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seemed to me a very inadequate reason. In this sense we are all 'in bondage to the elements.' They bring us winter and summer; they send us to bed at night and call us up in the morning. But the interpretation will gain far more force if we suppose that Paul is thinking mainly of the planetary week and perhaps also of the other 'chronocratories' by which a planet was lord of the month or of the year[1]. The devotee of these planetary chronocratories was really under a 'bondage to the elements' from which those who held aloof from such observances were free. The prima facie objection to this hypothesis is that the errors of the Galatians throughout the epistle are represented as Judaistic in character. To justify the suggestion it would be necessary to suppose that the Galatian Judaism was of a semipagan character and in particular that their Sabbath was partly a Jewish Sabbath and partly a Saturn's day. But I am not sure that such a hypothesis is altogether arbitrary. As I have said above, it is almost a necessity that Jewish proselytes and indeed Hellenistic Jews should import into their conceptions of the Sabbath
- ↑ One of the most striking examples quoted by Boll (v. p. 85) from the Apocalypse is ch. ix, 15, 'and the four angels were loosed, which had been prepared for the hour and day and month and year, that they should kill the third part of men.' Those who are convinced otherwise that the book is permeated by astrology, will naturally find Valens' four chronocratories
