This is the verdict-line of the whole argument that began at 4:1. Paul has run a legal analogy (the heir who is a minor is functionally indistinguishable from a slave, vv. 1-2), applied it to the pre-Christian condition (v. 3), narrated God’s two sendings — of the Son and of the Spirit (vv. 4-6) — and now states the conclusion: ὥστε οὐκέτι εἶ δοῦλος ἀλλὰ υἱός.

Three things carry the weight.

First, the abrupt shift to the second person singular. Galatians is addressed to churches (1:2), and Paul has been using plurals throughout. Here he turns and addresses one person. The status he has argued for corporately he now presses on each hearer individually.

Second, the slave/son antithesis is not a metaphor imported from nowhere: it is the same pair from vv. 1-3 (δούλου, δεδουλωμένοι) and it will return in the Hagar/Sarah allegory (vv. 22-31, παιδίσκη / ἐλευθέρα). The letter is built on it.

Third, διὰ θεοῦ — ‘through God.’ This is the most difficult and best-attested reading, and the manuscript tradition is full of attempts to improve it. Paul uses διά + genitive normally of mediation, and to say that one is an heir ‘through God’ places God in the mediating slot, which is unusual enough that scribes across every text-type reached for something smoother. The apparatus below treats this as the verse’s principal crux.

The variants here are among the most luxuriant in Galatians. The principal readings:

1. διὰ θεοῦ — 𝔓⁴⁶ (with κληρονόμος διὰ θεοῦ), א* A B C² 33, and the bulk of the earliest and best witnesses. Adopted by NA28/UBS5.
2. κληρονόμος θεοῦ διὰ Χριστοῦ (‘an heir of God through Christ’) — the Byzantine majority, and hence the reading behind the older English tradition.
3. κληρονόμος διὰ Χριστοῦ — a few witnesses.
4. κληρονόμος μὲν θεοῦ, συγκληρονόμος δὲ Χριστοῦ — assimilation to Rom 8:17.
5. διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, διὰ θεόν, and further hybrids.

The internal argument is decisive and runs one direction only. διὰ θεοῦ is the lectio difficilior by a wide margin: nowhere else does Paul say a believer receives anything ‘through God’ with διά + genitive, since that slot normally belongs to Christ or the Spirit. Every other reading is explicable as relief of that difficulty — either by supplying Christ in the mediating slot (2, 3, 5), or by converting θεοῦ into a possessive genitive attached to κληρονόμος (2, 4), or by assimilation to the far more familiar Rom 8:17. No plausible mechanism produces the short, hard reading out of any of the smooth ones.

Metzger’s committee rated the reading {B} and noted the extraordinary proliferation of secondary forms as itself evidence that the archetype read something scribes found awkward.

Granting the text, what does διὰ θεοῦ assert? Two constructions are defended.

The difference is real but not large: on either reading the point is that the inheritance rests on divine action and not on the hearer’s law-observance, which is the polemical burden of the whole letter. What must not happen in the rendering is the silent substitution of ‘by’ or ‘of,’ each of which resolves the question. Per the standing glossary entry, διά + genitive is rendered ‘through’ and kept lexically distinct from ἀπό/ἐκ (source) and ὑπό (personal agency).

ὥστε with a finite indicative, drawing an inference from what precedes — the same use fixed at Phil 4:1 and 1 Cor 11:33, and used by Paul again at Gal 3:9, 24; 4:16. It is not the ὥστε + infinitive of actual result (Phil 1:13).

The inference reaches back past v. 6 to the whole of vv. 4-6: because God sent the Son to redeem and the Spirit to attest, therefore your status is what it is. The connective is load-bearing and is rendered, never dropped (§10).

οὐκέτι is logical as much as temporal: not ‘not any more, for now,’ but ‘the former condition has been terminated.’ It answers the ἦμεν … δεδουλωμένοι of v. 3, whose periphrastic pluperfect described a settled prior state.

The move from plural (ἡμεῖς, v. 3; ἀπολάβωμεν, v. 5; ἐστε, v. 6) to εἶ, second person singular, is abrupt and deliberate. Lightfoot took it as individualizing rhetoric — the preacher turning from the assembly to the single hearer. It has occasionally been read as a diatribe-style address to an imagined interlocutor, but nothing else in the context sets up such a figure. The individualizing reading is the natural one.

English cannot mark the number of ‘you.’ The study tier flags it; the reading text cannot, and the loss is recorded here rather than compensated by inserting a word Paul did not write.

δοῦλος — per the standing glossary entry, ‘slave.’ Owned, non-free legal status. ‘Servant’ softens an institution the argument depends on: the whole force of vv. 1-7 is that the heir-as-minor was legally indistinguishable from chattel (οὐδὲν διαφέρει δούλου, v. 1), and that this is what has been terminated. Softening the word dissolves the antithesis.

υἱός — ‘son,’ not ‘child.’ Paul had τέκνον available and uses it four verses later (4:19) and again at 4:28, 31. Here he needs υἱός because (a) it echoes τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ (v. 4) and τὸ πνεῦμα τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ (v. 6) — the believer’s sonship is derivative of the Son’s — and (b) in both Roman and Jewish law it is the son who inherits, which is precisely the inference of the second clause.

