Translation notes: Hebrews 13:17

The standard printed editions agree on the wording of this verse.¹ What follows is about sense, not about rival texts.

Πείθεσθε (Peithesthe) is a present middle/passive imperative of πείθω (peithō). In the active the verb means to prevail upon someone, to win them over, most often by what is said. (The second perfect, πέποιθα (pepoitha), is active in form but intransitive, and means to trust, to be confident.) In the middle or passive it means to be prevailed upon. With a dative of person, that construction is ordinary Greek for listening to someone and going along with them.

The Bauer lexicon (BDAG), the standard lexicon of New Testament Greek, prints the pair “obey, follow”, and lists this verse under it.² For the same construction at Acts 5:36–37 and 40, 23:21 and 27:11 the same entry gives, in its next subsection, the alternative those passages permit: “be persuaded by someone, take someone’s advice or obey, follow someone”.³ “Follow” is therefore a listed rendering of the word; it is chosen here to keep the command’s manner in view. “Heed”, the word of the one critical commentary consulted that prints neither “obey” nor “submit”, would keep the manner in view as well; the choice between them is taken up under “‘Heed’, the nearest alternative”.

Force and manner are different things. Force is what the command requires; manner is the colouring the word brings to the requiring, what a dictionary would call the word’s connotation. This translation does not abandon the force of the text. A first-century hearer would have heard a real command to go along with these people, not a suggestion, but also not a command to stop thinking.

A lexicon records the range of what a Greek word can mean, so it is not wrong to list “obey”, and it allows “follow”. The question here is which word within that range is a fair rendering of this sentence. The lexicon cannot settle that, and the verb’s history is weaker evidence still. What settles it is what the translators themselves do with this construction everywhere else in the New Testament, and how the English word they print here is heard; the writer’s own choices point the same way, and so does what the Greek of the letter’s own world does with the verb. The first is set out next; the writer’s choices under “The words not chosen”; the English word’s hearing under “The word itself” and “The two kinds of fence”; the letter’s world under “The letter’s register”.

The pattern in the translations

Where people respond to other people, or to what they say, standard modern translations already render this voice and case as persuaded following.

The New Testament contains nine other instances of this pairing: the middle or passive voice of πείθω (peithō) paired with a dative, most often of a person. The survey that follows takes in all nine.⁴ The mood varies: the Acts examples are narrative indicatives and 23:21 is a prohibition, where 13:17 is a present imperative. That difference is real, and what it does and does not settle is taken up under “The imperative” below; what is constant is the voice and the case.

How the tradition handles them is revealing. In Acts 5:36–37 Luke uses this very phrasing, ἐπείθοντο αὐτῷ (epeithonto autō), of the men who went after the rebels Theudas and Judas. There, both the ESV and the NASB render it “all who followed him”. “Follow” is thus an established, orthodox rendering for this construction, even in Bibles that print “obey” in Hebrews. Nor are those two alone: the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), the New English Translation (NET) and the Christian Standard Bible (CSB) also print a form of “follow” at Acts 5:36–37 and “obey” at 13:17, so the versions that make this one exception are not two but at least five.

The King James printed “obeyed him” in both verses, and so was at least consistent with its “obey” at 13:17, though beyond those two verses even it did not keep to it: “to him they agreed” (5:40), “believed the master” (27:11), “believed the things which were spoken” (28:24); its 23:21 is quoted below. The Revised Version, the American Standard and the New King James still print “obeyed” at 5:36–37. In the King James line the move to “followed” came with the Revised Standard Version and the versions after it, and they left Hebrews where Tyndale had put it. Nor is the mismatch only a modern one. Tyndale himself, translating from the Greek, printed “they all which beleved him” and “as many as harkened to him” at Acts 5:36–37, and “Obey” at 13:17: the exception is as old as the English New Testament from the Greek.

The pattern continues wherever the Greek describes people weighing voices and making choices. In Acts 5:40 the Sanhedrin is won over by the speech of Gamaliel, a teacher of the law honoured by all the people (5:34); the ESV prints “they took his advice”, and the NASB “they followed his advice”. In Acts 27:11 a Roman centurion, weighing Paul’s warning against the ship’s pilot’s advice, sides with the pilot; the NASB prints he was “persuaded by” the pilot, and the New International Version says he “followed the advice of” the pilot. In Acts 23:21, Paul’s nephew warns a Roman tribune not to give in to the men waiting to ambush Paul; the ESV translates the command “do not be persuaded by them”, and the King James itself, which prints “Obey” at 13:17, has “do not thou yield unto them”. The verb, voice and case are those of 13:17, and it too is a command, though a negative one in the aorist.

Only one of the personal instances goes the other way, and the context explains why. In James 3:3 the construction describes horses with bits in their mouths, “so that they obey us” (ESV). A horse is not persuaded; it is steered, and “obey” is the right English there. The grammar is the same as in Acts. What differs is who is responding to whom: an animal under a bit, not people weighing the voices of other people.

Fourteen verses on, James names the virtue that belongs to this verb’s family, εὐπειθής (eupeithēs), among the marks of the wisdom from above (3:17). The ESV prints “open to reason”, the NASB “reasonable”, the NRSV and the New King James “willing to yield”, the King James “easy to be intreated”; the NIV has “submissive” and the CSB “compliant”. The adjective is not the construction and is not counted in the survey; but where it describes people among people, most of the versions that print “obey” for the horse print persuasion or yielding.

Three instances take a dative of thing rather than of person, and they divide. At Romans 2:8 and Galatians 5:7 the ESV and NASB print “obey”: “obey unrighteousness”, “obeying the truth”; the New International Version, at Romans 2:8, prints “follow evil”, reaching for “follow” even there. At Acts 28:24 neither the ESV nor the NASB prints “obey”. After the Jews of Rome have heard Paul out from morning till evening, οἱ μὲν ἐπείθοντο τοῖς λεγομένοις (hoi men epeithonto tois legomenois): the ESV prints “were convinced by what he said”, the NASB “were being persuaded by the things said by Paul”.

Acts 28:24 does not break the pattern; it shows more exactly where the line between “obey” and persuasion runs. It does not run between persons and things, and it takes two questions to draw it: what stands in the dative, and whether the one responding is able to weigh it. Unrighteousness and the truth stand as norms, and the versions treat a norm as something complied with or not, not as something weighed. In James 3:3 the dative is a person, “us”, but the one responding is a horse, which weighs nothing and is steered by a bit. Where either is true, a norm in the dative or a responder that cannot weigh, the translators reach for “obey”. Where people respond to a communication, or to the person making it (what Paul said, Gamaliel’s speech, the pilot’s counsel), they reach for persuasion, advice or following. Stated that way, the line accounts for every instance in the survey (it was drawn from them, as a description of what the versions do), and the ESV and the NASB keep to it everywhere but Hebrews 13:17. That description is of these versions’ New Testament practice. Where 4 Maccabees puts a person in authority in this dative, the NRSV, which prints “obey” at 13:17 too, prints “obey” there as well, with a penalty behind the relation or without one (“The letter’s register” below). What the survey settles is narrower, and it is enough: “follow” is these versions’ own rendering of this construction, and the verb does not by itself decide which of the two they print here.

If the committees were writing the natural English of each scene rather than sorting by manner, the point stands harder, not softer: the natural English for people responding to what other people have said is not “obey”, and 13:17 is a gathering of people responding to the people who lead them. The same construction, in the same versions, is rendered “follow” with no loss of force felt, and a reader with the short case’s table in hand can see that nothing is lost.

The versions do the same with a stronger verb. At Acts 27:21 Paul, a prisoner, tells the ship’s company they should have listened to him, πειθαρχήσαντάς μοι (peitharchēsantas moi), and the verb is πειθαρχέω (peitharcheō), the word of “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29) and of obedience to rulers (Titus 3:1). The ESV prints “you should have listened to me”, the NASB “you should have followed my advice”, the NIV “you should have taken my advice”; the Theological Dictionary calls the verb “rather less forceful” there, “simply ‘to heed or follow the admonition’”.⁵ So the verb alone does not decide the English. Where the scene is one of counsel, Paul having “advised” them at 27:9, even the obey-verb is printed as advice.

It might be objected that “followed” at Acts 5:36–37 is only what English says of a rebel’s adherents and shows nothing about the verb. That may explain why the word was chosen; it does not make “followed” a weak word. The men who went after Theudas and Judas followed them to ruin, dispersed and scattered, Luke says, and came to nothing; and the versions still did not need “obey” to say so. Josephus sets the two verbs side by side of a Theudas he dates under the procurator Fadus (whether he is Luke’s is disputed): Theudas πείθει (peithei), “persuades”, most of the crowd to take up their possessions and ἕπεσθαι (hepesthai), “follow”, him to the Jordan (Antiquities 20.97).

Hebrews 13:17 answers both of the survey’s questions as Acts does. Those responding are a gathering of people. Those they respond to are persons, and the letter’s first description of them is by what they said: at 13:7 the leaders are the ones who spoke the word of God to the hearers. The three verses that name them (13:7, 17 and 24) need not name the same individuals, as “Those who lead you” below notes, but the word is the same, and it arrives defined by speech. The voice and the case are those of Acts; what changes is the mood and the subject-matter, and in the New Testament the versions’ own practice does not turn on the subject-matter: the leaders they meet in this dative, Theudas and Judas, have men who “followed” them (5:36–37). Whether the mood should turn it here is the objection met next, and in full under “The imperative” below, which also sets out what the mood does add: force.

It might be said that Acts is narrative and 13:17 a command, and that the natural English of a command is “obey”. Acts 23:21 is a command, with the same verb and a dative of person, and the ESV prints “do not be persuaded by them”.

And the Greek of the letter’s own world supplies the positive form. Mattathias, dying, tells his sons how to stand to one another and to the brother he gives them as a father. Josephus gives him the verb of this verse in the form of this verse, and its object is what Simon will counsel: “regard your brother Simon, who excels in understanding, as a father, and be persuaded by whatever he advises”, οἷς ἂν οὗτος συμβουλεύσῃ πείθεσθε (hois an houtos symbouleusē peithesthe) (Antiquities 12.283). Marcus’s Loeb prints “follow whatever counsel he gives you”; Whiston, “be governed by him in what counsels he gives you”. In the same charge Mattathias tells them to yield to one another, εἴκοντας ἀλλήλοις (eikontas allēlois), in whatever each is the better, and then divides the roles on exactly that principle: the counsel is Simon’s, and the army goes to their brother Judas (12.284). Josephus’s source has only “listen to him”, αὐτοῦ ἀκούετε (autou akouete) (1 Maccabees 2:65): the verb of this verse is his own choice for heeding a counsellor.

When Ignatius, a bishop, uses this verb of himself in a command, it is to take the dative off himself: “even if I plead with you when I am with you, do not be persuaded by me; be persuaded rather by what I write to you”, μηδ᾽ ἂν ἐγὼ παρὼν παρακαλῶ ὑμᾶς, πείσθητέ μοι· τούτοις δὲ μᾶλλον πείσθητε, οἷς γράφω ὑμῖν (mēd᾽ an egō parōn parakalō hymas, peisthēte moi; toutois de mallon peisthēte, hois graphō hymin) (To the Romans 7:2). These are the two commands with this verb nearest to Hebrews in time and place, given by men with a claim on their hearers, and in both what is to be heeded is counsel: Simon’s advice, and Ignatius’s written argument over his own voice.

