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Heb_1:1-4. Without beginning with the ordinary salutation, with the omission even of any kind of preface, the author proceeds at once to place the revelation of God in Christ in contrast with the revelations of God under the Old Covenant, inasmuch as he characterizes the revelations under the Old Covenant as imperfect, while he shows the perfection of this new revelation by a description of the incomparable dignity of its Mediator. With Heb_1:1-3 the author strikes the keynote for all that which he is subsequently to disclose to the readers. The utterances of these three verses afford the theme of his whole epistle. For the later dogmatic disquisitions are only the more full unfolding of the same; and for the later paraeneses they form the motive and fundamental consideration. To Heb_1:4, however,—which combines grammatically with that which precedes into the unity of a well-ordered, rhetorically vigorous and majestic period,
Heb_1:1-3 stand related as the universal to the particular, since that which was before expressed in a more general way is in Heb_1:4 brought into relief on a special side, which finds in the sequel its detailed development, in such wise that then Heb_1:4 in turn forms, as regards its contents, the theme for the first section of the epistle (Heb_1:4 to Heb_2:18).
On Heb_1:1-3 comp. L. J. Uhland, Dissert. Theol. ad Hebr. i. 1–3, Pars I., II., Tubing. 1777, 4.
G. M. Amthor, Commentatio exegetico-dogmatica in tres priores versus epistolae ad Hebraeos scriptae (Coburg), 1828, 8.—(J. G. Reiche), In locum epist. ad Hebr. i. 1–3 observationes, Gotting. (Weihnachts-programm) 1829, 4.