A verbless first-class conditional: εἰ δὲ υἱός, καὶ κληρονόμος. Both protasis and apodosis lack a copula, and the subject (‘you’) is carried over. The construction is a compressed syllogism, and its terseness is the rhetoric — Paul is stating a legal entailment so obvious it needs no verb.

The καί is adjunctive (‘also’), not a connective: heirship is added to sonship as its consequence. Per the standing policy on adjunctive καί it is always rendered; dropping it would flatten the entailment into a restatement.

δέ here is continuative rather than adversative — it advances the argument one step rather than opposing anything. Rendered ‘and.’

The literal tier keeps both ellipses unfilled with brackets around nothing; the smooth tier supplies English ‘you are’ implicitly by parallelism, which is how English handles the same figure.

κληρονόμος — from κλῆρος (‘lot, allotted portion’) + νέμομαι; one who holds an allotted inheritance. The LXX background is heavier than the Greco-Roman: κληρονομία is the standard rendering of נַחֲלָה, the land-allotment of Israel (Deut 4:38; Josh 1:6; Ps 15:5 LXX), and κληρονομέω of יָרַשׁ. The Abrahamic promise-language of Gal 3:18, 29 (κατʼ ἐπαγγελίαν κληρονόμοι) is the immediate frame.

So the word is not merely a legal counter drawn from Roman testamentary practice, though the analogy of vv. 1-2 (ἐπίτροποι, οἰκονόμοι, προθεσμία) is unmistakably drawn from guardianship law. Both layers are live: Roman law supplies the illustration, the Abrahamic promise supplies the content of what is inherited.

Render ‘heir’ throughout, keeping the same English root for κληρονομία, κληρονομέω (v. 30), and συγκληρονόμος (Rom 8:17), so the family stays traceable.

The analogy of vv. 1-2 has generated a long dispute about which legal system Paul has in mind — Roman tutela and cura, Greek guardianship, or Jewish practice. No single system matches all three terms (ἐπίτροπος, οἰκονόμος, προθεσμία τοῦ πατρός) exactly: under classical Roman law the term of tutelage was fixed by statute at fourteen, not set by the father’s discretion, which fits Greek and provincial practice better.

For v. 7, the dispute matters less than it might. Whatever the system, the point Paul needs is one that every ancient legal culture supplied: the minor heir is under supervision and cannot dispose of the estate, and at the appointed term that condition ends without any change in who he is. The change is in status, not identity. That is exactly the shape of the argument in v. 7 — οὐκέτι marks the terminus, not a metamorphosis.

The secondary point is that both slave and son could be under the same οἰκονόμος. Being under supervision was not itself proof of slavery. What distinguished them was that one would inherit.

V. 7 states the conclusion of what v. 5 named υἱοθεσία — the technical Greco-Roman term for adoption, absent from the LXX and from the Hebrew legal tradition, which had no adoption institution of that kind. Paul’s choice of a Roman-law term for a Jewish-covenantal reality is itself the argument in miniature: the Gentile Galatians are being told that they need not become Jews by circumcision in order to be sons, because sonship was conferred by an act of God, not by an act of the law.

The order of the verses is worth marking. Paul does not say ‘the Spirit was sent so that you might become sons’; he says ‘because you are sons (ὅτι δέ ἐστε υἱοί), God sent the Spirit’ (v. 6). The Spirit’s Abba-cry is evidence of a status already conferred through the Son’s mission (vv. 4-5), not the means of conferring it. V. 7’s οὐκέτι then declares the completed result.

The Fathers read the verse this way with some consistency. Chrysostom (Hom. in Gal. 4) presses the ascending series — slave, son, heir — as a progression of dignities each granted freely, and notes that Paul says ‘heir’ rather than ‘son’ a second time in order to add something, not to repeat. Jerome, commenting on Galatians, wrestles openly with διὰ θεοῦ and observes that the reading with Christ was already circulating in his day. Augustine, drawing on this passage in the anti-Pelagian works, takes the emphasis of διὰ θεοῦ to be the exclusion of human merit from the conferral of the inheritance — a use of the verse that fits the critical text far better than the Byzantine one.

The versional evidence largely tracks the Greek variants and is chiefly useful for dating them.

Vulgate: quod si filius et heres per Deum — Jerome’s text has διὰ θεοῦ, and his commentary shows he knew the alternative. This is significant: the Byzantine expansion had not displaced the short reading in the Latin tradition of the late 4th century AD.

Peshitta: renders with ‘heir of God through Jesus Christ,’ reflecting an expanded Greek text of the type behind reading 2/5. Syriac tradition here is secondary.

Old Latin witnesses divide, some supporting per Deum, others carrying the Christ-expansion — which again indicates that the expansion arose early and independently in more than one stream, exactly what one expects of a reading that solves an obvious difficulty.

On the LXX side, the vocabulary of the verse is thoroughly Septuagintal: δοῦλος, υἱός, κληρονόμος all carry their LXX weight, and κληρονόμος in particular cannot be heard apart from the land-inheritance texts.