Verse 5 states the two purposes of the sending announced in v. 4. Paul has just said that God sent out his Son, born of a woman, born under law; now he says why: so that he might buy out those under law, so that we might receive the adoption as sons.

Three things carry the weight.

First, the two ἵνα clauses are not a repetition but a sequence: buying-out first, then sonship. The second depends on the first, and English should not fuse them into one purpose.

Second, ἐξαγοράσῃ is a commercial word — buying something out of the market, and in the papyri specifically buying a slave out of servitude. Paul has been running a slavery/heirship image since v. 1 (νήπιος, δοῦλος, δεδουλωμένοι), and this is where he cashes it. The image is live and must stay live.

Third, υἱοθεσία is not a religious word at all. It is the Greco-Roman legal term for adoption — the formal conferral of the status of son, with the inheritance rights that follow. That is why v. 7 can immediately conclude ‘no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir.’

The pronoun shift matters too: he might buy out those (third person, those under law) so that we might receive (first person, Paul with the Galatians). Whether the shift is significant or merely rhetorical is disputed, and it bears directly on whether Paul thinks Gentiles were also, in some sense, ‘under law.’

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Compound of ἐκ + ἀγοράζω (‘buy in the marketplace,’ ἀγορά). BDAG gives two senses: (1) buy up, buy out — the commercial base; (2) redeem, set free by payment. Paul uses the verb four times, twice in Galatians of Christ’s work (3:13; 4:5) and twice in the middle voice of ‘buying up the time’ (Eph 5:16; Col 4:5).

The ἐκ- prefix is not decorative. It marks removal from the sphere in which the thing was held — bought out of the ἀγορά, hence out of the seller’s possession. In the Hellenistic documentary evidence ἀγοράζω and its compounds are the ordinary vocabulary of slave purchase, and the sacral-manumission inscriptions from Delphi use purchase language for the freeing of slaves.

Decisive for the sense here is Gal 3:13, seven verses earlier: Χριστὸς ἡμᾶς ἐξηγόρασεν ἐκ τῆς κατάρας τοῦ νόμου — ‘Christ bought us out from the curse of the law.’ There the object of extraction is named. Here it is not; the participle of location (τοὺς ὑπὸ νόμον) supplies it instead.

Rendering: keep the purchase. ‘Redeem’ is theologically correct and liturgically weighty, but in modern English ‘redeem’ has become almost purely religious vocabulary and the reader no longer hears a transaction. ‘Buy out’ is retained in the main text; ‘redeem-by-purchase’ in the study tier, where the doctrinal freight can be named without hiding the image (§8 live metaphor; §11).

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx · obrien-nigtc

ὑπό + accusative is the standard Greek idiom for subjection to an authority or regime — cf. ὑπὸ ἐπιτρόπους (v. 2), ὑπὸ τὰ στοιχεῖα (v. 3), ὑπὸ ἐξουσίαν (Matt 8:9). The phrase is not locative but jurisdictional: under law’s authority, within its jurisdiction.

νόμον is anarthrous, and per standing policy the missing article does not make the referent generic — Torah is a well-known referent and Greek drops the article freely with such. But the anarthrous form does present the law as a regime rather than a named document, which is what the ὑπό construction requires. Hence ‘under law,’ not ‘under the law,’ in the literal and smooth tiers.

The phrase is a Galatians refrain: 3:23 (ὑπὸ νόμον ἐφρουρούμεθα, ‘we were kept under guard under law’), 4:4 (of the Son), 4:5, 4:21 (οἱ ὑπὸ νόμον θέλοντες εἶναι, ‘you who want to be under law’), 5:18. Note that v. 4 has just applied it to the Son himself: he entered the jurisdiction in order to buy out those held within it.

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A compound of υἱός + τίθημι (‘place as son’), and in the NT exclusively Pauline: Rom 8:15, 23; 9:4; Gal 4:5; Eph 1:5. It does not occur in the LXX. It is, however, well attested in Hellenistic inscriptions and legal documents from the third century BC onward, where it is the ordinary term for legal adoption — καθʼ υἱοθεσίαν is the standard formula on honorific inscriptions naming an adopted son.

