Did the Author of Hebrews Really Not Know Where He Was Quoting From? (Hebrews 2:6 and 4:4)

I used to find a strange sort of comfort in two verses that seemed to indicate that the author of Hebrews sometimes didn’t know where he was quoting from. At least I wasn’t the only one!

But you might ask: “That happens in the Bible? Where?”

There are two places in the book of Hebrews where it appears (at least on the surface) that the author didn’t know the source of his quotations:

“But someone has testified somewhere, saying, ‘What is man, that You think of him? Or a son of man, that You are concerned about him?’” (Heb 2:6 NASB italics mine)

“For He has said somewhere concerning the seventh day: ‘And God rested on the seventh day from all His works’” (Heb 4:4 NASB italics mine)

The Greek word at issue is πού (“where” or “somewhere”). In 2:6 πού gets paired with the indefinite pronoun τις (“someone” “something”). On a surface level, it looks like the author knows he’s quoting something but doesn’t know where he’s quoting from. F. C. Synge in his book Hebrews and the Scriptures claims as much; that is, that the author “has no idea where his citations come from.” So, did the author of Hebrews really not know where he was quoting from?

In my opinion, the idea that this Hellenistic Jewish author didn’t know where he was quoting from is highly unlikely, and most people who’ve spent serious study time in the book of Hebrews agree (though my solution to the problem appears to differ from many — see below). Here are four reasons for thinking that the author of Hebrews ��’t claiming that he doesn’t know the source of his quotations.

Reason #1: The author of Hebrews generally avoids naming the human author from whom he is quoting — focusing more on the divine source of Scripture. (4:7 might be an exception.) He may be doing the same thing in these two instances. When this author names someone in connection with cited Scripture, he names God, Christ or the Holy Spirit. In other words, the author of Hebrews seems intent on not highlighting the names of human authors, even though he quotes a lot from the Old Testament. Since there were no chapters or verses at the time, authors frequently pointed to a human author’s name to identify where they were quoting from. Hebrews, though, is an exception to this pattern. The observation that the author of Hebrews typically avoids naming the human author of a quoted Scripture might be part of the explanation for why this author used such interesting introductory words in Hebrews 2:6 and 4:4.

Reason #2: One of the verses we are considering, Hebrews 4:4, is so well known that it is impossible to think that the author didn’t know where he was quoting from. Hebrews 4:4 is a quotation from Genesis 2:2 — one of the final verses of the first creation narrative in the Bible. Every Jewish man and woman was thoroughly familiar with the creation narrative. Many had it memorized. Furthermore, the author of Hebrews introduced the quotation by saying that it was a passage “concerning the seventh [day].” That comment suggests (conclusively, in my opinion) that he knew where he was taking his readers, since Genesis 2:2 is the best-known seventh-day passage in the Bible.

Reason #3: Slightly less well-known, but running a close second in terms of familiarity, is Psalm 8 (a psalm of David), which is quoted in Hebrews 2:6, our first example above. In addition to its appearance in Hebrews 2:6, this Psalm 8 gets quoted three other times in the New Testament (Matt 21:16; 1 Cor 15:27; Eph 1:22), which strongly suggests that this Psalm 8 was commonly quoted in the New Testament era. The Psalter as a whole was used in various liturgical settings and was frequently memorized by Jewish men and women. It is difficult to imagine that a Hellenistic Jewish writer as thoroughly saturated with Scripture as was the author of Hebrews didn’t know where he was quoting from when he decided to draw a quotation from Psalm 8.

Reason #4: Hebrews 5:6 includes a similar expression to 2:6 and 4:4 just before quoting from a different Old Testament verse, but in this third case, he doesn’t use the Greek word πού. The introductory formula to 5:6 reads: “just as he says also in another [passage].” The similarity (indefiniteness) together with the difference (the lack of πού) may be the key to unlocking what is going on in these passages (see below). What is the author doing in 5:6? He is pointing to a different Scripture from the main passage of Scripture he has just been working with (Psalm 95).

Based, then, upon the high unlikelihood that an author so saturated in Scripture could have forgotten where the seventh-day-of-creation narrative and Psalm 8 were found, and in light of the somewhat similar expression that appears in 5:6, I think that the author may simply be saying, “I’m about to quote from somewhere else besides the places I’ve already been quoting.”

Consequently, we should interpret Hebrews 2:6 as:

“But someone has testified somewhere [that is, somewhere besides Psalm 110, which was the last passage he quoted about angels], saying, ‘What is man, that You think of him? Or a son of man, that You are concerned about him?’” (Heb 2:6). Remember that the author just mentioned angels in the verse before (2:5) and had been quoting a handful of passages already about angels in Hebrews 1. He needed to say something to distinguish this Psalm 110 quotation from the previous quotations, which is what I think he was doing with “But someone has testified somewhere �ڱ��…�ĝ

Similarly, regarding Hebrews 4:4, we should interpret it as:

“For He has said somewhere [that is, somewhere besides Psalm 95] concerning the seventh day: ‘And God rested on the seventh day from all His works’” (Heb 4:4). The author has been using Psalm 95 as his primary text leading up to this moment, and will continue to use it for a bit after his quotation in Hebrews 4:4. Thus, the author of Hebrews uses the “where” word (πού) to alert his readers that he is going to divert to a different text from his main text for just a moment.

Though most scholars seem to agree with my assessment that the writer of Hebrews couldn’t possibly be saying that he didn’t know where he was quoting from, my solution that the author is simply saying that he is now quoting from a different text than the one he has just been using doesn’t seem to be a common explanation for what he is doing. (Actually, so far I haven’t found any commentator suggesting this solution, though I haven’t looked at everything written on these two texts.) I have more work to do on this, but I see this as a promising solution to the problem of πού (“where” or “somewhere”) in Hebrews 2:6 and 4:4. The author of Hebrews knew the location of his quotations. He uses πού in these two texts to signal that he will now quote from “somewhere else” besides the Old Testament texts he has been quoting in the preceding verses.

Notes

F. C. Synge, Hebrews and the Scriptures (London: S.P.C.K., 1959), 53. Cited in Paul Ellingworth, The Epistle to the Hebrews: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Eerdmans and Paternoster, 1993), 148.

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