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Heb_10:39. The author expresses his confidence that the readers and himself belong not to the class of men who, because they draw back from Christianity out of cowardly misgiving, fall a prey to destruction, but rather to the class of those who do not grow weary in the Christian faith, and therefore attain to life. This expression of confidence is in its essence an admonition, and indeed a more urgent one than though the direct form of exhortation had been chosen.
To ἐσμέν Grotius, Wolf, Carpzov, Heinrichs, and many others erroneously supplement τέκνα or υἱοί . For εἶναι , with the mere genitive, is a well-known genuinely Greek manner of expressing a relation of pertaining to a thing. See Bernhardy, Syntax, p. 165; Kühner, II. p. 167.
εἰς ἀπώλειαν … εἰς περιποίησιν ζωῆς ] Corroborative allusion to the result of the two opposite lines of action.
ἀπώλεια is everlasting perdition, and περιποίησις ψυχῆς (comp. 1Th_5:9 : εἰς περιποίησιν σωτηρίας ) gaining of the soul, i.e. everlasting life and everlasting blessedness. Wrongly Ebrard: of the bodily deliverance from the judgment impending over Jerusalem, is the discourse to be understood.
Ψυχῆς , moreover, belongs simply to περιποίησιν , not already, as Böhme and Hofmann will have it, to ἀπώλειαν , since only περιποί ., not also ἀπώλ ., stood in need of an addition.