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12 Separation and Polemic (1) The old covenant, with its law and commandments and sacrificial system has been annulled, set aside and indeed cancelled (7:18; 10:9). The words that are used here, atheted and anaireo, allow no other interpretation than that. In particular, the word atheted is well docu­ mented in the papyri as meaning abolition and appears as such in Hebrews itself (7:18; 9:26; 10:28). The word anaireo,meaning funda­ mentally to wipe out through murder, here means "to abolish" and stands in 10:9 as the opposite of "to establish" (histemi). (2) The reason why this has been done is that God in his sovereignty decided to do so, because of certain defects in the law and the first covenant. This follows from such statements as: "The earlier rule's cancellation dia to antes asthenes kai anopheles" (7:18), or "Had that first covenant been faultless (amemptos), a second would not have had to come to take its place" (8:7). Amemptos is not attributed to the first diatheke and yet, when the author continues, he cannot bring himself to say that God calls the first covenant faulty. Rather the fault is now attributed to "them." "God finding fault with them says . . ." (Jeremiah 31). What is the antecedent to "them"? It has to be understood as the disobedient Israelites. Nevertheless it should not be used to soften this writer's perception.27 He has already implied that the first covenant has to be faulted but it is God himself who does the faulting for it remains his covenant. (3) The old is growing old and obsolete and will shortly disappear (8:13). For the writer it is not the force of history that brings about obsolescence. It isonly God, the subject of history, the one whoinitiates all and terminates everything who makes the first obsolete by what he has done in the second: en to legein kainen pepalaioken ten proten to de palaioumenon kai geraskon eggys aphanismou (8:13). In that respect the author argues that whoever clings to the old denies that God has indeed acted in the new. Thus the author with apparent sharpness delineates the dif­ ference between the old and the new. If Marcion in later days was to accentuate the difference between the old and the new in ways unac­ ceptable to the church, later attempts to wipe out the differences between the old and the new have not been successful either. For the modern interpreter it isespeciallydisturbing that those who argued for a union of the twocovenants were among the most anti­semitic thinkers of their times.28 For what they did wasto reclaim the Old Testament asa 27 As does Grundmann (TDNT 4:572); he also makes the astounding statement that for Paul "zeal for the Law and the fulfilment of Halacha became sin and thus righteousness through the Law impossible, not because he could not fulfill the Law but because fulfilling the Law became sin." 28 One thinks in particular here of men like Martin Bucer and John Calvin. See H.H. Wolf, Die Einheit des Bundes; Das Verhdltnis von Alien und Neuen Testament beiCalvin Anti­Judaism and the Epistle to the Hebrews 13 Christian document and to see Christ at work already there, rather than to respect the uniqueness of the old covenant. For our author the issue is more complex. For he sees, like Jeremiah and Isaiah, the relation between old and new covenants in dialectical terms.29 As Kasemann puts it: "The relation between the old and new covenants is not simply polemical, with respect to the ceremo­ nial law. Rather it is dialectical since the old diatheke is both surpassed and invalidated. Consequently it receives recognition as shadow and example."30 It would seem clear that the author does not hesitate to explicate the differences that exist between him and the religion, Judaism, to which he himself and certainly many of his readers belonged. He even warns his people to "go outside the camp" and there isevery reason to believe that he means thereby that they are to break their ties with Judaism.31 There is a sharp edge to this, but it is not fed by hatred. Rather it emerges out of an enthusiasm for something new that has occurred, a total commitment to that new way,and a firm belief that it has a continuity with the old; in fact, the continuity is so great that the new obviously...

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