The lexicon sorts these instances differently, as noted at the head of this article: 13:17 under “obey, follow”, the Acts instances with a personal dative in a group of their own that permits either rendering, a group the entry closes with what it calls the relation “between heretical leaders and their adherents”: Irenaeus on Valentinus, Marcion and the rest, who ruin themselves and “those persuaded by them”, τῶν πειθομένων αὐτοῖς (tōn peithomenōn autois), where the old Latin has assentiunt, “assent to” (Against Heresies 3.12.5). The entry gives no reason for the sorting, and grammar offers none: the voice and the case are the same. What separates 13:17 from the Acts instances is its setting: a command, in exhortation, about those who lead. It is also a lexicographer’s judgement, not a settled one: Thayer, the standard lexicon of the generation before, drew no such line, and sets Acts 5:36–37 and 40, 23:21 and 27:11 beside Hebrews 13:17 under a single heading, “to listen to, obey, yield to, comply with”. These notes concede the force BDAG’s sorting recognises and ask a different question: which English word to give it. The lexicon’s own entry offers two, and the survey above shows which of the two the translators choose wherever the lexicon leaves them the choice. Louw and Nida, who sort by meaning rather than by gloss, file the verb with πειθαρχέω (peitharcheō) under obeying, and define it there “to submit to authority or reason by obeying” (note 3): reason stands inside the definition, as a thing submitted to, which is the manner claimed here and no more.

The imperative

The imperative is what pushes the verb toward compliance: a command to be persuaded by someone is, in practice, a command to heed them. That is why the rendering keeps the form of a command and does not read “be persuaded”: that would be good English, but it asks for a change of mind rather than for going along, and drops the force. What the imperative does not do is force “obey”.

The objection, in its strongest form, is this. Translation, a critic will say, tracks the speech act and not only the voice and the case. One cannot be ordered to be persuaded, so in a command this verb can only mean bare compliance. Luke’s narrative imperfects report what people did and get “followed”; a present imperative in a letter’s closing exhortations tells people what to do and gets “obey”.

Its premise is not true of Greek. The New Testament commands in the passive and the middle-passive freely: “be reconciled to God”, καταλλάγητε (katallagēte) (2 Corinthians 5:20); “be transformed”, μεταμορφοῦσθε (metamorphousthe) (Romans 12:2); “do not be led astray”, μὴ πλανᾶσθε (mē planasthe) (1 Corinthians 15:33); and in this chapter, eight verses before the command, “do not be carried away by diverse and strange teachings”, μὴ παραφέρεσθε (mē parapheresthe) (13:9). A command in that voice tells the hearers what to let be done to them, or not to, and to act on it. And 13:9 and 13:17 make a pair, each a middle-passive imperative with its dative: do not be carried off by those teachings; be persuaded by these people. That answers the grammar. It does not yet answer the English, which is the rest of the objection.

One place in the New Testament comes close to answering it. At Acts 23:21 the ESV, which prints “obey” at 13:17, renders μὴ πεισθῇς αὐτοῖς (mē peisthēs autois) “do not be persuaded by them”, so English can command the persuasion sense with a personal dative. But that is a negative aorist prohibition, a different speech act again, and it settles nothing about a positive, continuing command. The positive form itself is not in doubt: Mattathias’s command, above, gives it, with Simon’s counsel in the dative, and so does Etheridge’s rendering of the Syriac, quoted below, “Be persuaded by your leaders”. Two further things answer the objection outright.

The first begins with a concession. In classical Greek this construction was itself an ordinary way to speak of people under authority: the Achaeans and Agamemnon (Iliad 1.79), soldiers and their commanders, citizens and their laws, all with this verb; Iliad 1.79 is the first citation Liddell and Scott, the standard lexicon of classical Greek, give for “listen to one, obey him”. That is so, and it is why the lexica gloss the construction “obey”: where the relationship carries a sanction, compliance is not optional, and that sense is the Greek’s own. It settles the force, which is not disputed. It does not settle which English word, and on that the writer’s choices and the translators’ own practice both point away from “obey”.

How common that use was can be counted, and the count is not what the objection expects. In the classical texts of the Perseus collection the infinitive πείθεσθαι (peithesthai) occurs 357 times, in 229 passages, all printed in the appendix. Of those 229, about a tenth take a leader-word: ἄρχων (archōn), στρατηγός (stratēgos), βασιλεύς (basileus), ἡγεμών (hēgemōn), σατράπης (satrapēs). An eighth take a norm, most often νόμος (nomos); the rest take a person, now and then a ruler named rather than titled, a thing said, or nothing.⁶ That is the force conceded above, and in one instance the sanction is capital: Plato’s law-code has the man who is not persuaded by the law put to death (Laws 955d).

But the second-person imperative, which is the form of this verse, is another matter. Of the thirty-one commands in the present imperative, πείθεσθε (peithesthe) or πείθου (peithou), one is a god’s, in verse (Apollo, Homeric Hymn 3.486), two are orders or the echo of one, a father’s to his son and a king’s guards’ to one another (Trachiniae 1228; Rhesus 993), five are prohibitions, and twenty-three are counsel. Among the prohibitions is Cleocritus’s to the men of the city, “do not be persuaded by the most impious Thirty” (Xenophon, Hellenica 2.4.21), a command not to obey them, and one of two places in the thirty-one where a ruler stands in the dative; the other is Rhesus 993. Those two are among the six that put someone other than the speaker in the dative, as 13:17 does; the other four are two prohibitions, a piece of counsel (Trachiniae 470) and a jibe (Plutarch, On Common Conceptions 2). The usage survey sorts all thirty-one by who stands in the dative.

The counsel includes Crito’s ἐμοὶ πείθου (emoi peithou) to Socrates (Crito 45a) and Socrates’ to Crito (Phaedo 117a), Callicles’ to Socrates (Gorgias 486c), Andocides’ to the assembly (2.24), the speaker’s to his opponent (Demosthenes 39.34), Plato’s to Dion’s friends, “be persuaded by me, for the sake of the third, Zeus the Saviour” (Letter 7, 334d), Hippias’ to Protagoras and Socrates (Protagoras 338a), Alexander’s to the Athenians (Herodotus 8.140), the Chorus’s to Oedipus and to Electra (Oedipus at Colonus 520; Electra 1015), the king Theoclymenus’ to Helen, “if I seem to you to speak not badly, be persuaded”, just after he has sent his servants off with a bare χωρεῖτ᾽ (chōreit᾽), “go” (Helen 1390–93).

The three that are orders are the force conceded above: a god’s to mortals, with his promises (Homeric Hymn 3.478–86); a dying father’s to his son, on the ground that one who has complied in great things should not refuse in small, πιστεύσαντ᾽ … ἀπιστεῖν (pisteusant᾽ … apistein), and backed by a father’s curse (Trachiniae 1201–02, 1228–29, 1239–40); and Hector’s guards, bidding one another πείθου βασιλεῖ (peithou basilei), “obey the king”, as they go to carry out the orders he has just given (Rhesus 993). A would-be commander asks for command with it (Herodotus 6.11, below), and the two commands nearest Hebrews, Mattathias’s and Ignatius’s, set out under “The pattern in the translations”, are counsel.

Liddell and Scott’s own examples run the same way. They gloss the tragedians’ present imperative πείθου (peithou) “be persuaded” and their aorist πιθοῦ (pithou) “comply”, and the four lines of Sophocles they cite for the two are all counsel or entreaty: the Chorus pressing Oedipus (Oedipus at Colonus 520) and Electra (Electra 1015), Antigone pleading with her father (Oedipus at Colonus 1181), Orestes, still a stranger to his sister, coaxing her (Electra 1207). Even their “comply” is not an order from above.

The concession leaves the manner untouched, because the manner is not argued from the word’s history: usage, not etymology, settles what a word carries. It is argued from the translators’ own practice and from how the English word is heard, with what the verb’s own users made of it pointing the same way, and from the writer’s choices: a writer who had ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō), ὑπακούω (hypakouō) and πειθαρχέω (peitharcheō) to hand used the first two in this letter, and reached past all three for the verb he turns on himself one line later.

Franz Laub, whose 1982 study of these leaders William Lane’s commentary follows, found πείθεσθαι (peithesthai) “in the sense of ‘obey’ comparatively sparse in connection with persons of authority”: his instances are the king and the mother of 4 Maccabees and the horses of James 3:3, and where the New Testament comes nearest to “obey” with this verb, he adds, the dative is the truth or unrighteousness. It was Laub who observed, as Lane did after him, that the New Testament normally calls Christians to constituted authority with ὑποτάσσεσθαι (hypotassesthai), the verb Hebrews does not use. And he put the manner of the verb it does use in a phrase of his own: “the obedience of one who lets himself be won by convincing speech, and then ‘follows’”.⁷

By the New Testament period ὑπακούω (hypakouō) had become the usual verb for obeying, and Hebrews uses it of obedience to God and to the Son, as “The words not chosen” below shows. Of the gathering and those who lead it, the letter uses the verb in which being persuaded and complying were one word. In the Greek Old Testament, which this writer quotes throughout, that verb was not the usual word for obeying a person in authority. The choice is worth noticing; whether register accounts for it is taken up under “The letter’s register”.

The second answer comes from outside the New Testament, where positive commands with this verb, addressed to persons, are common, and where no Bible tradition is in play. Nestor, in the first book of the Iliad, closes each half of his appeal to Agamemnon and Achilles with the same command, ἀλλὰ πίθεσθε (alla pithesthe) (Iliad 1.259, 274). The second time he gives the reason, ἐπεὶ πείθεσθαι ἄμεινον (epei peithesthai ameinon), “since to be persuaded is better”: the act commanded and the state that makes it better are one verb in one line, and the whole speech between the two commands is counsel. One of the two he commands is the king of 1.79, the man the Achaeans are persuaded by; Nestor holds no command over him, and the ground he gives the first time is that he is the older (1.259).

Sophocles has both verbs of Hebrews 13:17 in one appeal. Antigone says to her father πάτερ, πιθοῦ μοι (pater, pithou moi), the verb with a dative of person, and three lines on ὕπεικε (hypeike), the verb of 13:17’s second command (Oedipus at Colonus 1181, 1184). A daughter is not giving her father orders; she is asking him to be won over and to give ground, and she says so in the line itself, κεἰ νέα παραινέσω (kei nea parainesō). Jebb gives the whole line “Father, hearken to me, though I be young who counsel”. Liddell and Scott cite the first of those lines, as noted above, under the aorist they gloss “comply”: the compliance they illustrate is a daughter’s plea to her father. The same lexicon’s gloss for the construction with a dative of person is “listen to one, obey him”, in that order.⁸

Homer’s translators divide too, and within one speech. The modernised text of Murray’s translation in the Perseus Digital Library prints “listen to me” at 1.259 and “obey” at 1.274; Murray himself, in 1924, had “hearken” at both, and “obey” at 1.79, of the king “whom the Achaeans obey”, though he gives “hearken” to a king’s bidding too (1.150). The verb never lost either note, and the English has to choose which to print.

Nestor’s line was still read as counsel in the letter’s century: Dio Chrysostom takes it as the text of a discourse, and says Nestor commends himself because “he had been able before to persuade many powerful men”, so that any who refuse him will refuse through their own folly, “not as though he were unable to counsel” (Oration 57.1–3).

