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10. ῥίζα γὰρ πάντων τῶν κακῶν ἐστὶν ἡ φιλαργυρία. For the love of money is the root of all evils, an emphatic, rhetorical, statement. To lay stress, as the Revised Version has done, on the absence of the article before ῥίζα, seems unnecessary, and the resultant translation “a root of all kinds of evil,” though no doubt giving us a more scientifically exact maxim than the A.V. presents, is far less forcible. Quite as strong statements had been made about this vice before St Paul’s day. Comp. Apollodorus Frag.
ἀλλὰ σχεδόν τι τὸ κεφάλαιον τῶν κακῶν
εἴρηκας· ἐν φιλαργυρίᾳ γὰρ πάντʼ ἔνι,
or Diog. Laert. VI. 50 τὴν φιλαργυρίαν εἶπε μητρόπολιν πάντων τῶν κακῶν. Or again, Ammian. Marcell. XXXI. 4 aviditas materia omnium malorum.
τῶν κακῶν refers, of course, to moral not physical evils; to sins whether of omission or commission.
φιλαργυρία, defined by the Stoics as ὑπόληψις τοῦ τὸ ἀργύριον καλὸν εἶναι (Diog. VII. 111), is a passive vice, as contrasted with the active grasping of πλεονεξία, which indeed has a much wider range. The latter might co-exist with prodigal expenditure; not so φιλαργυρία, which is the miser’s sin, the auri sacra fames of Virgil (Aen. III. 56). Thus the older Latin rendering avaritia gives the sense better than the Vulgate cupiditas. The word only occurs again in the Greek Bible in 4Ma 1:26; 4Ma 2:15; but we have the adjective φιλάργυρος in 2Ti 3:2, and in Luk 16:14, where it is applied to the Pharisees.
ἦς τινὲς ὀρεγόμενοι, which some reaching after.… The image is, perhaps, not strictly correct, for we can hardly reach after an ὄρεξις like φιλαργυρία, but it is quite in St Paul’s manner; cp. ἐλπὶς βλεπομένη (Rom 8:24). For ὀρέγεσθαι see on 1Ti 3:1.
ἀπεπλανήθησαν ἀπὸ τῆς πίστεως κ.τ.λ., have been led astray (cp. 1Ti 1:19, 1Ti 4:1) from the faith &c., i.e. as from a straight path. Struggling out of this they get entrapped among the briars and thorns of the world, and pierce themselves. ἀποπλανᾷν only occurs in the N.T. again in Mar 13:22; it is, however, a LXX. word.
καὶ ἑαυτοὺς περιέπειραν ὀδύναις πολλαῖς, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows. περιπείρειν is ἅπ. λεγ. in the Greek Bible; it means to impale or pierce through, the force of περί arising from the idea of the thing pierced surrounding that which pierces. Cp. Philo in Flacc. i. ἀνηκέστοις περιέπειρε καοῖς. ὀδύναι (in N.T. only here and in Rom 9:2) stands for the pangs of conscience, the shafts of remorse.