Verse 9 is the pastoral payoff of the sowing-and-reaping paragraph (vv. 7-8). Paul has just laid down an agricultural axiom with a threat attached: what a person sows, that he reaps. Now he turns the axiom into encouragement. The same law that condemns sowing to the flesh guarantees the harvest to those sowing to the Spirit — so keep sowing.

The verse is built as two balanced halves, each closing with a negated element:

• τὸ δὲ καλὸν ποιοῦντες μὴ ἐγκακῶμεν — doing the good, let us not lose heart
• καιρῷ γὰρ ἰδίῳ θερίσομεν μὴ ἐκλυόμενοι — for at the proper time we will reap, if we do not go slack

Three things need care. First, ἐγκακέω and ἐκλύομαι are not the same word twice: the first is inward discouragement, the second is bodily collapse — the exhausted farmer whose arms drop. Second, καιρῷ ἰδίῳ does not mean ‘eventually’; it names a fixed, appointed harvest-time, and whose ‘own’ time it is (the crop’s, God’s, or the reaper’s) is genuinely open. Third, the whole sentence hangs on a hortatory subjunctive with Paul inside it — let us — not a command aimed at the Galatians from outside.

The harvest here is future and God-timed; the labor is present and continuous. Paul does not say the weariness is unreal. He says the harvest is certain, and that the only thing that forfeits it is quitting.

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.

ἐγκακῶμεν is the pivot of the verse. The verb is rare — six NT occurrences, all in Paul except Luke 18:1 (Luke 18:1; 2 Cor 4:1, 16; Gal 6:9; Eph 3:13; 2 Thess 3:13) — and effectively absent from the LXX and from classical prose.

Morphologically it is ἐν + κακός: literally ‘to be in a bad way,’ hence to lose one’s nerve or give up. BDAG gives ‘to lose one’s motivation in continuing a desirable pattern of conduct or activity, lose enthusiasm, be discouraged.’ Two components are consistently present:

1. Cessation — the verb names giving up, not merely feeling bad. Luke 18:1 sets it against πάντοτε προσεύχεσθαι: the alternative to praying always is ἐγκακεῖν, stopping.
2. Interiority — the failure is of morale, not of muscle. 2 Cor 4:16 makes this explicit by pairing οὐκ ἐγκακοῦμεν with the inner man being renewed while the outer wastes away.

That second point is what fixes the rendering here, because the participle at the end of the verse (ἐκλυόμενοι) supplies the bodily counterpart. ‘Lose heart’ is adopted — it names cessation of will while leaving the physical to the second verb.

Parallel: 2 Thess 3:13, ὑμεῖς δέ, ἀδελφοί, μὴ ἐγκακήσητε καλοποιοῦντες — almost the same sentence with the same two lexemes, which is strong internal evidence that καλὸν ποιεῖν + μὴ ἐγκακεῖν is a formula Paul used more than once.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

NA28 prints ἐγκακῶμεν, supported by the primary Alexandrian witnesses (ℵ A B C and the bulk of the early tradition). The Byzantine majority reads ἐκκακῶμεν (ἐκ + κακός, ‘to give out from badness’), which is also the form that stands in the Textus Receptus and therefore behind the older English tradition.

The variation is essentially orthographic and carries no exegetical weight — the two forms are the same lexeme with a different preverb, and the lexica treat ἐκκακέω as a secondary formation. The same alternation appears at every one of the six NT occurrences of the verb, which is exactly the profile of a phonetic/scribal variant rather than a deliberate change. The ἐγ- form is better attested and earlier; the ἐκ- form is a later regularization.

No reading is adopted here that would change the sense either way. The variant is recorded because §4 requires it, not because anything turns on it.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

ἐκλυόμενοι is a different picture entirely. ἐκ + λύω: to be loosed out, unstrung, to have one’s strength give way. In classical usage it describes a bowstring slackened, a body giving out under exertion, limbs failing.

The LXX use is decisive for the biblical register. It renders the Hebrew רָפָה and עָיֵף of hands that drop and knees that give (2 Chr 15:7, μὴ ἐκλυέσθωσαν αἱ χεῖρες ὑμῶν; Prov 6:3; Isa 40:31 in the same semantic field), and of people fainting from hunger (Matt 15:32; Mark 8:3 — the crowd who would ἐκλυθῶσιν on the road). Hebrews 12:3, 5 stacks it with κάμνω and pairs it with the Prov 3:11 quotation: μὴ ἐκλύου ἐλεγχόμενος.