And Herodotus shows the imperative asking for more than bare compliance, and a translator hearing it so. Dionysius, the Phocaean general, with three ships, closes a speech to the Ionian fleet with this verb: ἀλλ᾽ ἐμοί τε πείθεσθε καὶ ἐμοὶ ὑμέας αὐτοὺς ἐπιτρέψατε (all᾽ emoi te peithesthe kai emoi hymeas autous epitrepsate), “be persuaded by me and entrust yourselves to me” (6.11), which Godley prints “Believe me and entrust yourselves to me”. The Ionians entrust themselves, ἐπιτρέπουσι (epitrepousi), and for seven days of his drilling ἐπείθοντό τε καὶ ἐποίευν τὸ κελευόμενον (epeithonto te kai epoieun to keleuomenon), “were persuaded and did what was ordered”, where Godley prints “they obeyed him and did his bidding”: Godley divides too, within one episode, “Believe me” for the appeal and “obeyed” once the command was given.

Then, worn out by the drilling, they said to one another “let us no longer be persuaded by him”, and after that πείθεσθαι οὐδεὶς ἤθελε (peithesthai oudeis ēthele), “no one was willing to be persuaded” (6.12).⁹ The command is real, the compliance is real, and the whole of it rests on a trust given and a willingness that runs out. The verb of the refusal is not ἀπειθέω (apeitheō); it is this verb, negated.

Koester’s Anchor Bible translation (2001) shows the same division in practice: his note glosses the first verb as taking directives, with Romans 2:8 and James 3:3 as the parallels, and his text still declines “obey”.

The mood does not change the verb. A command to be persuaded by someone is a command to heed them, and the Greek makes it with the verb in which being persuaded and complying were one word. The present rendering does not ask “follow” to carry force and manner alone. It applies “follow” here as the translations apply it in Acts, and pairs it with “yield”: the pair, not either word by itself, carries both the force and the manner.

The words not chosen

The usual New Testament verb for hearing a command and carrying it out is ὑπακούω (hypakouō). Hebrews knows the word group. The verb comes twice, at 5:9 of those who obey the Son and at 11:8 of Abraham obeying when God called him, and the noun ὑπακοή (hypakoē) names the Son’s own obedience at 5:8. It is not the verb in this sentence. Greek also had a compound, πειθαρχέω (peitharcheō), the verb of Acts 5:29 and 27:21 met above, and of Titus 3:1, where it stands beside ὑποτάσσεσθαι (hypotassesthai) (taken up under “The verb the writer did not use” below); it is not here either. These words overlap with πείθομαι (peithomai), so the absences should not be pressed as if they changed the force of the command. It is still worth noticing: when this letter speaks of obedience to God or to the Son it uses the ὑπακούω (hypakouō) word group; when it tells the gathering how to relate to those who lead them it uses πείθεσθε (peithesthe).¹⁵ Where a religious guild of the first century BC bound its members to the ἡγούμενος (hēgoumenos) it had chosen, it used the plain verb, ὑπακούω (hypakouō) (“Those who lead you”).

The same test can be turned on the rendering adopted here. The ordinary Greek verb for following someone (walking behind, going where they go) is ἀκολουθέω (akoloutheō), and it is not in this sentence either. If the absence of ὑπακούω (hypakouō) is worth noticing, so is that. The answer is that English “follow” is not being used here in its walking sense. “Follow a leader” and “follow instructions” are compliance uses of the word, and “follow a leader” is the one the lexica pair with “obey”.

“Follow a leader” is also the lexicon’s own second gloss for the verb here (“obey, follow”, BDAG), and the Theological Dictionary’s for Acts 23:21 and 27:11 and for Ignatius (“to be won over by persuasion, to follow”; this verse it files under “to obey”). It is the Greek’s own companion to the verb too, as “The letter’s register” below sets out: πείθεσθαι καὶ ἀκολουθεῖν (peithesthai kai akolouthein) (Plutarch, Aristides 5.2; Aratus 9.6), “to follow the Roman commanders and comply with their orders” (Polybius 10.38.5), “be persuaded by them and yield… and follow willingly” (Epictetus, Enchiridion 31.1), “heeding the one advising and following willingly” (Musonius 16). Philo sets being persuaded by custom against following nature, ἕπεσθαι φύσει (hepesthai physei), as the two ways of going along (On Drunkenness 55), and Plutarch says that following God and being persuaded by reason are the same thing (On Listening to Lectures 1). Spicq’s lexicon defines the verb by it: “following advice, giving in to reasons, taking an opinion into account”.

That is the sense intended here: compliance in the manner of persuasion rather than of bare command. On its own, English “follow” does not rule out the word’s looser modern uses: following along, following at a distance; nothing in the word forbids them. The pairing does. Set beside “yield”, it is heard as going along with those who lead, not trailing after them at a distance of one’s own choosing.

The persuasion still in the word

The letter’s own use of πείθω (peithō) points the same way. In the very next sentence, at 13:18, the writer turns the verb on himself: πειθόμεθα (peithometha), “we are persuaded that we have a good conscience.” The manuscripts divide here. The Byzantine text, and the King James after it, read the perfect πεποίθαμεν (pepoithamen), “we trust”, where the standard editions print the present middle of the verb commanded at 13:17. The division does not touch the point: on either reading he turns the same verb on his own confidence one sentence after the command. The letter’s other occurrences match. At 2:13 the Son says “I will put my trust in him” (πεποιθώς, pepoithōs, quoting Isaiah). At 6:9 the writer is “persuaded of better things” about the hearers (πεπείσμεθα, pepeismetha). Everywhere else in Hebrews the verb is trust and confidence.

The construction at 13:17 is not the same as these uses of trust: a command, with a dative of person, a construction that carries compliance. These verses therefore do not soften its force, and they do not by themselves fix its manner: another sense of a word does not settle the sense of this one. What they show is that the persuasion colouring of this verb was live in the writer’s ear one line later: he commands πείθεσθε (peithesthe), and in the next breath says of himself πειθόμεθα (peithometha).

Paul’s usage runs the same way even where the versions print this verb as “obeying the truth”. “Who hindered you from πείθεσθαι (peithesthai) the truth? This πεισμονή (peismonē) is not from him who calls you… I am confident, πέποιθα (pepoitha), about you” (Galatians 5:7–10): three words of the one family in four verses, and the ESV prints “obeying” for the first and “persuasion” for the second. There the construction is that of 13:17, dative and all.

The verb’s negative tells the same story. The letter uses it, with its noun, four times, and always of refusal toward God: of the wilderness generation at 3:18, 4:6 and 4:11, and of the people of Jericho at 11:31. The writer glosses it himself. Having said at 3:18 that the oath was sworn against those who ἀπειθήσασιν (apeithēsasin), “disobeyed”, he gives his conclusion at 3:19 in another word: they could not enter δι᾽ ἀπιστίαν (di᾽ apistian), “because of unbelief”. In this writer’s hands not complying and not believing are one failure. With the pattern already set out, the command most naturally asks for the compliance of people who have been won over.

Luke, who uses the construction most, sets the whole of it out in one scene. At Acts 28:23 Paul spends the day πείθων (peithōn), persuading, the Jews of Rome; at 28:24 some ἐπείθοντο τοῖς λεγομένοις (epeithonto tois legomenois), the construction of this verse, and the others ἠπίστουν (ēpistoun), disbelieved. The active is what the one who speaks the word does; the middle or passive with its dative is the hearers’ answer; and its opposite, in the same sentence, is not insubordination but unbelief. At Acts 19:8–9 it is the same: Paul πείθων (peithōn) in the synagogue, and some ἐσκληρύνοντο καὶ ἠπείθουν (esklērynonto kai ēpeithoun), were hardened and would not be persuaded, the pairing of hardening with this verb’s negative that Hebrews makes across chapters 3 and 4. None of this turns the command into “trust them”; the construction is the compliance one, as said above. It shows what kind of compliance the word family names: the answer of people to whom the word has been spoken.

The English tradition printed it so. The King James, which gave English “Obey them that have the rule over you”, renders this verb’s negative, and its noun, as unbelief every time this letter uses them: “them that believed not” (3:18), “because of unbelief” (4:6), “the same example of unbelief” (4:11), “them that believed not” (11:31). At 4:11 and 11:31 its margin offers “disobedience” and “that were disobedient”: the translators weighed both words, and put believing in the text.¹⁴ The Latin had printed unbelief at all four before them (increduli, incredulitas), as it prints believing or consenting for the construction itself at eight places of ten (“The tradition’s word”). The modern versions print “disobedient” and “disobedience”. Neither is wrong; the word holds both, as the writer’s own gloss at 3:19 shows. But the tradition that kept “obey” at 13:17 heard believing in the same verb’s negative four times in this letter.

The letter frames the relation in the same key. At 13:7 the hearers are told to consider the outcome of the earlier leaders’ way of life and to imitate their faith, μιμεῖσθε (mimeisthe): the verb of the disciple, not of the subject. At 13:22 the writer names what he has written a λόγος τῆς παρακλήσεως (logos tēs paraklēseōs), a word of exhortation. Its own mode is persuasion, and the command at 13:17 is made inside it. His own requests are made the same way: παρακαλῶ (parakalō), “I urge you”, twice in the next five verses (13:19, 22), and of the whole letter ἀνέχεσθε (anechesthe), “bear with” it. And the good conscience he is persuaded of at 13:18 concerns his wish to conduct himself well, ἀναστρέφεσθαι (anastrephesthai), the word of the ἀναστροφή (anastrophē) whose outcome the hearers were told to consider in their leaders at 13:7. He lays his own conduct open to the scrutiny he has just asked them to give. Laub reads the writer so: to gain a hearing for his word of exhortation he “claims no other authority than that of the word of God”, and so, though he does not say it directly, places himself in substance among those who lead; and if by the “we” of 13:18 he counts himself in their circle, the verse “reads like an apologia of the gathering’s leaders to the whole gathering” (note 7).

The letter’s register

It might be said that the choice is one of register and not of manner. The Greek of this letter is the most literary in the New Testament, and πείθεσθαί τινι (peithesthai tini) is the classical verb for obeying a person, the verb of the Achaeans and Agamemnon (Iliad 1.79); a writer who prefers the elevated word may have reached for it as the elevated word for obedience and for nothing more, where ὑπακούω (hypakouō) is the word of the Greek Old Testament.

The letter answers the objection twice. Where it means obedience to God or to the Son it uses the plain verb, ὑπακούω (hypakouō), at 5:9 and 11:8, and 11:8 is the writer’s own narration, not a quotation. Where, in exhortation in its own voice, it means subjection, it uses ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) at 12:9, in the same register as 13:17 and a chapter before it. The writer did not avoid the ordinary words for style; he had used both in this letter, and at 13:17 used neither. Register might account for a preference for πείθεσθαι (peithesthai) over ὑπακούω (hypakouō). It accounts for nothing in the case of ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō), which is ordinary literary Greek, the verb of Paul, Josephus and Plutarch, and the one absence that bears on “submit”.

Luke is the other stylist of the New Testament, and the construction in Acts is his. If register had bleached the verb to bare compliance, the versions that print “followed”, “took his advice” and “persuaded by” show no sign of hearing it.

