Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world:
All Commentaries on Galatians 4:3 Go To Galatians 4
Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
Even so we. That is the Jews, whom he so describes in chap. iii25.
When we were children. Like boys untaught in the knowledge, and therefore in the love of God and His righteousness.
Under the elements of the world1. Serving the letter of the Old Law. For the law, as being imperfect, was first given to the world, i.e, to the Jews, and through the Jews to all nations, to teach them the rudiments of faith and piety. But the Gospel, succeeding the law, teaches their perfection. As Justinian calls his Institutes the "elements of the law," and as we speak of the elements of grammar, philosophy, and music, so here the Apostle speaks of the law as elementary. As boys, says Anselm, learn the elements, and their conjunction, but do not understand the words and sentences composed from them until they proceed to higher branches of learning, to which they can only attain by first learning the elements, so the Jews had the elements in their ceremonies, of which they did not understand the meaning, until by these elements, as their elevators, they come to the faith of Christ.
S. Paul calls the men of the world by the name of the world. The reference is first to the Jews, then, by metonymy, to all men. God willed to open, in one corner of the world a school, where He might teach men the rudiments of faith and piety, until He should open everywhere schools where they were most learnedly taught.
2. More properly and naturally the elements of the world are the days, months, times, and years of verse10. These he calls elements byan allusion to Gen. i, where it is said that God created the elements of the world in seven days, and then rested on the seventh day, and instituted the Sabbath as a memorial among the Jews of His creative rest. The days are thus called elements, because in them the elements were created, and their creation represented by metonymy on the Sabbath. Or they may be so called because time governs the world and all in it, as the generation, corruption, and succession of things. Accordingly, in grateful recollection of God"s providence, disposing by sun and moon the succession of the seasons and of day and night, He willed that Sabbaths, new moons, and other days should be observed by the Jews, that they might continually recognise God as the Creator and Preserver of all things, through the instrumentality of these stated feasts, till, being better taught by the Gospel, they should worship God in spirit and in truth.
Erasmus, however, thinks that the world here by catachresis stands for whatever has the nature of visible and transitory things, such as the ceremonies of the Old Law, which, in Colossians 2:20, he calls "the rudiments of the world." But this is not the usual meaning of the word with the Apostle, nor is it the meaning in Colossians 2:20, as I will prove when I come to comment on it. Cf. also infra, notes on verse9.
We were in bondage. Theophylact explains this from the analogy of the child under tutors. As this child differs nothing from a slave, Song of Solomon , when we were children in the knowledge of Christ and the love of God, we were, like slaves, under the aforesaid elements of the world, and under the tutorship of the Old Law.