This matters for register. The word Paul chose is not cultic and not scriptural; it is juridical. Adoption in Roman law (adoptio, and for adult males adrogatio) transferred a person into a new patria potestas, extinguished the previous legal identity, and conferred full rights of inheritance — which is exactly the logic of v. 7 (οὐκέτι δοῦλος ἀλλὰ υἱός· εἰ δὲ υἱός, καὶ κληρονόμος). The Galatians, in a province where Roman legal forms were visible, would have heard an institution, not a metaphor for affection.

Rendering: adoption as son(s). The morpheme υἱός must stay audible, because Paul’s whole argument runs on it — υἱόν (v. 4), υἱοθεσίαν (v. 5), υἱοῦ (v. 6), υἱός twice (v. 7). Rendering ‘adoption as children’ obscures that chain, and per §3 the masculine is what the text has. The referent is certainly mixed-sex (the Galatian assemblies), and the point of the term is the status conferred — in Roman law the heir’s status — not the sex of the recipient. Noted, not neutralized.

Built onbdag · obrien-nigtc · hurtado-ljc

λαμβάνω with the ἀπό prefix. Two possibilities, and the choice affects the theology of the verse.

Intensive/simple: ‘receive,’ with ἀπό adding nothing beyond marking the source from which the receiving comes. This is the commonest Koine value of the compound (Luke 18:30; Col 3:24 ἀπολήμψεσθε τὴν ἀνταπόδοσιν).

Recuperative: ‘receive back, get what is due.’ Well attested — Luke 15:27 (the prodigal’s father ‘has him back’), Luke 6:34, Phlm 15 (ἵνα αὐτὸν αἰώνιον ἀπέχῃς is the near neighbour), and abundant in the papyri of recovering a deposit or collecting a debt.

If recuperative, the sense would be that the adoption was owed — promised to Abraham, held in trust until the προθεσμία of v. 2 — and is now collected. That fits the guardianship parable of vv. 1-2 remarkably well: the heir does not acquire the estate at his majority, he comes into what was already his.

If simple, Paul means only that the status is conferred and received.

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Two ἵνα clauses, both telic with aorist subjunctive, in asyndeton — no καί between them. The question is their relation.

Coordinate: two parallel purposes of the sending. But this leaves the second clause redundant, and does not explain the absence of a connective.

Subordinate/consecutive: the second purpose is achieved through the first. The buying-out is the means; the adoption is the terminus. This is how the aspect works: both aorists are complexive, and the asyndeton suspends the sentence so that the second clause lands as the goal rather than as an addition.

The second reading is preferred, and it is why the English keeps two ‘so that’ clauses side by side without a conjunction, letting the sequence do the work. Supplying ‘and’ (as some later witnesses and the Latin tradition effectively do by smoothing) would flatten the escalation. Per §10, epistolary connectives — and their deliberate absence — are load-bearing.

Note also the person shift across the two clauses: ἐξαγοράσῃ (3sg, subject God from v. 4) → ἀπολάβωμεν (1pl). Whatever one concludes about the referent of τούς, the movement from a third-person object of purchase to a first-person community of recipients is the rhetorical hinge into v. 6-7, where the second person (ἐστε, εἶ) takes over.

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The verse is textually stable in the critical editions. NA28 prints it without a bracketed reading and without an entry in the UBS apparatus of significant variants; the sentence is not discussed in Metzger’s commentary.

Two minor items are visible in the wider apparatus and are recorded here for completeness, neither affecting sense:

1. ἵνα (second) — a handful of witnesses omit or replace the second ἵνα with καί, producing a coordinate rather than an asyndetic construction. This is a classic instance of scribal smoothing of asyndeton (compare the same tendency at Phil 3:2 and 4:8) and the harder, unconnected reading is to be retained.