Outside the letter, the chief witness is the Greek of its own world, since that is the Greek the objection appeals to. The Greek Old Testament meets the objection on its own ground, because the verb stands there chiefly in the books composed in Greek, 4 Maccabees above all, which is literary Greek and no translation. In the Septuagint the middle and passive of the verb, apart from the perfect “trust”, occur nineteen times (twenty-one if two futures that more probably belong to πάσχω (paschō), “suffer”, are counted). The datives are anyone (Tobit 10:7, of a grieving wife who would not be talked round), money (2 Maccabees 10:20), proofs (3 Maccabees 3:24), the sight of things (Wisdom 13:7), the law (4 Maccabees 18:1; at 5:16 it is the law the martyrs are persuaded to live by), and, four times, a person in authority: three times Antiochus, whom the martyrs refuse (8:17, 26; 10:13), once the mother of the seven (15:10).¹⁰

The only other πείθεσθε (peithesthe) in the Septuagint and the New Testament, the form of this verse in its mood and number, is 4 Maccabees 18:1, and its complement is the law. “Be persuaded by the king’s commands” is what a herald shouts at Eleazar as he is scourged (6:4). Eleazar has already given the king his answer: the martyrs, persuaded to order their lives by a divine law, count no compulsion, ἀνάγκη (anankē), more forcible than their εὐπείθεια (eupeitheia) toward it, their ready obedience, a noun built on this verb’s own root (5:16). Laub’s finding, quoted under “The imperative” above, that the verb is comparatively sparse in the sense of “obey” with persons of authority, is borne out here, and the instances say more than the count: in the Septuagint it is so used four times, all in 4 Maccabees, of a tyrant refused and a mother followed, and of no one else. The NRSV, whose “yields” at 6:35 is quoted under “Yielding and subjection, side by side”, prints “obey” at all four, and so does the RSV behind it; Brenton, older, prints “obey” at two of the four and “giving ear to the king” and “give regard to the king” at the other two (8:26; 10:13). Three have the king in the dative, with the instruments of torture in the room, the sanctioned sense conceded under “The imperative”; and two of those three are words the writer puts into the mouths of cowards the brothers were not (8:16–17, 26), the third the torturers’ own as they drag the fourth brother forward (10:13). The fourth is sons keeping the law to the death at their mother’s word, “they obeyed her” (15:10), where the ground the writer gives is their own virtue and their love for her, no penalty is in view at all, and the writer says how she had it: she “persuaded”, ἔπεισεν (epeise), each of her sons to die rather than break the commandment (16:24), and the same version prints “persuaded” there. Where these versions print “obey” for a person, the person is a king or a parent; Hebrews’ leaders are neither, and the letter neither rests the command on standing of that kind nor names a penalty (“No gain to you” below).

Josephus, in the five forms the survey covers, has a ruler in the dative three times in twenty-two: a praetor obeyed in a civic decree (Antiquities 14.232), and a Roman legate and the magistrates, both refused (18.268; War 2.234). His one second-person imperative is Mattathias’s, “be persuaded by whatever Simon counsels” (12.283). Moses charges the young to be persuaded by their elders in the clause where the elders are to give ear to the general (3.47).¹¹ Outside those forms, his account of the Jewish constitution has the high priest lead the other priests, ἡγήσεται (hēgēsetai), sacrifice with them, guard the laws, judge disputes and punish the convicted, and “whoever does not obey him will pay the penalty as one impious toward God himself” (Against Apion 2.193–94). That is the force these notes concede, with its sanction named: the head of a priesthood judging and punishing under the law, not leaders keeping watch over lives they must give account for.

Philo’s datives are God, virtue, custom and reason, and, by simile, parents and masters (On Drunkenness 33; On Dreams 2.108): reason once a counsellor who advises (On Abraham 256), and once a guide obeyed “when it commands”, προστάττοντι (prostattonti), by the learner, where the perfect man moves of himself (Allegorical Interpretation 3.144–45); not one is a human officeholder.¹² In the papyri the citations Moulton and Milligan could find for “obey” are a child to “papa and Matron”, a citizen to his city and a fourth-century contract formula, εὐδοκῶ καὶ πίθομαι (eudokō kai pithomai), the papyrus’s spelling of πείθομαι (peithomai), “I consent and abide by” what is written; and other contracts set the perfect participle beside what it excludes: ἑκὼν καὶ πεπεισμένος ἄνευ βίας καὶ ἀπάτης (hekōn kai pepeismenos aneu bias kai apatēs), “willing and persuaded, without force or deceit”.

The moralists of the letter’s decades put the manner in so many words. Epictetus: “I am free and a friend of God, so as to be persuaded by him willingly”, ἵν᾽ ἑκὼν πείθωμαι αὐτῷ (hin᾽ hekōn peithōmai autō) (Discourses 4.3.9), of a God whose laws he goes on to call orders: the force is not in doubt, and the word he gives the manner is willing; a patient to his physician, “it is mine to be persuaded by you” (2.15.15); and, in one clause on piety toward the gods, this verse’s first verb beside the simple form of its second, εἴκω (eikō): “to be persuaded by them and yield to all that happens and follow willingly” (Enchiridion 31.1). Musonius, asked whether one must be persuaded by one’s parents in everything, defines the man who is εὐπειθής (eupeithēs) as “heeding the one advising what is fitting, and following willingly”, holds that a son is persuaded by his parents when they advise good things and he does them willingly, and rules that whoever refuses a father’s, a ruler’s or a master’s bad, unjust or shameful order “is in no way disobeying” (Lecture 16; Epictetus and Musonius are both quoted in note 9).

The Apostolic Fathers, the Christian writers nearest to Hebrews after the New Testament, use the verb of a church and its own leaders once, in a second-century homily: “we did not believe and were not persuaded by the presbyters who announced to us our salvation” (2 Clement 17:5). BDAG files the verse under “obey, follow”, and the usual translations print “obey”, though Ehrman’s Loeb has “we were not persuaded by the presbyters”; either way the verb walks in step with believing, and the leaders are named by what they announce. The one bishop who puts himself in the dative is Ignatius, and he does it to steer a church off his own pleading and onto his letter, as set out above (To the Romans 7:2).¹³

Where those writers want subjection they say so: their verb for a gathering and its leaders is ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō), which in nine verses of the Apostolic Fathers takes the bishop, the presbyters or the deacons (seven in Ignatius, of the bishop and his presbytery; Clement’s presbyters; Polycarp’s presbyters and deacons), and in a tenth 13:17’s own phrase for the leaders (1 Clement 1:3); the verb of 13:17’s second command, ὑπείκω (hypeikō), they never use at all.

And the elevated Greek, read at length, is not the colourless synonym the objection needs. The verb can take rulers and laws, and in the classical texts surveyed under “The imperative” does so in a fifth or more of its instances; that is the force these notes concede. Most of those uses explain nothing, as ordinary uses do not; and its users knew the compliance it names could be had by force: Clearchus made his men feel, as Brownson’s Loeb has it, “that Clearchus must be obeyed”, ὡς πειστέον εἴη Κλεάρχῳ (hōs peisteon eiē Klearchō), by being harsh and punishing hard, and the men who served him “held by some necessity” he found “very obedient”, σφόδρα πειθομένοις (sphodra peithomenois), where no one followed him out of friendship (Xenophon, Anabasis 2.6.8–9, 13). But the verb is the passive of persuading, and where its users set persuading against forcing as the two ways of bringing men to comply, this verb stands with persuading: the Romans, Veturia tells her son, will grant everything “persuaded by reason and exhortation, but compelled, as you now demand, they would never grant anything” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus 8.48.3); men serve well “if they are not led in everything like a master and by force”, δεσποτικῶς καὶ βιαίως (despotikōs kai biaiōs) (Plutarch, Phocion 2.5, below); the law persuades some and keeps force for the dispositions that “do not yield to persuasion” (Plato, Laws 718b, below); and a Christian of the next century writes that God sent His Son “as persuading, not compelling; for compulsion is no attribute of God” (Diognetus 7.4).

The verb does not make a slave of the one who complies, and its users say so: in one sentence of Xenophon slaves ὑπηρετοῦσι (hypēretousi) their masters and free men πείθονται (peithontai) their rulers (Agesilaus 1.22); the sick are not slaves because they are persuaded by their doctors, “and it is no small or easy things they are persuaded of” (Dio Chrysostom 14.6–7). A slave could still be its subject: Xenophon has animals learn it from punishment when they try to disobey and good treatment when they serve, κολάζεσθαι … εὖ πάσχειν (kolazesthai … eu paschein), and slaves by the same training, the kind thought fit for beasts, through the belly, where men in general can be brought to it by word as well, by being shown that it is to their advantage (Oeconomicus 13.6–9), and Philo’s speaker learned it as a house-slave learns it of masters (On Dreams 2.108). What the word did not do was name the service as servile.

Its ground is competence: people “are most willing to be persuaded by those they think best”, as sailors by the most skilled pilot (Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.3.9), by doctors before parents, by “those who speak most sensibly” before kinsmen (Apology 20), by “the more accurate” (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1073b), by “those with most sense” (Demosthenes 61.57); and Diogenes, sold as a slave, told his purchaser that he must be persuaded by him even so, as by a doctor or a pilot (Diogenes Laertius 6.30). The other generals were persuaded by the same Clearchus “not because they had elected him, but because they saw that he alone had the sense a commander needs” (Anabasis 2.2.5).

Its users want it willing, and say which kind is better. Obedience can be compelled, and this verb can stand in the sentence that compels it: σαυτῷ πείθεσθαι ἀναγκάζων (sautō peithesthai anankazōn), “compelling me to be persuaded by you”, Cyrus says of his father’s training. Honour for the obedient and punishment for the disobedient are the road to it, and Xenophon names where that road ends with another verb again, τὸ ἀνάγκῃ ἕπεσθαι (to anankē hepesthai), “following under compulsion”; but to “the much better thing, being persuaded willingly”, τὸ ἑκόντας πείθεσθαι (to hekontas peithesthai), there is a shorter road, since men are “exceedingly glad to be persuaded” by the one they think wiser about their own good (Cyropaedia 1.6.20–21). The queen bee’s subjects “are persuaded willingly” (5.1.24). The allies of Thebes, who disputed the command with the Thebans in council, in the field followed the Theban generals “of their own choice, persuaded by them”, since nature, Plutarch says, makes the one who can save the ruler of the one who needs saving (Pelopidas 24.3–4). And Plato, in a word of his own, counts the rule of the wise over those who “follow”, ἕπεσθαι (hepesthai), as the greatest of the claims to rule, and in accord with nature: the rule of law over the willing, “and not by force” (Laws 690b–c).

Among its companions are the verbs of following: πείθεσθαι καὶ ἀκολουθεῖν (peithesthai kai akolouthein). Aristides told his fellow generals that “to be persuaded by and to follow those who think well is not shameful, but noble and saving” (Plutarch, Aristides 5.2), and the Achaeans kept themselves free, small as they were, because they could “be persuaded by and follow” the foremost in virtue rather than envy him (Aratus 9.6); so too “to follow the Roman commanders and comply with their orders” (Polybius 10.38.5, the terms of a treaty), ἀκολουθεῖν ἑκόντα (akolouthein hekonta) (Epictetus), ἑπόμενος ἑκουσίως (hepomenos hekousiōs) (Musonius).

That is the register the objection appeals to. In it, as in the Greek of Tobit and the papyri, πείθεσθαι (peithesthai) with a person could be forced, but wherever its users say which kind is better, it is compliance in the manner of assent: “an obedience on a persuasion”, as Owen said of this very verse, before any of this had been counted. The classical hearer of 13:17 would have heard a real command. He would not have heard servitude in it; Greek kept other words for that.

The word itself

The pattern in the translations shows what the translators do with this construction; this section asks the other half of the question, how the English word they print here is heard. A word means what its users make it mean, not what its root once meant.

One path of the verb is being won over, a path this letter itself walks at 6:9 and 13:18, and, in the perfect that means trust, at 2:13. At 13:17, paired with a second verb of compliance and with people who lead as its object, what the verb asks is: follow them.

