Three short strokes, each doing distinct work.

First, a prohibition already in progress. μὴ πλανᾶσθε is a present imperative — not ‘don’t be deceived’ as a general caution but ‘stop being led astray,’ addressed to people currently under a misapprehension. Paul uses the identical formula at 1 Cor 6:9, 15:33, and Jas 1:16 has it too; in every case it heads off a specific false inference about consequences.

Second, a word found nowhere else in the New Testament. μυκτηρίζω is built on μυκτήρ, ‘nostril’: to turn up the nose, to sneer. It is not the general ‘mock’ of ἐμπαίζω or χλευάζω. The LXX uses it for the contemptuous dismissal of God’s word and God’s messengers (2 Chr 36:16; Prov 1:30; Jer 20:7), and the passive here is best taken not as ‘nobody ever sneers at God’ — plainly people do — but as ‘God does not get sneered at,’ i.e. the sneer never lands. The nose curls; the outcome is unchanged.

Third, an agricultural maxim, stated as law. The sowing/reaping proverb was proverbial across the ancient Mediterranean and deeply embedded in Israel’s wisdom and prophetic vocabulary (Prov 22:8; Hos 8:7; 10:12-13; Job 4:8). Paul’s version is tightly built: the object is fronted (ὃ … ἐάν σπείρῃ), suspended, then slammed home by the resumptive τοῦτο — this, and nothing other than this. The adjunctive καί (‘also’) pairs the reaping with the sowing rather than merely connecting the clauses.

The tense contrast is the point and is easy to lose. Sowing stands in a durative present subjunctive; reaping is a plain future indicative. The interval between the two is exactly what makes the sneer possible and the deception plausible.

What the maxim is doing here is contested. Verse 6 concerns the material support of teachers; vv. 9-10 concern not growing weary in doing good. Whether v. 7 grounds the giving, opens the general warning, or does both is discussed below.

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

Root sense is causing to wander off a path — of straying sheep (Matt 18:12-13; 1 Pet 2:25, quoting Isa 53:6 LXX), of wandering stars (Jude 13), of being led off course. The deception sense is derivative and remains metaphorically live in Koine: to be deceived is to be walked off the road.

μὴ πλανᾶσθε is a fixed early-Christian formula (1 Cor 6:9; 15:33; Jas 1:16; cf. Luke 21:8). In each instance it precedes a statement about consequences that the hearers are inclined to discount. That distribution is evidence about its function: it is not a general caution against error but a specific refusal to let an audience believe that an action and its outcome can be prised apart.

The form is middle/passive and indistinguishable in morphology. The passive (‘do not be led astray [by someone]’) suits the Galatian situation, where agitators are actively at work (1:7; 5:7-10, 12; 6:12-13). The permissive middle (‘do not let yourselves be led astray’) is equally available and shifts a share of the responsibility onto the hearers. Both are live; the rendering ‘do not be led astray’ is hospitable to each.

Register note: ‘be deceived’ is the traditional English, but it has become a colorless word for holding a false belief. ‘Led astray’ retains the road.

Hapax legomenon in the New Testament. Denominative from μυκτήρ, ‘nostril, snout’ — literally to turn up the nose at someone. The compound ἐκμυκτηρίζω survives at Luke 16:14 (the Pharisees, φιλάργυροι, sneering at Jesus) and 23:35 (the rulers at the cross), which fixes the register: contemptuous dismissal by those who consider themselves untouchable.

The LXX distribution is where the theological weight sits. The verb regularly renders Hebrew לָעַג and related terms for scoffing, and its characteristic object is God’s word, God’s prophets, or God himself:

• 2 Chr 36:16 — ‘they were mocking (μυκτηρίζοντες) his messengers … until the wrath of the LORD rose up against his people, and there was no healing.’ The structure — sneer, then unavoidable consequence — is Paul’s structure exactly.
• Prov 1:30 — the fools ‘sneered at my reproofs’; vv. 31-32 then state the harvest: ‘they shall eat the fruits of their own way.’ This is arguably the closest single parallel to Gal 6:7 as a whole, joining the sneer to the eating of one’s own produce.
• Jer 20:7 — Jeremiah’s complaint that he has become a laughingstock.
• Ezek 8:17; Ps 79:7 LXX — contempt shown to God or his people.

