Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text
Pick a passage anywhere in the New Testament. See the customs and ideas a first reader knew without being told.
Hebrews 12:1-13, The race, the shame and the Father's discipline
Surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, believers are to throw off every weight and run with endurance, eyes fixed on Jesus, who endured the cross and scorned its shame. Their hardships are a father's discipline, which only legitimate children receive.
Hebrews 12:1-13, in every translation this tool compares.
Having listed the heroes of faith, the writer pictures them as spectators around a race and tells his hearers to drop whatever slows them and run with endurance. Jesus is the model runner, who bore the shame of the cross for the joy ahead and now sits beside God's throne. The writer then reads their present hardships through Proverbs as the training a loving father gives his true children, painful for now but producing holiness and peace. So they should take fresh heart and keep going.
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/athletes-and-games\/","n":"The games and the victor's wreath","s":"Greek cities held great athletic festivals, and Corinth hosted the Isthmian Games every two years, second only to the Olympics. Athletes trained for months under oath for a wreath of leaves that soon withered.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/martyrs\/","n":"Martyrs","s":"Jews remembered those who died rather than break God's law, above all the Maccabean martyrs tortured under Antiochus, and the prophets said to have been stoned or sawn in two. Their hope was the resurrection.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/crucifixion\/","n":"Crucifixion","s":"Rome's public, shaming death for rebels, after flogging, with the charge posted for passers-by to read.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/honor-and-shame\/","n":"Honor before a crowd","s":"Public standing was the currency of the ancient Mediterranean. People competed for honor and dreaded being shamed in front of others.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/adoption-and-heirs\/","n":"Adoption, heirs and wills","s":"A family's property passed to its heirs; in Jewish practice the land went to the sons, the eldest with a double share. Roman law also let a man adopt a son, often a grown one, who left his old debts and ties behind and became his heir. A will, sealed before witnesses, settled who inherited and who looked after an heir too young to inherit.","r":""}
Athletic contests were a stock image for the moral struggle, and 4 Maccabees applied it to the martyrs (Keener; the cultural backgrounds notes). Cloud was often used for a crowd, so the witnesses may be spectators, but Keener and the cultural backgrounds notes think rather of those who received God's testimony in chapter 11; the ESV Study Bible notes that the New Testament says nowhere else that saints in heaven watch, and Wright places them at the finishing line, cheering. Laying aside weights could mean training weights, but Keener and the cultural backgrounds notes think the Greek custom of stripping to run more likely. Not yet resisting to the point of blood may bear on the date: Carson, Moo and Morris note that if the readers were in Rome it would fall before Nero's persecution of 64, when, the cultural backgrounds article on Rome says, Christians were burned "alive as torches"; if they lived elsewhere it proves little. The word for discipline was the basic Greek word for education, which usually included beatings (Keener). Illegitimate sons lost inheritance rights and got little of a father's attention (Keener; the cultural backgrounds notes).
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, introduction to Hebrews 12:1-3, and on Hebrews 12:1, 12:2, 12:3, 12:4, 12:5-7, 12:8, 12:9 and 12:13
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on Hebrews 12:1, 12:2, 12:8 and 12:9
- ESV Study Bible, study note on Hebrews 12:1
- N. T. Wright, Hebrews for Everyone, comment on Hebrews 12.1-3
- D. A. Carson, Douglas J. Moo and Leon Morris, An Introduction to the New Testament, ch. 17, Hebrews, Date
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, article Rome
