Charles Ellicott Commentary Galatians 3:16

"Now to Abraham were the promises spoken, and to his seed. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ." — Galatians 3:16 (ASV)

A parenthetical explanation of the true object of the promise. That promise was shown by its wording to refer to the Messiah. It did not speak of “seeds,” but of “seed”—not of “descendants,” but of “descendant.” And the Messiah is, par excellence, the “descendant” of Abraham.

The object of this parenthesis is to prove a point which the Judaizing opponents of the Apostle would not contest—namely, that the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham was reserved for that Messianic dispensation to which they themselves belonged. The Law therefore intervened between the promise and its fulfillment, but, since it was itself later than the promise, could not alter the terms of its fulfillment. If the promise had been fulfilled before the giving of the Law, and if the Messianic dispensation to which the Apostle and his readers belonged was not a fulfillment of the promise, then the Law might have had something to do with it: the restrictions of the Law might have come in to limit and contract the promise; the Gentiles might have been saddled with the obligations of the Jews. But it was not so.

To Abraham and his seed were the promises made.—It was expressly stated that the promises were given “to Abraham and his seed.” The exact terms are worth noting.

The quotation appears to be made from Genesis 13:15 or Genesis 17:8. The word “promise” is put in the plural because the promise to Abraham was repeated several times—to Abraham first, and, after him, to the other patriarchs. The object of the promise, as recorded in the Book of Genesis, was, in the first instance, the possession of the land of Canaan; but St. Paul here, as elsewhere, gives it a spiritual application.

He says not.—The “he” is not expressed. We must supply either “God” or “the promise given by God”—that is, “it says,” as in quotations from an authoritative document.

And to seeds, as of many; but as of one.—The argument of the Apostle turns upon the use, both in the Hebrew and in the LXX., of a singular instead of a plural noun. Both in the Hebrew and in the LXX., however, the noun, though singular, is collective. It meant, in the first instance at least, not any one individual, but the posterity of Abraham as a whole.

The Apostle refers it to Christ and the “spiritual Israel” (that is, the Church, of which He is the Head), on the same principle on which, throughout the New Testament, the history of the chosen people under the old covenant is taken as a type of the Christian dispensation.

We may compare Matthew 2:15, where an allusion to the exodus of Israel from Egypt is treated as a type of the return of the Holy Family from their flight into Egypt. Such passages are not to be regarded as arguments possessing a permanent logical validity (which would be to apply the rigid canons of Western logic to a case for which they are unsuitable), but rather as marked illustrations of the organic unity which the apostolic writers recognized in the pre-Christian and Christian dispensations. Not only did both have the same Author and form part of the same scheme, but they were actually the counterparts of one another. The events that characterized the earlier dispensation had their analogies—sometimes spiritual, sometimes literal—in the later.