The passive is the crux. Read as a bare statement of fact it is false: God demonstrably is sneered at, and this letter is written against people doing something like it. Two better construals:

(a) Successful action, a well-recognized force of the Greek passive: God is not sneered at with effect — the sneer does not connect. The colloquial ‘God is not to be trifled with’ catches the sense.

(b) Deceived by outward show, taking the nose-turning as a gesture of feigned reverence turning to derision behind the back. Some patristic and later commentators pressed toward ‘God is not deceived’ or ‘God is not outwitted,’ which suits a context about giving to teachers (v. 6): one might fool the teacher about one’s means; one cannot fool God. This is a real strand of interpretation but strains the lexeme, which is about contempt rather than deceit.

Rendering policy: keep the sneer. ‘Mock’ is the traditional English and is not wrong, but it has broadened to cover any ridicule; ‘sneered at’ preserves the specific facial gesture of contempt and the social register (the superior dismissing the inferior) that makes the reversal bite. ‘Trifled with’ is permitted where the successful-action sense must be explicit.

Proposed — pending reviewJohan Lust, Erik Eynikel, and Katrin Hauspie, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, rev. ed., Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2003

θεός stands without the article and at the head of its clause. Neither feature makes it indefinite — Apollonius’ canon and ordinary Koine practice permit a definite anarthrous θεός, and no reader would hear ‘a god.’ The anarthrous form is qualitative: God as God, in the character in which he cannot be sneered at.

The fronting before the negative and verb is emphatic and should be preserved in English word order where possible. The clause is also asyndetic — no καί, no δέ joining it to μὴ πλανᾶσθε. Per the standing asyndeton policy, no connective is supplied; the abruptness is the rhetoric. Editions punctuate variously (comma, colon, or full stop), and the choice is editorial, not manuscript evidence: the earliest witnesses carry no punctuation. A colon or dash in English keeps the two clauses as one movement, which the following γάρ presupposes.

ὃ γὰρ ἐὰν σπείρῃ ἄνθρωπος, τοῦτο … is a casus pendens construction: the relative clause is fronted as the topic, then resumed by the demonstrative τοῦτο in the main clause. Per the standing policy on this construction, both the order and the resumptive pronoun are preserved in English — the suspension before the verdict is doing rhetorical work, and collapsing to ‘a person reaps what he sows’ discards it.

ἐάν here is the Koine substitute for classical ἄν in indefinite relative clauses (cf. Gal 5:17 ἃ ἐάν; Matt 5:19). It is orthographic-phonetic, not conditional: the clause is never ‘if a person sows.’ Some witnesses read ἄν, the literary normalization; the harder ἐάν is to be preferred and carries no semantic difference.

The subjunctive σπείρῃ is present, not aorist — sowing as an ongoing practice, matching the durative present of πλανᾶσθε. The main verb θερίσει is future indicative. That aspectual and temporal asymmetry is the argument in miniature: a continuing practice now, a single settled harvest later.

The sowing-and-reaping pair is a live metaphor and is retained as such (§8). It must not be abstracted into ‘actions have consequences’ in the main text; the field is the data.

The image was proverbial in both Greek and Hebrew culture, which is why Paul can deploy it without a citation formula. But the specific shape — the crop matching the seed, and the harvest deferred — is at home in Israel’s wisdom and prophetic literature:

• Prov 22:8 LXX — ‘he who sows worthless things will reap evils.’
• Hos 8:7 — ‘they have sown wind, and they will reap the whirlwind.’
• Hos 10:12-13 — the double command to sow for righteousness and reap according to mercy, set against having ‘plowed wickedness, reaped injustice.’
• Job 4:8 — ‘those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.’
• Sir 7:3 — ‘do not sow in the furrows of injustice, and you will not reap them sevenfold.’

The Pauline reuse is dense: 1 Cor 9:11 (sowing spiritual things, reaping material), 2 Cor 9:6 (sowing sparingly, reaping sparingly), and here. The 1 Cor 9:11 parallel is worth weighing when deciding how tightly v. 7 binds to v. 6, since it uses the same imagery precisely for the support of teachers.

Keep one English root at each occurrence. ‘Plant’ and ‘harvest’ are permitted only where the noun rather than the verbal action is in view.

τοῦτο καὶ θερίσει — the καί stands between the resumptive demonstrative and the verb, not between clauses. It is adjunctive, and per the standing corpus policy on adjunctive καί it must be rendered: ‘that he will also reap.’