So: physical collapse under sustained exertion. The image belongs to the same field as the farmer of vv. 7-8 — the reaper whose arms drop before the field is finished.

Rendering. ‘Go slack’ or ‘give out’ preserves the loosening image (§8: this is a live metaphor, not a dead one, and it pairs deliberately with an agricultural verb). ‘Faint’ is accurate to the LXX register but in modern English has narrowed to losing consciousness. ‘Grow weary’ is admissible but should be reserved rather than spent on ἐγκακέω.

Morphologically the participle is middle/passive and formally ambiguous; the passive (‘being unstrung,’ with the exertion as the implicit agent) is the natural reading and keeps the picture of strength being drained rather than surrendered.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

The participle stands at the very end of the sentence, after the main verb, negated with μή.

μή is the regular participial negative in Koine and by itself proves nothing (per the standing glossary entry). But its combination with a future indicative main verb pulls the clause toward conditional force: we will reap — provided we do not go slack. This is how the Fathers read it and how the sentence must be read if it is to function as encouragement rather than as a flat prediction.

The smooth rendering adopts the conditional (‘if we do not go slack’) because the discourse function of the verse is exhortation and because γάρ makes the whole second half the ground of the first. The literal tier keeps the bare negated participle so the alternative stays visible.

Built onbdf

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

καιρός, not χρόνος. Per the standing glossary entry, καιρός is the fixed or opportune moment, not a measured span — the LXX word for the appointed festivals (Lev 23:2, 4) and for the moment that has struck. In an agricultural sentence it is precisely the harvest-season: the crop comes in when it comes in, and no amount of eagerness advances it.

ἴδιος means ‘one’s own, proper to.’ The phrase καιρῷ ἰδίῳ (and the plural καιροῖς ἰδίοις) is a small Pauline idiom for the divinely set moment — 1 Tim 2:6; 6:15; Titus 1:3 all use it of God’s timetable. That distribution is the strongest evidence available for how the phrase functions.

The rendering keeps ‘at the appointed time’ — English ‘appointed’ carries the fixedness without naming who fixed it, which is what the Greek does. ‘In due season’ is the traditional phrase and is accurate but has become an idiom for ‘eventually,’ which is the one thing καιρός does not mean.

Word order. καιρῷ stands first in its clause, before γάρ can even be reached — the dative is fronted, and the emphasis falls on when. English should keep the time-phrase early.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

Proposed — pending reviewJ. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, 10th ed., London: Macmillan, 1890.

θερίσομεν is the fourth occurrence of the harvest verb in three verses (v. 7 θερίσει; v. 8 θερίσει twice; v. 9 θερίσομεν). The repetition is the paragraph’s structure and must survive in English with a single word at every point.

What changes at v. 9 is the person: the third-person generalizations of vv. 7-8 (ὃ ἐὰν σπείρῃ ἄνθρωπος … ὁ σπείρων) become first-person plural. Paul steps inside the harvest he has been describing. Together with the hortatory subjunctive ἐγκακῶμεν this makes the whole verse self-inclusive: the apostle is one of the sowers who must not quit.

The future is straightforwardly predictive. The object is unexpressed here — v. 8 has already supplied it (ζωὴν αἰώνιον) — and English should leave it unexpressed rather than repeating it, since the reticence lets the promise stand in its own terms.

Built onbdag

The articular neuter substantive τὸ καλόν is fronted before its participle — object before verb, which is marked order and topicalizing. Paul puts the good deed first in the sentence and then tells them not to quit it.

The present participle ποιοῦντες is durative: an ongoing practice, not a completed act. Its relation to the main verb is best taken as attendant-circumstance or temporal — ‘while doing / in doing the good’ — rather than causal or concessive, neither of which is marked.

