευλογηθήσονται ἐν σοὶ πάντα τὰ ἔθνη) — the nations are blessed in Abraham, which is what makes the transfer of his designation to them intelligible rather than arbitrary.

So the logical shape is: Abraham’s righteousness came by faith (v. 6) → therefore the faith-people are his sons (v. 7) → and Scripture foresaw exactly this, since it promised blessing for the nations in him (v. 8) → so the faith-people are blessed along with him (v. 9). Verse 7 is the middle term, and ἄρα is the joint.

One feature of the Greek deserves notice: Paul does not write σπέρμα here. He saves that word for 3:16, where he will press its singularity, and for 3:29, where he returns it to the plural addressees. At v. 7 he uses the broader υἱοί — a designation that can be held by many without prejudice to the σπέρμα argument still to come.

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)

The verse is textually stable. Two minor points.

Ἀβραάμ / τοῦ Ἀβραάμ. The critical text reads the anarthrous genitive. A portion of the tradition supplies the article, assimilating to Paul’s own articular usage a few verses later (τοῦ Ἀβραάμ, 3:14; τοῦ Ἀβραάμ σπέρμα, 3:29). The anarthrous form is the harder reading and the direction of scribal activity is clear; it is retained, and the predicate stays qualitative.

Punctuation. The comma after πίστεως and the sentence-final stop are editorial. More consequentially, the decision to punctuate Γινώσκετε as an imperative rather than an indicative is a judgment of the modern editors, since the majuscules are unpunctuated and the form is ambiguous. This must be reported as editorial judgment and not cited as manuscript support for either mood. See the section on Γινώσκετε.

No variation affects οἱ ἐκ πίστεως or the resumptive οὗτοι, which is itself worth recording: the construction is awkward enough that scribes elsewhere in this corpus smooth comparable resumptions, and the absence of smoothing here suggests the figure was felt as idiomatic.

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The Greek commentators read the verse as an argument about the ground of kinship rather than about its extent.

Chrysostom, in his homilies on Galatians, takes the force of the verse to lie in the reassignment of the Abrahamic designation: Abraham’s title came to him through faith, and so it passes to those who share the faith rather than to those who merely share the descent. He notes the point of order — that Paul argues from Abraham, whom the opponents themselves invoke, and so turns their own ground against them.

Jerome, in his commentary on Galatians, presses the Genesis sequence: Abraham was reckoned righteous before he was circumcised, so faith, not the rite, is what constituted him. The Latin tradition reads Cognoscite ergo — an imperative — which fixed the imperative reading for the West and lies behind the older English “Know ye therefore.” That is reception, not evidence (§11): Latin has no ambiguity to preserve, since cognoscite and cognoscitis are distinct forms, and the translator had to choose.

Augustine, in the Expositio ad Galatas, draws the line that later became standard in the West: the promise reaches the nations through imitation of Abraham’s faith rather than through propagation of his flesh.

None of these resolves the mood question from the Greek side; the Eastern commentators assume the imperative too, but do so because that is how the sentence functions pastorally, not because the form is decidable.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1889) · Jerome, Commentary on Galatians, trans. Andrew Cain, Fathers of the Church 121 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010) · Eric Plumer, Augustine's Commentary on Galatians: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Notes, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

Two background items bear on the rendering.

The ἐκ πίστεως formula. Paul’s phrase is not coined from nothing. Hab 2:4 LXX reads ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεώς μου ζήσεται, and Paul cites it four verses later at Gal 3:11 in the form Ὁ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται — dropping the μου, which is itself a matter for the note at that verse. The substantivized οἱ ἐκ πίστεως of 3:7 and 3:9 is plausibly formed on that prepositional phrase, which means the designation carries prophetic warrant and is not merely a convenient shorthand. This is further reason to keep “out of faith” stable across 3:7, 3:9, 3:11, 3:12, and 3:22 rather than varying the English for style.

υἱοὶ Ἀβραάμ. The LXX does not use this exact phrase as a standing designation, but the idiom of sonship as covenantal standing is pervasive (υἱοὶ Ἰσραήλ throughout; υἱοὶ θεοῦ ζῶντος, Hos 2:1 LXX). The phrase as a self-designation is at home in Second Temple and NT-period Jewish usage, where it rests on descent; Paul’s reassignment of its basis is therefore a genuine intervention in a live claim.

Versional handling. The Vulgate’s Cognoscite ergo quia hi qui ex fide sunt, hii sunt filii Abrahae preserves the resumptive hii — evidence that the construction was not felt as an error to be corrected. The Peshitta likewise retains a resumptive pronoun. Neither version can reproduce the mood ambiguity of Γινώσκετε, and both read imperatively.

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