“Obey” carries the force but adds a manner of its own. In today’s English “obey your leaders” is heard as “do whatever they tell you”: compliance grounded in the command itself, whether or not one is persuaded. One obeys the speed limit, or a referee, whether or not one is convinced; “I obeyed, but I was never persuaded” is ordinary English, and if persuasion were part of what “obey” asks, it would be a contradiction. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown said as much in a phrase: obedience, they wrote at “Children, obey your parents” (Ephesians 6:1), is “more unreasoning and implicit” than submission, and the submission they set it against is the wives’ ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) (Ephesians 5:21), the verb this letter kept for God’s rule (note 27).

The tradition’s own pages confirm the hearing. Wherever English prints “obey” over a fallible authority, its expositors have to add a limit, that the obedience is not absolute and not against conscience, here as under “obey your parents”, and here that it is not blind or implicit either; no one fences a word against a hearing it does not have, and that fence says a great deal about the English word and nothing about the Greek, as “The two kinds of fence” shows. Persuasion is not part of what “obey” asks, yet it is where the lexica file πείθεσθαι (peithesthai): Liddell and Scott’s “listen to one, obey him” stands under their “to be prevailed on, won over, persuaded”, and BDAG’s head gloss for the whole middle and passive is “to be won over as the result of persuasion” (notes 3 and 8); and it is where, on the translators’ own showing, the verb still stands in Acts.

“Follow” does not put the persuasion back; no single English word does. What “follow” does, with people who lead as its object, is name the going along, the disciple’s word, and leave out what “obey” puts in: compliance grounded in the command, and the rank of the one who gives it. That is all that is claimed for the word, paired with “yield”, as “And yield to them” below expands, and it is enough.

Nor does leaving that out leave out the force. The most familiar command in the English Bible is “Follow me”, and no one hears it as a suggestion. The Greek there is ἀκολουθέω (akoloutheō) (Matthew 9:9; John 21:19), not this verb, though in the same kind of command: a present imperative with the person in the dative. What is in dispute here is the force the English word carries in the reader’s ear, and those who heard the command left their nets and their father on the spot (Matthew 4:20, 22). The English Bible has never found “follow” too weak for the Lord’s own command, whose claim on those He called rested on who He was and what He said, and a word strong enough for that command is strong enough for this one.

The persuasion is carried by the passage itself: by the writer’s own use of the verb one line later (“The persuasion still in the word” above), and by the ground the verse’s reason clause gives. That ground is not any office but the leaders’ watch and their account, the kind of claim the verb’s own users meet by being persuaded, as by a pilot or a physician.

“Heed”, the nearest alternative

“Heed” was weighed and passed over, and the reason belongs here: it is the nearest alternative to “follow”, and of the two it is the one with a critical commentary behind it: Koester’s Anchor Bible translation (2001) prints it, and his note glosses it as taking directives. It has real force; it presupposes something said; it carries none of the indifference to persuasion that “obey” carries; and Liddell and Scott’s first gloss for this construction, “listen to one”, is its near neighbour. These notes take his readings at several other points, and part from him here.

Two things told against it to begin with, and both are matters of English ear rather than of Greek. In current English it has narrowed to warnings and advice (“heed the warning”, “take heed”), so that “heed those who lead you” is heard as bookish where “follow” is heard as plain. And it is heard of single occasions: one heeds a particular warning, where this command is a present imperative for a standing relation to people, and “follow” names the relation. “Follow” also has the versions’ own usage behind it where the dative is a person who leads (Acts 5:36–37), the ground of the short case’s point 1.

A third told against it, and this one is not a matter of ear. What was counted in its favour above, that it presupposes something said, is also its limit. Before the chapter commands anything at 13:17 it has already said what it asks of the hearers toward those who lead, and what it asks is not confined to words: at 13:7 the leaders are introduced by what they spoke, and the response called for goes past speech to the whole course of a life, its outcome considered and its faith imitated. The verses need not name the same individuals, as “Those who lead you” below sets out; what runs across them is the word and the kind of claim it carries, and in this chapter that claim is the work and the life: the word spoken, the faith left behind, the watch kept.

Koester’s comment reads the verse as adhering to the word of God the leaders speak, and that is the reading in which “heed” is the natural word; the rendering here keeps the dative as the leaders themselves, and “follow” with it. “Heed” takes the words, and reaches the people only as the ones who spoke them. “Follow”, with people in the dative, takes the people themselves, which is how the dative is read here. Both words drop the note “obey” adds. A reader who prefers Koester’s word loses nothing of the case against “obey”, which is the case being made; Koester does not print “obey” either. What “heed” gives up is the reach of the dative: it shrinks from the leaders themselves to what they say.

“Yield”, in a standing relation between people, is not everyday English either; one yields in traffic, or a point in argument. It is kept because “yield to them” is heard at once, and because it has warrant in the tradition and in a critical translation: Ellicott’s note, Koester’s “yield”, the Common English Bible’s “defer”, and Segond’s déférence. Moffatt, who called the pair “strong words”, set a sentence of Epictetus beside the first verb; Moulton and Milligan quote the same sentence under ὑπείκω (hypeikō) as the setting of the second: examine the man you deal with, “and if he is better, listen and be persuaded by him; if worse, persuade him; if equal, agree”. The register of the first verb is thus supplied as the setting of the second.

The tradition’s word

The tradition’s word has a history of its own. “Obey” entered English around 1300, borrowed through French from the Latin oboedire, formed from ob- with audire, to give ear to.¹⁶ When the first complete English Bible rendered this verse in the late fourteenth century, the translation was made from the Latin, not the Greek: the Vulgate’s oboedite became Wycliffe’s “Obeie ye to youre souereyns”.¹⁷ Tyndale, translating from the Greek in 1526, printed “obey” too, and rendered the second verb, ὑπείκετε (hypeikete), with “submit”, the word he already used for ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō): “Obeye the that have the oversight of you and submit youre selves to them”. The King James kept Tyndale, with “them that have the rule over you” for the leaders, and “Or, guide” in its margin; the revisions since have kept the King James. Luther, also from the Greek, printed Lehrern for the leaders, gehorchet for the first verb and folget ihnen, “follow them”, for the second; the Luther Bible has had “follow” in this verse for nearly five centuries.

So the English “obey” at this verse is the Latin Bible’s oboedite: the first English Bible translated it from the Latin, and the English tradition has kept it since, even when translating from the Greek. It was chosen in an older English to render a Latin word whose own root carries its compliance in the register of listening, much as πείθεσθαι (peithesthai) carries its in the register of persuasion.

How the word’s manner sat in fourteenth-century ears is harder to recover; it served for feudal and monastic obedience as readily as anything gentler. Whether the word drifted or carried the rank from the start, the expositors settle when it was heard so: Owen fenced it in 1684, within seventy-five years of the King James. “Obey” has been heard as compliance to rank for as long as it has been expounded.

Nothing in this indicts the Reformation translators: they worked from the Greek, and printed the word English already had for the verse. The case against “obey” rests on the translators’ own practice, set out under “The pattern in the translations”, and on how the English word is heard, set out under “The word itself”. What the Latin explains is where the word came from, and where the rank came from that the English carried in its noun until most modern versions printed “leaders”: “souereyns”, “oversight” and “rule over you”. The rank it still carries in its second verb is the same move made again, “suget” and then “submit”, the tradition’s word for ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) (“The verb the writer did not use” below). The next paragraph sets out that source.

The Latin supplied more than the verb. The Vulgate reads Oboedite praepositis vestris et subiacete eis. The praepositi are those placed over others; subiacere is to lie beneath. Wycliffe’s “souereyns” follows the first, and his next clause, “be ye suget to hem”, follows the second. Neither picture is in the Greek. The picture in ἡγουμένοις (hēgoumenois) is of those who go in front, not those set above, whatever standing the word comes to carry; and ὑπείκετε (hypeikete), for all the ὑπό (hypo) in it, names the yielder’s own movement, not a place beneath, as “And yield to them” below sets out. The ranks, one placed over and the other lying beneath, come into the English tradition from the Latin.

Neither Latin word was chosen when the Vulgate was made. The Vulgate’s text of the letters is not Jerome’s work; he revised the Gospels only. An unknown reviser, working in Rome between about 393 and 410, revised the Latin already in use.¹⁸ That older Latin had both words here before him: Codex Claromontanus, a bilingual manuscript copied in the fifth century whose Latin from 1 Thessalonians to Hebrews is, in Houghton’s words, “older and more distinctive”, reads Oboediite praepositis vestris et subiacete at this verse and praepositorum at 13:7.

And praepositus was the church’s word before it was the Latin Bible’s, and Rome’s before it was the church’s: the ordinary word for anyone set over others, from an army officer to the emperor’s chamberlain or the official in charge of the water supply. Early in the third century Tertullian writes of the praepositi of the church, who ought not to flee in persecution. At the century’s middle Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, writing to a bishop who had been insulted by his own deacon, says that deacons should remember that the Lord chose “apostles, that is, bishops and praepositi”; and he uses the word of himself. Cyprian never cites Hebrews, which stood outside the African canon of his day: the word came to him from the church, not from this verse.

The old Latin translation of 1 Clement gives Clement’s phrase for the Corinthians’ leaders, the phrase of this verse, as praepositis uestris. It was not the Latin church’s only word for a bishop, nor its commonest: in Cyprian’s letters episcopus is nearly four times as frequent, and sacerdos nearly five. But it was a standing one, and it is the one at this verse.

The Latin also had a word with the Greek’s own picture in it, and once used it for this participle. Across the New Testament it renders ἡγούμενος (hēgoumenos) according to the setting:

Ὑπείκετε (Hypeikete) is a present active imperative of ὑπείκω (hypeikō). The word occurs only here in the New Testament. Its root picture is physical: withdraw, step back, make room, give ground. In relational use, it takes on a settled sense of giving way or deferring.

Paired with πείθεσθε (peithesthe) as it is here, the verb would most likely have been heard in that settled sense, which is well established outside the New Testament. In Homer, Achilles refuses to yield to Agamemnon “in every matter, whatever you say”, and in the same breath refuses him the first verb too, οὐ γὰρ ἔγωγ᾽ ἔτι σοὶ πείσεσθαι ὀΐω (ou gar egōg᾽ eti soi peisesthai oiō), “for I do not think I shall obey you any longer”, in Murray’s translation (Iliad 1.294–96); Zeus and Hera agree to yield to each other in turn (Iliad 4.62). In Sophocles, Haemon tells his father that the trees which yield to the winter torrent keep their branches, while those that strain against it are torn out root and all (Antigone 712–14); there yielding is the wisdom that preserves, not defeat. In the same poet, Antigone asks her father to yield to his daughters, ὕπεικε (hypeike), three lines after asking him to comply with her, πιθοῦ μοι (pithou moi) (Oedipus at Colonus 1181–84), a passage taken up under “The imperative” above.

Liddell and Scott’s entry begins where the picture begins: “retire from one’s seat for another, make room for him” (Odyssey 16.42); “give one the first word, allow him to speak first” (Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.3.16); and, of what the young owe their elders, brothers and fellow citizens alike, to yield them the road, the seat and the first word, ὁδῶν καὶ θάκων καὶ λόγων ὑπείκειν (hodōn kai thakōn kai logōn hypeikein) (Cyropaedia 8.7.10). Thayer glosses the relational use as yielding to authority and admonition; BDAG’s glosses at Hebrews 13:17 are yield, give way, submit.³⁰ Koester’s note takes the verb to assume a difference of viewpoint, in which one party must give way.

The verb the writer did not use

The absence test applied to ὑπακούω (hypakouō) under “The words not chosen” applies here too, and here bears more weight. Hebrews knows ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō): at 2:5 and 2:8, of the world to come and of all things put in subjection, and at 12:9, of being subject to the Father of spirits. It is not the verb at 13:17. There, the absence of ὑπακούω (hypakouō) was not pressed. This one is, and the difference is principled.