On καλός see the standing glossary entry: the LXX equivalent of טוֹב across the aesthetic-moral range, not narrowly ‘morally right’ (δίκαιος) nor merely ‘useful’ (χρηστός). Note that Paul switches adjectives one verse later: v. 9 has τὸ καλόν, v. 10 has τὸ ἀγαθόν. Whether this is deliberate differentiation or stylistic variation is not decidable, but the English should keep the two adjectives distinguishable (‘what is good’ / ‘the good’) rather than collapsing both to one word and hiding the switch.

Compare 2 Thess 3:13, where the same idea is compressed into the single compound verb καλοποιοῦντες. The near-identity of that sentence with this one suggests a settled Pauline formulation.

Built onbdag · bdf

Two postpositives carry the structure, and both must be rendered (§10).

δέ at the head. Mildly contrastive after v. 8. The preceding verse ended with the two harvests set against each other; δέ turns from the description to the exhortation drawn from it. ‘And’ or ‘but’ both serve; ‘now’ would over-mark a transition that is not a new topic.

γάρ in the second clause. This is the load-bearing particle: it makes the certainty of the harvest the ground of the command not to quit. The logic is not ‘don’t give up, and by the way you’ll be rewarded’ but ‘don’t give up, because the harvest is fixed.’ Rendering γάρ with a colorless ‘and’ would dismantle the argument.

The resulting shape is chiastic in its negations:

doing the good … let us not lose heart / not going slack … we will reap

The outer members are the activity, the inner members the two failures, and the whole is held by γάρ. The two μή-clauses sit adjacent at the center of the sentence in the Greek order (μὴ ἐγκακῶμεν, καιρῷ γὰρ ἰδίῳ θερίσομεν μὴ ἐκλυόμενοι), which is why keeping them lexically distinct matters so much: if both are rendered ‘be weary,’ the center of the sentence becomes a tautology.

Built onbdf

ἐγκακῶμεν is first person plural subjunctive with μή — a negated hortatory, ‘let us not.’

This matters pastorally and is easy to lose. Paul does not write μὴ ἐγκακεῖτε (‘do not you lose heart’), which was available and which he uses elsewhere with second-person address (2 Thess 3:13 μὴ ἐγκακήσητε). Here he includes himself, exactly as he does at Gal 5:25-26 (στοιχῶμεν, μὴ γινώμεθα) a few lines earlier. The corpus policy on μὴ + hortatory subjunctive requires the ‘let us not’ construction in English at every such point, and converting to a second-person imperative erases the self-inclusion.

The present aspect is durative: a standing refusal to quit, not a single decision.

Note the mood sequence across the sentence — subjunctive (exhortation) then future indicative (assurance). Paul asks for something of the will and then grounds it in something not subject to the will.

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The early commentators consistently read the verse as addressing discouragement over delay, not over difficulty. The problem is that the harvest is not yet visible, and the sower is tempted to conclude that nothing is growing.

Chrysostom, on Galatians, presses the farming image: the husbandman does not abandon the field because the fruit is slow, and Paul’s καιρῷ ἰδίῳ is precisely the answer to impatience — the season is not ours to set. He also reads the two negated verbs as a progression, discouragement first and collapse after, which supports keeping them distinct in English.

Jerome and the Latin tradition render the pair non deficiamus … non deficientes, using one Latin root twice and thereby losing the distinction the Greek maintains — a good illustration of the flattening the rendering here is designed to avoid. Latin’s poverty at this point should not be inherited through the English translation tradition that descends from it (§2, §11).

Augustine (and after him a long homiletic line) applies the verse to perseverance in almsgiving and to the endurance of the church between the ages. That application is reception, not lexical evidence, and is recorded as such (§9).

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 Company, 1889.

The future θερίσομεν is unqualified as to date. v. 8 has already named the crop — ζωὴν αἰώνιον — which locates the primary reference at the eschatological harvest, in line with the standard biblical harvest-imagery (Joel 3:13; Matt 13:39; Rev 14:15).

The rendering does not adjudicate. ‘At the appointed time we will reap’ is as open as the Greek, and neither ‘on the last day’ nor ‘in due course’ should be smuggled in.

One restraint is worth naming. The verse makes the harvest contingent on not quitting, and §6 forbids softening that. Paul does not write that the harvest is certain irrespective of persistence; he writes that it is certain at its appointed time, with a negated participle attached. Whatever theological account one gives of perseverance, the sentence as written puts a condition where English translators are often tempted to put a reassurance.

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