One short sentence closes the chapter’s first movement. Paul has produced two exhibits — Abraham’s own case (v. 6, quoting Gen 15:6) and Scripture’s advance announcement to Abraham that all the nations would be blessed in him (v. 8, Gen 12:3 / 18:18) — and now draws the conclusion with ὥστε and a finite indicative: this is asserted as accomplished fact, not projected as a possibility.

Four things carry the weight.

1. οἱ ἐκ πίστεως repeats verbatim the designation coined in v. 7, where it was predicated of Abraham’s sons. The repetition is the argument: the same phrase names the same people, and the reader who has granted v. 7 has already granted v. 9.
2. εὐλογοῦνται is a present passive with no agent named. The blessing is God’s — the preceding verse makes that plain — but Paul writes the divine passive and the apparatus must not supply what he withheld. The present is durative: a blessing in force, not a blessing promised.
3. σύν is companionate, not instrumental. Those of faith are not blessed by Abraham or through him; they are blessed alongside him. This is a quietly significant move: v. 8 said the nations would be blessed ἐν σοί (in Abraham), and v. 9 does not repeat that preposition. Abraham is the fellow-recipient, not the channel.
4. τῷ πιστῷ — the adjective, in attributive position, is genuinely open between ‘believing’ (he exercised faith, v. 6) and ‘faithful’ (he was reliable, the Jewish tradition’s Abraham of Sir 44:20 and 1 Macc 2:52). The two readings are not far apart in effect, but they are not identical, and Paul does not resolve them.

The verse also sets up what follows. Blessing has just been the operative noun twice (εὐλογηθήσονται, v. 8; εὐλογοῦνται, v. 9); the next sentence opens with κατάρα (v. 10). The paragraph turns on a blessing/curse antithesis that the LXX Deuteronomic sanctions had already fixed as the two covenantal alternatives.

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 corpus has already fixed two policies for this conjunction: ὥστε + infinitive = result (‘so that, with the result that’, Phil 1:13), and ὥστε + finite indicative = ‘so then’, drawing a conclusion out of preceding argument (Gal 3:9, 24; 4:7, 16; Rom 7:4, 12; Gal 3:9 belongs squarely here).

With the indicative the construction is an independent assertion of an achieved state of affairs, and Koine had largely lost the classical conceived/actual distinction in the infinitive construction but never needed it in the finite one (BDF §391). Two consequences follow:

• The conjunction must be rendered. Per §10, epistolary connectives carry argument structure and are never dropped; a bare ‘and’ or an asyndetic English sentence turns a stated inference into a coordinate observation.
• No modal hedging is permitted. ‘So that those of faith may be blessed’ converts a present indicative into a purpose clause and, in effect, defers the blessing — precisely what the verb’s tense denies.

‘Therefore’ is acceptable where a tight single-step inference is in view; ‘so then’ is preferred here because ὥστε closes a two-exhibit argument (v. 6 and v. 8) rather than deducing from one premise.

The phrase is Galatians’ signature formula, derived from Hab 2:4 LXX (quoted at Gal 3:11) and set throughout the letter against ἐξ ἔργων νόμου. The corpus policy is fixed: ἐκ is rendered ‘out of’ in the literal tier, marking source and ground; the noun stays anarthrous and qualitative (‘out of faith’, never ‘out of the faith’); and ‘through faith’ is excluded, since that is διά + gen, a construction Paul maintains as distinct and uses five verses later (διὰ τῆς πίστεως, v. 14).

Two observations specific to this verse.

First, οἱ ἐκ πίστεως is a designation, not a description of an activity. Article + prepositional phrase substantivized is the standard Koine device for naming a class by what it derives from (cf. οἱ ἐκ περιτομῆς, Acts 11:2; οἱ ἐκ νόμου, Rom 4:14; and the group-membership ἐκ already fixed for οἱ ἐκ τῆς Καίσαρος οἰκίας, Phil 4:22). The literal tier accordingly brackets the supplied noun — ‘the [ones] out of faith’ — rather than paraphrasing to ‘those who believe’, which converts a membership-phrase into a verbal clause and loses the parallel with the ἐξ ἔργων νόμου party of v. 10.