The case against “obey” rests on what the English word conveys where people answer people, not on anything in ὑπακούω (hypakouō); and “obey” is not ὑπακούω (hypakouō)’s word alone, since the same versions print it for πείθομαι (peithomai) itself where the dative is a norm or an animal (Romans 2:8; Galatians 5:7; James 3:3). So that absence says something about the Greek but nothing against the English.

The case against “submit” rests on the English tradition’s own habits. “Submit” and “be subject” are its ordinary renderings of ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō), the verb of “be subject to the governing authorities” (Romans 13:1) and “submit yourselves therefore to God” (James 4:7), and a reader of the English Bible hears that verb in the word. The lexica do list “submit” among the glosses of ὑπείκω (hypeikō), and are not wrong to do so (note 30). The objection is not that “submit” misstates the verb, but that in the English Bible it is another verb’s word; and that other verb is not at 13:17. So this absence, unlike the first, tells directly against the English word.

Even so, the point has limits. None of the three verses in Hebrews concerns leaders and a gathering: two concern the ordering of creation, and one the hearers’ subjection to the Father of spirits. The parallel is not close. The choice still means something: the writer had the submission verb to hand, used it in this letter, and at 13:17 chose instead a verb of giving way, found nowhere else in the New Testament. Even at 12:9 the submission verb stands on one side of the comparison only: of the fathers who disciplined us the writer says “we respected them”, ἐνετρεπόμεθα (enetrepometha), and it is to the Father of spirits that we are “much more” to be subject. Where Hebrews speaks of subjection, it uses ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō); here it says give way.

One verse has the Greek behind both of the tradition’s words, “obey” and “submit”. At Titus 3:1 the churches are to be reminded ἀρχαῖς ἐξουσίαις ὑποτάσσεσθαι, πειθαρχεῖν (archais exousiais hypotassesthai, peitharchein): the ESV prints “to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient”, the CSB “to submit to rulers and authorities, to obey”. That is the Greek a reader of “Obey your leaders and submit to them” would expect to find behind it, and it is said of rulers and authorities. Hebrews 13:17 has neither verb. In English the verbs of the two verses cannot be told apart; in Greek the verses have not one verb in common.

Yielding and subjection, side by side

The New Testament sets the two words side by side in one verse. The simple verb εἴκω (eikō) occurs only there, at Galatians 2:5, of the false brothers: οἷς οὐδὲ πρὸς ὥραν εἴξαμεν τῇ ὑποταγῇ (hois oude pros hōran eixamen tē hypotagē), “to whom we did not yield in subjection even for an hour”. The yielding Paul refused was the subjection those men demanded, and it takes the noun to say so: the verb gives the giving way, and the noun names what kind it would have been. Hebrews has the yield-verb, and no ὑποταγή (hypotagē) beside it.

The versions know the difference. The ESV prints “to them we did not yield in submission”, the NASB “we did not yield in subjection to them”, the New King James “did not yield submission”; the King James has “gave place by subjection”. Each gives the verb a word of giving way, and keeps for the noun beside it the tradition’s word for ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō). (The NRSV and the CSB fold the two into “submit”, the NIV into “give in”.) And where the compound ὑπείκω (hypeikō) itself stands in the Greek Old Testament, the RSV and the NRSV print “yields”: reason “in no respect yields” to pleasures (4 Maccabees 6:35).³¹ At Hebrews 13:17 those same two versions print “submit”. It is the pattern of the first verb again, on a smaller scale: “yield” is not a new rendering but the versions’ own, where they meet the verb or its simple form elsewhere.

The verb the next generation supplied

The move from the letter’s verbs to subjection began in the generation that had the letter in hand. Clement of Rome knew Hebrews: his thirty-sixth chapter is built from its first. He wrote to Corinth within a generation of it, about the same relation, a gathering and those who lead it. For the leaders he used the letter’s own phrase, and he set the subjection verb with it: ὑποτασσόμενοι τοῖς ἡγουμένοις ὑμῶν (hypotassomenoi tois hēgoumenois hymōn), “being subject to your leaders” (1 Clement 1:3).³² The verb was not incidental; it is the instrument of his letter and of his generation.

Ὑποτάσσω (Hypotassō) stands in nine verses of 1 Clement, with any object, and in twenty-nine verses of the Apostolic Fathers in all. Seven of the twenty-nine, in Ignatius, have the bishop or his presbytery in the dative; he closes his letter to the Trallians ὑποτασσόμενοι τῷ ἐπισκόπῳ ὡς τῇ ἐντολῇ (hypotassomenoi tō episkopō hōs tē entolē), “being subject to the bishop as to the commandment” (13:2). The noun ὑποταγή (hypotagē) stands twice in Clement and once in Ignatius.³³ At 57:1 Clement tells those who began the schism outright: ὑποτάγητε τοῖς πρεσβυτέροις (hypotagēte tois presbyterois), be subject to the presbyters. And at 37 he sets the church’s order beside an army’s, where the ἡγούμενοι (hēgoumenoi) are the officers under the emperor: “let us consider those who serve as soldiers under our ἡγούμενοι, how in good order, how [yieldingly], how subordinately they carry out what is ordered… each in his own rank carries out what is commanded by the emperor and the ἡγούμενοι” (37:2–3; the bracketed word is a disputed reading, taken up below).

In Clement’s letter the same noun names the authorities before whom Paul bore witness, Egypt’s rulers, and those who with the emperor give an army its orders (5:7; 51:5; 37:2–3); in Hebrews it names the ones who spoke the word of God (13:7).

Clement set the verb there for a reason of his own: the Corinthian church had removed some of its presbyters, and subjection was what he wrote to restore. For that he needed a verb of subjection, and neither verb of Hebrews names it: whatever compliance πείθεσθαι (peithesthai) asks, it asks in the register of persuasion, and ὑπείκω (hypeikō) asks for giving way, the yielder’s own movement, which the lexica will gloss “submit” but which names no place beneath (“Giving way to a superior” below). So he supplied the verb himself, and did more than change a verb. He used the letter’s own phrase for its leaders, gave it the verb the letter had withheld, and set the relation in the order of an army, which the letter had not done, for a purpose the letter did not have. Whether he weighed the verb of Hebrews and found it wanting, or simply wrote the church’s order in the vocabulary of subjection that runs through his letter, makes no difference to what he did or to what followed from it.

Clement’s form, not the letter’s, is the one the verse’s readers have reached for since, and Attridge’s comment on this verse is the modern form of it: the verse shows “concern for proper subordination to ecclesiastical authorities”, which he finds characteristic of “works of the later first century, particularly those associated with Rome”. That is Hebrews read as Clement. Weiss holds the exhortation nearer to the firm authority of 1 Clement 1:3, 21:6 and 37:2 and of the Didache than to the “respect” Paul asks in 1 Thessalonians 5:12; Cockerill, reporting him, calls such arguments “largely speculative”.

Laub is exact about the difference. 1 Clement takes over the surrounding social and political order as the church’s own, under one τάξις (taxis) in which the cosmos, the soldier and the priesthood each keep their rank, and it gathers Rome’s rulers and the church’s officers under the one word ἡγούμενοι (hēgoumenoi); “for Hebrews this thinking is certainly not present in the pronounced form of 1 Clement”. He does not make Hebrews a church without leaders: they are a collegial body set apart from the saints, “a regular leadership office taking shape”, and the letter shares its age’s interest in church authority. What it lacks is any formal ground for it. He grants a real duty of obedience toward the leaders, and will even say “hierarchical” of the relation, provided the word is not taken in the sense of church law. But “of a hierarchical structure one should, at least as regards Hebrews, not yet speak”; the leaders have, “as it seems”, as yet “no means of power of any kind of church discipline”; and the author “grounds the demand for obedience only on the weight of what is at stake”. That is the letter these notes read: real leaders, whose one instrument is the word.

What the generation did with the second verb is the same in miniature. Ὑπείκω (Hypeikō), the verb of this verse’s second command, is not used by Clement or by any writer of the Apostolic Fathers, of this relation or of anything. The one time Clement uses its simplex, εἴκω (eikō), he says to whom the yielding is not owed: he prays that the offenders be given gentleness and humility “so as to yield not to us but to the will of God” (56:1). And in his army the yield-root may stand after all, in an adverb. At 37:2 Lightfoot and Holmes read πῶς εἰκτικῶς (pōs eiktikōs), “how yieldingly”; the Jerusalem codex has ἑκτικῶς (hektikōs), “how readily”, which Lake prints; Alexandrinus is worn at the word, and Lightfoot, who read it, judged εἰκτικῶς (eiktikōs) to have “the higher claim”.³⁴ If Clement wrote it, he wrote the yield-word into a description of soldiers; but it stands beside ὑποτεταγμένως (hypotetagmenōs), “subordinately”, not in place of it. On either reading, subjection is the third adverb and not the second: where the yield-word stands, in Clement as in Hebrews, subjection has not taken its place.

Clement’s ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō), the Latin’s subiacete, the verbs of subjection with which Jerome and Augustine quoted the verse, and Wycliffe’s “suget” are not a line of descent, and no line needs drawing: they are one move, made again and again. “Submit”, which Tyndale chose from the Greek, is the English tradition’s own word for ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō), and with it the English Bible renders Hebrews as though the writer had written Clement’s verb. None of this is evidence of what the writer of Hebrews meant; reception is not synonymy. It is evidence of how soon, and how often, his choice was set aside, and it shows the choice was a choice, because the alternative was in the next generation’s hands and in their mouths.

Nor did the writer have to wait a generation for the alternative to exist. The New Testament itself, in the letter’s own generation, uses ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) of Christians subject to other Christians: of the household of Stephanas, “be subject to such people” (1 Corinthians 16:16), of the younger toward the elders (1 Peter 5:5), and of all believers toward one another (Ephesians 5:21).³⁵ Lane’s observation, after Laub, that the New Testament “normally” calls Christians to constituted authority with this verb (“The imperative” above) reaches wider than these two: the verb is the New Testament’s ordinary word for Christians under authority of any kind, the governing authorities and masters among them (Romans 13:1; Titus 3:1; 1 Peter 2:13, 18).

Where it is used of Christians toward those who serve or lead among them, the places are the first two, and neither is quite the case of 13:17, a whole gathering toward the people who lead it. At 1 Corinthians 16:16 what is asked for turns on labour, “every fellow worker and labourer”, and not on any recognised leadership role, though in the New Testament such labour is itself a form of leading. At 1 Peter 5:5 the party addressed is the younger, though the elders there are the ones who shepherd the flock; and when the verse turns to the whole gathering, what it asks is humility toward one another.

That cuts both ways. The New Testament offers no exact parallel to 13:17; and the verb of subjection was in ordinary use among Christians in the letter’s own generation, before Clement made it the church’s word for this relation, and Hebrews, with it in circulation, did not use it. The Apostolic Fathers confirm that “normally” and sharpen the exception: in the writers who follow Hebrews ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) is used of a gathering and its leaders in ten verses, against one with πείθομαι (peithomai) (2 Clement 17:5, under “The letter’s register”).

Subjection, where it is wanted, has to be supplied. The Greek gives the second command no object at all; most versions supply the leaders (“submit to them”), and so does this rendering (“yield to them”). The New International Version supplies “their authority”, in 1984 and 2011 alike: a noun the Greek does not have, and the rank that “submit” implies, written out.

