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Gal 5:1. Τῇ ἐλευθερίᾳ-στήκετε, stand fast-in the liberty) The short clause, wherewith Christ has made us free, has the force of aetiology, or assigning the reason. Liberty, and slavery (bondage), are antithetic. It is without any connecting particle, Gal 3:13 : τῇ ἐλευθερίᾳ, [by virtue of the] liberty, is emphatically put without ἐν, in: liberty itself confers the power of standing. Ἠλευθέρωσε signifies has rendered free, and ᾖ coheres with free [rather than with the rendered]: stand, erect, without a yoke.-πάλιν, again) ch. Gal 4:9, note.-ζυγῷ δουλείας, with the yoke of bondage) This expression is applied, not merely to the circumcision which was given to Abraham as the sign of the promise, but to circumcision as connected with the whole law, given long after on Mount Sinai, ch. Gal 4:24, Gal 3:17. For the Jews had been accustomed to look upon circumcision rather as a part of the law received by Moses, than as the sign of the promise given to Abraham, Joh 7:22. Nor was circumcision so much a yoke in itself, as it was made a yoke by the law; and the law itself was much more a yoke. Therefore Paul, by a weighty metonymy, puts the consequent for the antecedent: Be not circumcised, for he who is circumcised, along with this part of it, comes under the whole law, and revolts from Christ, Gal 5:2-4. Nor does the apostle oppose Christ so immediately to circumcision as he does to the law. He speaks according to their perverse custom, while he refutes their Galatism and Judaism; and yet he does not at all deviate from the truth. Peter also, Act 15:10, calls it a yoke.-ἐνέχεσθε) ἐνέχομαι, in the middle voice, I hold fast by, obstinately. That passage in Xiphil. in Epit. Dion. concerning a pole fixed in the ground, and which cannot be pulled out, shows the import of the word: ἐν τῇ γῇ ἐνέσχετο, ὥσπερ ἐμπεφυκώς, “it held a fast hold in the earth, as if it had grown there.”