2. ἀπολάβωμεν — the first-person plural is read by the whole significant tradition. Occasional witnesses show second-person ἀπολάβητε, assimilating to the ἐστε/εἶ of vv. 6-7. The shift from 1pl to 2sg is exactly the sort of thing scribes level out; the 1pl is original and the shift in v. 6 is Paul’s.

The substantive interpretive questions in this verse are lexical and syntactic, not text-critical.

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Vulgate: ut eos qui sub lege erant redimeret, ut adoptionem filiorum reciperemus. Three observations.

redimeret — from redimo, ‘buy back,’ the Latin commercial verb. Jerome kept the purchase. English ‘redeem’ descends directly from this word, which is precisely how the transaction faded from view: the Latin loan became a technical religious term in English while remaining ordinary commercial vocabulary in Latin.

adoptionem filiorum — Jerome supplies a genitive plural, ‘adoption of sons,’ which the Greek compound does not have as a separate word. This is a reasonable unpacking of υἱοθεσία, and the source of the traditional English ‘the adoption of sons.’ It is an expansion, not a rendering.

reciperemus — recipio is unambiguously recuperative (‘take back, recover’). Jerome read the ἀπό- as carrying force. That is evidence for the recuperative reading of ἀπολαμβάνω, though the Latin verb had also broadened by the fourth century and cannot settle the question.

Peshitta renders with the root ܙܒܢ (zbn, ‘buy’) — the purchase image survives in Syriac as well — and uses a construction for the second clause built on ‘sons,’ preserving the υἱός-chain.

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The Fathers read v. 5 as the answer to a why, and they read the two clauses as means and end.

Chrysostom (Hom. in Gal. 4) presses the exchange: the Son came under law not because he owed anything to it, but so that those who did owe might be released — and he notes the surplus, that Paul does not stop at release but goes on to sonship. ‘He did not merely free us from evils, but also bestowed on us the good things.’ The two ἵνα clauses are, for Chrysostom, precisely the negative and the positive halves of one act, and the second is the greater.

Theodoret and Theodore of Mopsuestia take τοὺς ὑπὸ νόμον as Jews in the first instance, with Gentiles brought into the υἱοθεσία by the ‘we,’ and so read the pronoun shift referentially.

Augustine (Exp. Gal. 30) uses the verse for the adoption/generation distinction that later became standard: the Son is Son by nature (natura), we by adoption (adoptio) — the very thing the τίθημι-morpheme of υἱοθεσία carries. This is legitimate exegesis of the word Paul chose, not later imposition.

Irenaeus (Haer. 3.16.3) and Athanasius (C. Ar. 2.59) both cite the verse in Christological argument: only one who is himself Son by nature can confer the placing-as-son on others. That is an inference from the verse, not the verse’s own claim, and should be labelled as such.

What the patristic reading contributes is the register: for these readers the purchase and the adoption were both concrete institutions, not metaphors. A modern rendering that abstracts either one loses what the fourth century heard.

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The verse will not let release stand as the goal. Buying a slave out of the market produces a freedman; it does not produce a son. Paul’s second ἵνα asserts that the purchase was for the sake of a status change no manumission could effect.

That is why the argument can run straight into vv. 6-7. Because you are sons, God sent out the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying Αββα ὁ πατήρ — the sending of v. 4 answered by a second sending, and the conferred status confirmed by the Son’s own address to the Father now spoken by the adopted. The chain υἱόν → υἱοθεσίαν → υἱοῦ → υἱός is the spine of the paragraph, and it terminates in κληρονόμος (v. 7), which returns to the ὁ κληρονόμος of v. 1. The parable of vv. 1-2 is now closed.

Two guardrails, per §6:

The rendering does not import a doctrine of the manner of the purchase. ἐξαγοράζω names a transaction and Gal 3:13 names the mechanism; the recipient of the price is not in the text and no rendering here should imply one.

The rendering does not soften υἱοθεσία into affection-language. Adoption in the first century was about legal standing and inheritance. The warmth of Αββα in v. 6 is real, and it follows the legal act rather than replacing it.

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