Second, the phrase is verbatim identical with v. 7 (οἱ ἐκ πίστεως), and identical English wording is mandatory at both points. The repetition is the hinge of the inference, and a reader who sees ‘those who have faith’ at v. 7 and ‘those who rely on faith’ at v. 9 cannot see that Paul said the same thing twice.

Since no genitive Χριστοῦ is present, the πίστις Χριστοῦ debate does not arise here; the noun stands absolute.

Built onbdag · bdf

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

εὐλογέω is the standing LXX equivalent of בָּרַךְ, covering both God blessing his people and his people blessing him. The corpus fixes it as ‘bless’, kept lexically distinct from εὐχαριστέω (‘give thanks’), ἐξομολογέομαι (‘confess / acclaim’), and αἰνέω — the LXX distributes Hebrew הודה and ברך across these and the reader must be able to see which Greek verb stands where. ‘Praise’ is excluded as base gloss.

Three features of the form are load-bearing.

The passive stays passive, with the agent unexpressed. v. 8 named ὁ θεός as the one who justifies and as the speaker of the promise, and the LXX source text (Gen 12:3) has the blessing flowing from God; but Paul wrote a bare passive and no subject. Rendering ‘God blesses those of faith’ supplies what the construction withholds. The point is not reticence about the giver — it is that the clause’s grammatical subject is the recipients, who are thereby placed in the same position Abraham occupies.

The present is durative, not futural. v. 8’s citation was future (ἐνευλογηθήσονται, tracking the LXX); v. 9 shifts to a present. The shift is the conclusion: what was announced beforehand is now in force. A future rendering (‘will be blessed’) reproduces the source text rather than Paul’s inference, and softens a claim about the present into a promise about the future (§6).

One English root across the paragraph. The noun εὐλογία follows at v. 14 and the antonym κατάρα at vv. 10 and 13. The εὐλογ-/κατάρα pair is the fixed LXX Deuteronomic sanction-vocabulary (Deut 11:26; 27-30; Josh 8:34), and the corpus already requires both members to be rendered strongly as nouns and verbs of the same roots. Varying to ‘receive God’s favour’ at v. 9 would sever the frame.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

σύν + dative is companionate. The corpus has already fixed the policy at σὺν Χριστῷ (Phil 1:23): σύν must remain lexically distinct from ἐν Χριστῷ (incorporative), and the two prepositions are not to be harmonized in English.

That policy has real force here, because v. 8 quoted the promise as ἐν σοί — ‘in you all the nations will be blessed’. Paul had that preposition in front of him, from his own quotation one clause earlier, and did not reuse it. Instead of making Abraham the sphere or channel of blessing, v. 9 makes him a fellow recipient. Three renderings must therefore be excluded from the reading text:

• ‘blessed through Abraham’ (διά + gen; converts a companion into a mediator)
• ‘blessed in Abraham’ (reproduces v. 8’s ἐν, erasing the change)
• ‘blessed along with Abraham’s blessing’ (supplies a noun and dissolves the person)

‘Together with’ is retained in the literal tier so the σύν- force is unmistakable; ‘with’ is permitted in smooth registers with the compression noted.

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

The adjective stands in attributive position (article–adjective–noun) and its force is genuinely double.

Active sense — ‘believing’. This matches v. 6 immediately (Ἀβραὰμ ἐπίστευσεν) and the cognate noun in the same verse (ἐκ πίστεως). On this reading the adjective is doing the argument’s work: Abraham believed, these believe, and therefore they are blessed alongside him. The two NT uses where the active sense is plain are John 20:27 (μὴ γίνου ἄπιστος ἀλλὰ πιστός) and the standing designation οἱ πιστοί for believers (Acts 10:45; 1 Tim 4:3, 10, 12).