Giving way to a superior

Lane reads the second verb as submission to a person’s authority, and finds that sense frequent in secular Greek, citing 4 Maccabees 6:35 and three passages of Philo. The Philo passages are Laub’s, from a note that calls the verb “very frequent” in profane Greek and lists five, two of them with no person in them at all (creatures yielding to the commands of pleasure, Special Laws 3.8; the powers to the cosmos, On the Eternity of the World 74). Laub himself has the second verb go “perhaps” a step further than the first.

None of Lane’s four has a gathering and the people who lead it, and in all four what stands in the dative is a thing: pleasures, reason, threats, commands. In 4 Maccabees reason masters pleasures and does not yield to them (Ellingworth: “of reasoning, not yielding to pleasures”). In Philo the senses are tame when they have yielded to reason as cattle to a herdsman (On the Sacrifices 105); children “do not yield to the threats” of their parents, and may then be beaten (Special Laws 2.232); the elements obeyed Moses “as a master” and “yielded to his commands”, ταῖς προστάξεσιν ὑπεῖκον (tais prostaxesin hypeikon) (Moses 1.156).

In the last two a person with power stands behind the thing, and that sense is the Greek’s own. “They are rulers, so one must yield”, ἄρχοντές εἰσιν, ὥσθ᾽ ὑπεικτέον (archontes eisin, hōsth᾽ hypeikteon), says the Ajax of Sophocles (Ajax 668). A philosopher’s list of duties sets “yield to rulers”, ἄρχουσιν ὑπείκειν (archousin hypeikein), beside “obey the laws” (pseudo-Plutarch, On the Education of Children 10). And the one line in the survey that has the words of this verse, the verb with ἡγουμένοις (hēgoumenois) in the dative, is of the same kind: the elders of Argos, their king struck down and a tyranny in prospect, ask whether they shall live on “yielding to these defilers of the house as our leaders”, ὑπείξομεν δόμων καταισχυντῆρσι τοῖσδ᾽ ἡγουμένοις (hypeixomen domōn kataischyntērsi toisd᾽ hēgoumenois), and answer that death is better (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1362–65); Liddell and Scott cite the line for “submit to”. That sense settles the force, as Iliad 1.79 did for the first verb.

Koester cites the same 4 Maccabees verse for the sense already noted, viewpoints differing and one party giving way; he calls overstated the rigorous reading of the second verb as the obedience of a servant or child, and prints “yield”. Cockerill, who prints “submit”, finds in the second verb only “a more general expression” that “demonstrates the breadth of the pastor’s vocabulary”, and holds it “a mistake to press the difference between these two imperatives”.

How frequent that sense was can be counted, as it was for the first verb. In the Greek texts searched the verb stands in 186 passages, every one printed in the appendix.³⁶ In forty of them, about one in five, the one yielded to stands above the one who yields: a ruler, a master or the powerful in twenty-two, parents, elders or a teacher in eleven, the gods in seven; and in more than a third of the twenty-two the yielding is refused. Solon made his laws “not yielding to the powerful” (Plutarch, Solon 15.1); Socrates “would yield to no one contrary to what is just”, οὐδ᾽ ἂν ἑνὶ ὑπεικάθοιμι παρὰ τὸ δίκαιον (oud᾽ an heni hypeikathoimi para to dikaion) (Plato, Apology 32a). In twenty-six the two are equals, or it is the higher who gives way. In the rest, nearly two in three, standing is seldom in question: flesh yields to a finger and rock to iron, a line of troops falls back, anger and desire and argument are yielded to or are not. So the sense Lane names is there: one use in five in all, and forty of the sixty-six where someone is yielded to.

What the verb names throughout is giving ground, and what stands against it, in more than a dozen passages of the survey, is a word of resisting: standing firm, straining against, throwing off the rein, as with Haemon’s trees (Antigone 712–14, above). The verse points to the same opposite. A watch kept “with joy and not groaning” is a watch not strained against (“With joy and not groaning” below).

Giving way to a superior is still a sense Thayer records, and these notes do not deny it: one yields to elders, to rulers, to a winter torrent. The ὑπό (hypo) in ὑπείκω (hypeikō) is there: the verb is giving way under pressure. But it is a verb of motion, and the motion is the yielder’s own; subiacere is a verb of position, and the position is beneath the other party. The Greek says who moves. It does not say who is above. In more than a dozen passages of the survey it is the higher party that yields to the lower, or is asked to: the milder counsel in the senate prevails, “yielding to the people”, ὑπείκουσα τῷ δήμῳ (hypeikousa tō dēmō) (Plutarch, Camillus 42.3); a father is asked to yield to his daughters (Oedipus at Colonus 1184, above).

Between equals it is the deference that merit earns. The Athenians of Plato’s funeral speech, which idealises them, are “all brothers born of one mother”, who think it right to be neither slaves nor masters of one another, and whom their equal birth constrains “to yield to one another for nothing but repute for virtue and wisdom”, μηδενὶ ἄλλῳ ὑπείκειν ἀλλήλοις ἢ ἀρετῆς δόξῃ καὶ φρονήσεως (mēdeni allō hypeikein allēlois ē aretēs doxē kai phronēseōs) (Menexenus 239a), as the sons of Mattathias are to yield to one another in whatever each is the better (“The pattern in the translations” above).

Lane’s own commentary is a witness to the same thing. He repeats Laub’s observation about ὑποτάσσεσθαι (hypotassesthai), the verb the New Testament normally uses and Hebrews does not (“The imperative” above); and, following Laub, he holds that nothing in the verse refers to a hierarchical structure or to jurisdiction: the leaders’ authority derives from the word they preach and not from any office. An authority that rests on the word is one that persuades, and giving way to it is what “yield” names. Where Lane prints “submit to their authority”, his own account of that authority is nearer to “yield”.

Westcott’s climb

The strongest objection to the pair is Westcott’s. He read the second verb as going beyond the first: “Obedience to express injunctions is crowned by submission to a wish”; and Ellingworth, who calls ὑπείκετε (hypeikete) “rarer and perhaps stronger”, is of the same mind (both quoted in note 26). If the second verb intensifies the first, then a rendering that softens the first and gives the second a soft-sounding English word would seem to lower the pair twice over where the Greek raises it. And these notes hold that “yield” supplies force that “follow” lacks, which looks like the opposite claim.

The answer is that Westcott is right about the climb and the objection is wrong about what the English words weigh. The climb he describes is one of reach, not of rank: the first verb asks for compliance with what the leaders expressly ask, the second for giving way to what they merely wish, and that is exactly the reach of English “yield”. One follows an instruction; one yields to a wish. Westcott himself, introducing the verse on the same page, gave the second command the word adopted here: the hearers “are charged to obey and yield themselves to those who are still over them”. Bengel had read the climb as reach in 1742: “This is more than to obey. Obey in those things which they command you to do as salutary: submit, even when they seem to demand a little more.” His own Latin for the second verb is concedite, give way, not a verb of subjection.

Nor is “yield” the softer of the two English words in the dimension that matters. Following is going along with what they ask, and where one already agrees it costs nothing; yielding is what one does when one does not necessarily agree and gives way regardless, and it is the harder thing to ask. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, printing “submit” under the King James text, said the same of it: “a matter of dutiful yielding, when your judgment and natural will incline you in an opposite direction”. The pair in English climbs as the pair in Greek climbs, from going along with what they ask to giving ground where one would have stood, and that is the sense in which “yield” carries force “follow” does not. What the rendering declines is the other reading of “stronger”, the one that hears rank in the second verb. The writer had ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) for that, and did not use it (“The verb the writer did not use” above).

Nor was the pair the writer’s invention. Greek sets the first verb beside the second, or beside its simple form, often enough for the pairing to have a colour of its own: being won over and giving way, over against being forced. Sophocles has them in one appeal (“The imperative”), Josephus in one charge (“The pattern in the translations”), and Epictetus sets them side by side in speaking of the gods (“The letter’s register”).

Plato has them where he says how reason governs the world. Reason “rules Necessity by persuading her”, νοῦ δὲ ἀνάγκης ἄρχοντος τῷ πείθειν αὐτήν (nou de anankēs archontos tō peithein autēn) (Timaeus 48a), and the elements were fitted together “so far as the nature of Necessity, willing and persuaded, yielded”, ἡ τῆς ἀνάγκης ἑκοῦσα πεισθεῖσά τε φύσις ὑπεῖκεν (hē tēs anankēs hekousa peistheisa te physis hypeiken) (56c). The rule is real; its manner is persuasion, and what answers it is a willing yielding. Plato’s Laws begin the same way, “persuading some”, and keep force for the dispositions that “do not yield to persuasion”, μὴ ὑπείκοντα πειθοῖ (mē hypeikonta peithoi) (Laws 718b): there the thing yielded to is persuasion itself, and the force kept behind it is named, and it is the lawgiver’s. In Hebrews those who lead hold none; the only loss the verse names is the hearers’ own (“No gain to you” below).

The colour is not the verb’s only one. Homer, who has the pair first, has Achilles refuse both to a king’s commands (Iliad 1.294–96); in Sophocles the Chorus bids Electra πείθου (peithou) when her sister’s counsel is to yield, εἰκαθεῖν (eikathein), “to those in power”, since she has no strength (Electra 1013–15); Aristotle has passion yield “not to argument but to force”, οὐ δοκεῖ λόγῳ ὑπείκειν τὸ πάθος ἀλλὰ βίᾳ (ou dokei logō hypeikein to pathos alla bia) (Nicomachean Ethics 1179b), and the citizen of the Crito must yield to an angry fatherland and “either persuade it or do what it bids”, ἢ πείθειν ἢ ποιεῖν ἃ ἂν κελεύῃ (ē peithein ē poiein ha an keleuē) (51b), with its punishments in view.

Plutarch, writing within a lifetime of the letter, brings Plato’s sentence down from the world to the leading of people. The statesman who opposes the people in everything is harsh, and the one who is dragged along with them is no safer. What saves is “the oversight and steering of men that gives way in turn to those who heed it, grants what pleases and then asks what is useful”, ἡ δὲ ἀνθυπείκουσα πειθομένοις καὶ διδοῦσα τὸ πρὸς χάριν, εἶτα ἀπαιτοῦσα τὸ συμφέρον ἐπιστασία καὶ κυβέρνησις ἀνθρώπων (hē de anthypeikousa peithomenois kai didousa to pros charin, eita apaitousa to sympheron epistasia kai kybernēsis anthrōpōn), since men serve well “if they are not led in everything like a master and by force”, δεσποτικῶς καὶ βιαίως (despotikōs kai biaiōs). That, he adds, is how God is said to govern the world: “not forcing, but bringing Necessity round by persuasion and reason”, οὐ βιαζόμενος, ἀλλὰ πειθοῖ καὶ λόγῳ παράγων τὴν ἀνάγκην (ou biazomenos, alla peithoi kai logō paragōn tēn anankēn) (Phocion 2.4–5).³⁷

His participle is the first verb of this verse, and his yielding is its second in a compound, the leading giving way in its turn: the two words stand on either side of one relation, and what is set against both is force. Plato and Plutarch are not this letter’s sources, and nothing here makes them so. They show how the pairing sounded in literary Greek, which is the Greek the letter is written in (“The letter’s register” above); and Plutarch’s “is said”, λέγεται (legetai), marks the thought as a commonplace by his day. None of this makes the second verb weaker than Westcott found it. It says what kind of strength it has.