The force is to pair the reaping with the sowing as a second act following the first, which is precisely the point at issue. Dropping it (‘that is what he will reap’) leaves only an identity claim about the crop; retaining it adds the claim that the reaping is coming, as a further event, to the one who did the sowing. Some later witnesses omit it, which is the direction of smoothing to be avoided.

Note also that the subject of θερίσει is unexpressed and carried over from ἄνθρωπος. Greek does not repeat it; English must supply ‘he,’ and the supply should be marked in the literal tier.

Anarthrous, singular, generic — ‘a person,’ any human being. The masculine grammatical gender is the Greek default for a referentially inclusive statement, and the maxim is plainly universal in scope.

Per §3 the rendering shows the grammatical form in the literal tier and does not narrow or neutralize silently. The corpus glossary already fixes generic plural ἄνθρωποι as ‘people / all people’ with ‘men’ retained in the wooden tier; the singular follows the same logic, with English ‘a person’ in the reading text since English has no comparably-scoped generic masculine singular that would not now be read as restrictive.

The subsequent pronouns are masculine singular by grammatical concord with ἄνθρωπος; English ‘he’ tracks the Greek and the referent remains generic.

γάρ makes v. 7 the ground of something, and the connection to v. 6 is asyndetic-adjacent rather than explicit. Three readings are seriously held.

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 · J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 33A, New York: Doubleday, 1997

NA28 prints the verse without a marked variant of substance. Minor items worth recording:

• ἐάν / ἄν in the indefinite relative clause. Both are attested; ἐάν is the Koine form and the harder reading, ἄν the Atticizing normalization. No semantic difference.
• καί before θερίσει is omitted by a scattering of later witnesses — a simplification, since the adjunctive particle looks redundant to a scribe reading it as a connective. The inclusion is well supported and is the harder reading.
• Punctuation between μὴ πλανᾶσθε and θεὸς οὐ μυκτηρίζεται, and between v. 6 and v. 7, is entirely editorial. The earliest witnesses are unpunctuated, and modern editions differ. Any English rendering that begins a new paragraph at v. 7 is making a discourse judgment, not reporting manuscript evidence.

No variant here touches meaning.

Vulgate: Nolite errare: Deus non irridetur. Quae enim seminaverit homo, haec et metet. Jerome renders πλανάω with errare (‘go astray’), which keeps the wandering image better than English ‘be deceived.’ For μυκτηρίζω he uses irridetur, ‘is laughed at’ — a general derision word that loses the specific nostril-gesture. Note that et preserves the adjunctive καί, which many modern English versions drop.

Old Latin witnesses vary between irridetur and subsannatur, the latter closer to the sneering-grimace sense and used in the Latin Psalter for the same LXX verb.

Peshitta uses a verb of mockery/derision, likewise without a nostril-specific term; Syriac has no exact equivalent for the μυκτήρ etymology.

The pattern across the versions is consistent: every target language reaches for a general mockery-word, because the nose is untranslatable. That is itself an argument for flagging the etymology in apparatus rather than manufacturing an English compound.

Proposed — pending reviewBiblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson, 5th ed., Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007

Chrysostom (Homilies on Galatians, ad loc.) reads the verse against those who give grudgingly or not at all to their teachers while supposing that God will not notice the calculation — the sneer is the private assumption that one can profess much and give nothing. He presses the deferred-harvest point pastorally: the delay between sowing and reaping is what tempts people to think the sowing had no consequence.

Jerome (Commentary on Galatians) takes μυκτηρίζω through the nostril etymology explicitly and connects it to those who mock inwardly with a look while outwardly conforming — deception rather than open derision. His irridetur in the Vulgate is weaker than his commentary.

Augustine, in his exposition of Galatians, reads the verse as generally eschatological and links it to the flesh/Spirit harvest of v. 8, treating v. 6 as concluded.

The patristic split maps neatly onto the modern contest over scope: the Greek Fathers read v. 7 backward to v. 6, the Latin tradition tends to read it forward to v. 8. Neither side treated the reading as obvious, which is a useful check on modern confidence.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13, ed. Philip Schaff, Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1889 · Jerome, Commentary on Galatians, trans. Andrew Cain, Fathers of the Church 121, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010