Passive sense — ‘faithful, trustworthy’. This is the dominant NT value and the one the corpus has already fixed where God is the referent (πιστός, 1 Pet 4:19: ‘active reliability — one who can be counted on’). Of Abraham it is the standard Jewish epithet: Sir 44:20 (ἐν πειρασμῷ εὑρέθη πιστός), 1 Macc 2:52 (Ἀβραὰμ οὐχὶ ἐν πειρασμῷ εὑρέθη πιστός, καὶ ἐλογίσθη αὐτῷ εἰς δικαιοσύνην — note that this text already joins the epithet to the Gen 15:6 formula Paul quotes at v. 6), and Neh 9:8 LXX (εὗρες τὴν καρδίαν αὐτοῦ πιστὴν ἐνώπιόν σου).

Excluded in every tier: ‘Abraham who believed’ (converts an adjective to a relative clause and closes the question), ‘loyal Abraham’ (imports fidelity to a party), ‘trusting Abraham’ (adopts the active reading and adds a nuance the adjective lacks).

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

τῷ πιστῷ Ἀβραάμ is article–adjective–noun, the first attributive position, in which the modifier is embedded in the article-noun unit rather than added as a separate emphatic predication (contrast the doubled-article construction already catalogued at Phil 4:17 and Jas 1:9).

Two practical notes. First, Ἀβραάμ is an indeclinable Semitic transliteration, so the dative case is carried entirely by τῷ and πιστῷ — the article here is doing grammatical work, not pointing anaphorically, and English supplies nothing for it beyond the possessive or epithet construction. Second, because the adjective is attributive rather than predicative, the clause does not assert that Abraham is faithful; it identifies him as the one so characterized. ‘Abraham, who was faithful’ is a non-restrictive resolution that converts a designation into a claim and is excluded from the literal tier.

Built onbdf

v. 9 is the last word of the blessing half of a two-part structure. The vocabulary is Deuteronomic: εὐλογία and κατάρα are the LXX pair for the covenant sanctions (Deut 11:26-28; 27:11-26; 28:1-68; 29:19-20; 30:1, 19; Josh 8:34), set as mutually exclusive alternatives before a people who must choose.

Paul’s sequence:

• v. 8 — ἐνευλογηθήσονται ἐν σοὶ πάντα τὰ ἔθνη (Gen 12:3 / 18:18, future)
• v. 9 — οἱ ἐκ πίστεως εὐλογοῦνται (present, concluded)
• v. 10 — ὅσοι … ἐξ ἔργων νόμου εἰσὶν ὑπὸ κατάραν εἰσίν, with Deut 27:26 cited
• v. 13 — Χριστὸς ἡμᾶς ἐξηγόρασεν ἐκ τῆς κατάρας τοῦ νόμου, with Deut 21:23 cited
• v. 14 — ἵνα εἰς τὰ ἔθνη ἡ εὐλογία τοῦ Ἀβραὰμ γένηται

The structure is therefore blessing (8-9) / curse (10-12) / curse absorbed (13) / blessing reaching the nations (14). This matters for the rendering in one concrete way: the εὐλογ- root must carry a single English root across vv. 8, 9, and 14, and the κατάρα root across vv. 10 and 13, or the reader cannot see that Paul is running the Deuteronomic alternatives as his frame. Softening either side — ‘receive God’s favour’ for the one, ‘come under God’s displeasure’ for the other — destroys the architecture.

Note also what the paragraph does not say at v. 9. It does not yet say that the nations are blessed; that arrives at v. 14. At v. 9 the blessed are οἱ ἐκ πίστεως, a category defined by derivation and not by ethnicity, and the ἔθνη of v. 8 are still inside a quoted promise.

Proposed — pending reviewHans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Churches in Galatia, Hermeneia, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979.

