Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Galatians · About this commentary
Days, Months, Seasons, Years
Galatians 4:8-11
8 However at that time, not knowing God, you were in bondage to those who by nature are not gods. · WEB
The warning is about turning back, and the two verses before it establish what these particular readers would be turning back to.
Verse 8 fixes the readers' history, and everything in the paragraph depends on it. Not knowing God, you were in bondage to those who by nature are not gods. These are former pagans. Whatever they served, it was not Israel's law.
Verse 9 corrects itself mid-sentence: now that you have come to know God — and then, immediately, or rather to be known by God. The active phrasing is taken back. The relationship is not their achievement.
Then the charge: why do you turn back again to the weak and miserable elemental principles? Both adverbs matter. Back, and again — a return to something previously held. The word for the elements is the one from verse 3 Galatians 4:3, undefined there and undefined here.
Verse 10 gives the symptom: you observe days, months, seasons, and years. Two things about the list bear stating. It does not match the standing Old Testament formula for the sanctuary's offering calendar, which names feasts, new moons and sabbaths together 1 Chronicles 23:31 2 Chronicles 31:3. And a former pagan cannot be returning to a calendar he never kept.
What the passage opposes is observance taken up as a means of standing with God — the letter's subject since chapter 2 — and it treats these readers adopting such a system as a relapse into their old bondage under a new name. Honest readers have long differed over how far the four terms reach. Verse 11 gives Paul's reaction, and it is fear rather than anger.
held with reason What this mark means