The verse is textually stable. NA28 prints no variant in its apparatus for this line, and the editors’ confidence reflects agreement across the Alexandrian, Western, and Byzantine traditions.

Two minor points worth recording as the kinds of thing the tradition does with such clauses, both of which the text resists:

• The spelling of the patriarch’s name fluctuates orthographically in the manuscripts (Ἀβραάμ / Ἁβραάμ, with and without rough breathing), a matter of scribal convention carrying no weight. The accentuation and breathing printed in modern editions are editorial, the earliest majuscules having neither.
• A reader expecting the quotation’s future tense (ἐνευλογηθήσονται, v. 8) might expect a future here; the tradition does not supply one. The present εὐλογοῦνται is uniform, which is evidence that the tense-shift from v. 8 to v. 9 was felt as deliberate rather than as a slip to be corrected.

Since no variant bears on meaning, no footnote per §4’s variant rule is required in the main text.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

Vulgate: igitur qui ex fide sunt benedicentur cum fideli Abraham. Three divergences from the Greek, all instructive.

1. benedicentur is future, where Greek has a present. Jerome (or the Old Latin behind him) has assimilated v. 9 to the future of the quoted promise in v. 8 — exactly the levelling the Greek tradition declined to make. The English versions descending from this (‘shall be blessed’) carry the Latin’s tense, not Paul’s, and defer a blessing Paul asserts as present.
2. qui ex fide sunt supplies the copula Greek leaves unexpressed. Latin has no substantivizing article and must do so; the supplement is grammatical necessity, not interpretation, and tells us nothing.
3. fideli takes πιστῷ in the passive sense (‘faithful’), which the Latin adjective can carry but which also loses the active ‘believing’ option. Latin fidelis cannot hold both poles as cleanly as the Greek, so the version adjudicates by necessity — which is precisely why it must not be cited as evidence for the reading (§11).

Peshitta renders the participle-phrase with a relative construction and takes the adjective with the passive sense as well. The Syriac, like the Latin, lacks a device for substantivizing a bare prepositional phrase and so supplies a relative; nothing follows about the Greek.

The pattern is worth stating plainly: both major early versions resolve the two features that the Greek leaves open (the tense-contrast with v. 8, the active/passive force of πιστός), and in opposite directions from each other on neither point. They are reception, not evidence.

Proposed — pending reviewRobert Weber and Roger Gryson, eds., Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, 5th ed., Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007.

Chrysostom (Hom. in Gal. on 3:7-9) fastens on the σύν. His point is that Paul does not say the believers are blessed because of Abraham but with him, which he takes as putting them on the same footing rather than in a dependent relation — and he observes that this is the more remarkable because Abraham had the promise first. He reads πιστός actively, glossing it by Abraham’s believing in v. 6.

Jerome (Comm. in Gal.) presses the epithet in the other direction, connecting fidelis Abraham to the testing of Gen 22 and so to the Jewish tradition’s reliable Abraham. The two Fathers between them illustrate that the adjective’s ambiguity was felt early and was resolved differently by competent readers — which is the strongest argument for leaving it open.

Augustine (Expos. Gal.) notes the symmetry of the argument: the ones who are of faith are sons of Abraham (v. 7) and blessed with Abraham (v. 9), so that sonship and blessing are two descriptions of one standing. That is a reading of the paragraph rather than of a word, and it is sound: the verbatim repetition of οἱ ἐκ πίστεως across vv. 7 and 9 is what licenses it.

None of this is lexical evidence (§11). It is recorded because it shows which questions in the verse were live for readers who had the language natively, and the two that were live — the force of σύν and the sense of πιστός — are the two this apparatus leaves open.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13, ed. Philip Schaff, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, repr. 1994. · Jerome, Commentarii in epistulam Pauli ad Galatas, ed. Giacomo Raspanti, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 77A, Turnhout: Brepols, 2006.