“Yield” before now

The choice of “yield” is not new, and it is older than the English. Erasmus glossed the second verb concedite ac deferte, give way and defer, as “The tradition’s word” sets out, and Calvin’s own Latin printed deferte. In English, Ellicott’s commentary, printed under the King James’s own text, made the same choice: it glosses “submit yourselves” with the plain note “Better, yield (to them)”, and goes on: “Besides fulfilling their injunctions, be ready to comply with their wishes and requests”.³⁸ That is Westcott’s climb, read as reach. A Victorian commentary made for readers of “obey” and “submit” thus reaches for exactly the word adopted here, and a century and a quarter later the Anchor Bible translation prints it.

The tradition has since moved further. The New American Bible prints “Obey your leaders and defer to them”, keeping “obey” for the first verb and answering, in the second, the same concern “yield” answers here; the Common English Bible has “defer to them” too. Lünemann’s commentary in the Meyer series renders the pair “Obey your leaders, and yield to them”. Laub’s German is Gehorcht euren Vorstehern und gebt nach, “obey your leaders and give way”, and the New Jerusalem Bible has “give way to them”. Marcus Dods, in the Expositor’s Greek Testament, read the pair the same way: obeying the present leaders and yielding themselves “trustfully” to their teaching, with trust as the manner of the yielding.³⁹ Harris’s exegetical guide (2019) counts the New Jerusalem Bible’s rendering, with the New American Bible’s “defer to them”, as obscuring a sense of “submitting to authority” it takes from the lexicon, whose own glosses for that sense include “give way” (note 30). The survey answers that where authority is present, the context supplies it, since the same verb is used when the higher party gives way to the lower; what the verb contributes is the yielder’s own movement, and “give way” prints that and leaves the standing to the sentence, as the Greek does (“Giving way to a superior” above).

The two commands have each had a section to themselves, because they are the words in dispute. The rest of the sentence follows in the order the Greek gives it.

“Those who lead you”

Τοῖς ἡγουμένοις (Tois hēgoumenois) is a present participle of ἡγέομαι (hēgeomai). The oldest sense is to go in front, to lead the way. From that it comes to mean having charge. The phrase is “the ones leading you”. By the first century the word names rulers outright (Matthew 2:6; Acts 7:10; Sirach 17:17), and in the first century BC it could name the chosen head of a religious guild, taken up below, so nothing rests on that oldest sense.

The Greek phrase is the same in all three verses, and so is the English here. The three verses need not name the same individuals. At 13:7 the hearers are told to remember leaders who spoke the word to them (the tense looks back) and to consider the outcome of their way of life, which is most often taken of leaders who have since died. The leaders of this verse and of verse 24 are the ones at work now. The word says what they do; it names no particular office.

Nor does the letter give its leaders any title of church office: there is no ἐπίσκοπος (episkopos) or διάκονος (diakonos) in it, its only πρεσβύτεροι (presbyteroi) are the people of old (11:2), and its only shepherd is Christ (13:20). Owen, who kept “them that have the rule over you” and defended the authority of the office, said as much of the word itself: it “signifies properly guides or leaders, though usually applied unto them that guide, feed, or lead with authority, or by virtue of office”, and “all the names given by the Holy Ghost unto those who preside in the church are exclusive of rigid authority”. Wesley, printing the same English, noted that the word “implies also, that lead or guide you”.

What the New Testament does with it inside the church is more to the point. At Acts 15:22 it names Judas and Silas as leading men among the brothers, a standing rather than a post. What Luke then shows them doing is speaking: they “encouraged and strengthened the brothers with many words”, διὰ λόγου πολλοῦ παρεκάλεσαν (dia logou pollou parekalesan) (15:32); and at Acts 14:12 Paul is ὁ ἡγούμενος τοῦ λόγου (ho hēgoumenos tou logou), the one who took the lead in speaking. Taken with 13:7, where the leaders are the ones who spoke the word of God, the participle keeps company with speech. At Luke 22:26 the Lord’s own instruction is that ὁ ἡγούμενος (ho hēgoumenos) among his followers is to be as the one who serves: rank being told what it is for. The saying defines him against the other kind. “The kings of the nations lord it over them, κυριεύουσιν (kyrieuousin), and those who hold authority over them, ἐξουσιάζοντες (exousiazontes), are called benefactors. But not so with you” (22:25–26). It is the one place the Lord uses this word, and he uses it to say what the one who leads is not. Matthew gives the same teaching in terms of what the disciples are to be called: “do not be called Rabbi”, μὴ κληθῆτε Ῥαββί (mē klēthēte Rhabbi), “nor be called instructors”, μηδὲ κληθῆτε καθηγηταί (mēde klēthēte kathēgētai), and in place of the title a task: “the greatest among you shall be your servant” (Matthew 23:8–11). The benefactors in Luke are a title of the same kind, εὐεργέται καλοῦνται (euergetai kalountai), “they are called benefactors”. What the Lord refuses his followers is the name; what he gives the one who leads is the work.

The word could also be a title. Between 69 and 58 BC the members of a guild of Zeus Hypsistos in the Fayum set down a law binding on themselves. They had chosen Petesouchos son of Teephbennis as their ἡγούμενος (hēgoumenos) for a year, and the law required that all are to obey the leader and his assistant in the association’s affairs, ὑπακούσειν δὲ πάντας τοῦ τε ἡγουμένου καὶ τοῦ τούτου ὑπηρέτου (hypakousein de pantas tou te hēgoumenou kai tou toutou hypēretou), and forbade any member to leave the leader’s brotherhood for another (P.Lond. VII 2193, lines 10–11 and 14). BDAG sets that guild’s leader, and the heads of priesthoods in the papyri, beside the leaders of this letter, in one sentence on the leaders of religious bodies. Where that rule wanted obedience to a ἡγούμενος (hēgoumenos), it used the plain verb. The letter had the guild’s verb. It uses the ὑπακούω (hypakouō) word group of obedience to God and to the Son (5:8–9; 11:8), and of those who lead the gathering it wrote πείθεσθε (peithesthe) (“The words not chosen”).

Within a generation of Hebrews the word also names church leaders (1 Clement 1:3), a verse taken up under “And yield to them” above and in note 32. “Those who lead you” keeps the functional sense the New Testament gives the word, as Luther’s Lehrern, teachers, did (“The tradition’s word”), without reading a later title back into it.

One of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament has the language of 13:7: “remember night and day the one who speaks the word of God to you”, τοῦ λαλοῦντός σοι τὸν λόγον τοῦ θεοῦ μνησθήσῃ νυκτὸς καὶ ἡμέρας (tou lalountos soi ton logon tou theou mnēsthēsē nyktos kai hēmeras), “and honour him as the Lord, for where the lordship is spoken of, there the Lord is” (Didache 4:1).⁴⁰ The honour is high, and its ground is stated: what is spoken.

The leaders are nonetheless a recognisable group: verse 24 greets “all those who lead you, and all the saints”, and so sets them apart. Across the chapter the word carries work rather than rank: the earlier leaders of 13:7 spoke the word and left a faith worth imitating; the present leaders keep watch over the gathering as those who will answer for it. The verbs the chapter gives them are speaking, watching, answering and groaning, and none of commanding: what they expressly ask, the chapter leaves unnamed, where Clement’s soldiers carry out τὰ ἐπιτασσόμενα (ta epitassomena), “what is commanded” (1 Clement 37:3).

Ὑμῶν (Hymōn), “of you”, ties them to this particular group. Αὐτοί (Autoi), “they themselves”, puts the reason in these people and their work, not in an abstract office. Moffatt hears in the emphatic pronoun a contrast with the other voices the gathering had been listening to, the “various strange teachings” of 13:9: it would grieve their true leaders if the hearers gave way to these, “instead of following men who are really (this is the force of αὐτοί (autoi)) concerned for your highest interests”. Laub reads the pronoun the same way, “no one but they”, against other voices in the gathering, hears in the joy-and-groaning clause the strain of a real dispute, and puts that strain over the strange teachings of 13:9; and from it he takes what the second verb adds: on a weighty question of right faith, “the responsible and binding decision” passes to those who lead, though they have as yet no means of enforcing it (p. 181); Harris calls the pronoun emphatic by syntax and by position, and, following Lane, finds “hints in this v. of a strained relationship between the audience and their leadership”. If that is right, the command is to listen to these voices rather than those, which is the manner of the verb of persuasion exactly, and on the disputed teaching to give way to them, which is what “yield” asks of a hearer who is not yet persuaded. The grammar is with Moffatt: 13:9 and 13:17 are a pair of middle-passive imperatives, as “The imperative” sets out.

The word’s nearest cousin, in the classical corpus, stands in the dative with the first verb of this verse, of a human leader, once, of a chorus and its leader (Dio Chrysostom 14.4), and the earliest Greek exposition of the verse to survive at any length opened on that figure among others: a chorus without its leader, a phalanx without its commander, a ship without its helmsman, a flock without its shepherd (Chrysostom, Homily 34). The verb’s own users reach for the helmsman when they say why one person is persuaded by another: because he is thought the most skilled (Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.3.9; Cyropaedia 1.6.21), as “The letter’s register” set out, or because, together with the crew’s own concord, heeding him is the ship’s one safety (Dio Chrysostom 38.14); and he is the pilot the centurion followed at Acts 27:11. They say the same of a commander: the other generals were persuaded by Clearchus for his sense, not his election (Anabasis 2.2.5).

“Follow those who lead you” may sound circular in English: of course one follows those who are leading. The Greek has the same shape: a compliance verb paired with a leading-participle. One goes along with them because leading is what they are already doing. The apparent redundancy between the verb and its participle is the letter’s own point. Set beside 13:7 and 13:24, the phrase never stands alone: twice it comes with work attached, the word spoken and the watch kept, and once as a group set apart from the saints. The claim on the hearers is the work, not a title.

The New Testament grounds the same claim the same way, and in so many words. Paul asks a gathering “to acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you”, and to “hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work” (1 Thessalonians 5:12–13 NIV). The reason is a single phrase, διὰ τὸ ἔργον αὐτῶν (dia to ergon autōn), “because of their work”, and it holds even where a version hears standing in the middle participle: the ESV has them “over you in the Lord”, and still gives their work as the reason. What Paul asks for is esteem, not following, so the passage bears on the reason and not on the verb. On the reason, it says what αὐτοὶ γάρ (autoi gar) says here. (The verb Paul uses for esteem, ἡγεῖσθαι (hēgeisthai), is the verb behind “those who lead”, in its other sense, to regard; nothing is made of that here.)

None of this denies that the gatherings of the New Testament had leaders, with a real responsibility to care for those gatherings and keep watch over them. The question here is narrower: what Hebrews 13:17 rests their claim on, and what manner of command it gives. It rests the claim on that faithful work, and asks that they be followed and yielded to, not obeyed on command.

The earliest Greek exposition of the verse to survive at any length comes three centuries on, and shows where the reading had gone by then and where it had not. Chrysostom preached on the letter in Greek, by the usual dating during his years as bishop of Constantinople (398–404), in homilies published only after his death. He preached the verse as obedience: the homily opens on the evil of ἀναρχία (anarchia), with the figures named above, and holds that a gathering without a head is a herd without a shepherd. His frame is the ruler and the ruled, ἄρχων (archōn) and ἀρχόμενοι (archomenoi), and the fault he sets against anarchy is ἡ ἀπείθεια τῶν ἀρχομένων (hē apeitheia tōn archomenōn), “the disobedience of the ruled”.

Yet the word he gives the hearers’ part is the verb’s own, three times over, and once an adjective of its family: a people “not persuaded by its ruler”, ἄρχοντι μὴ πειθόμενος (archonti mē peithomenos); “what if he is wicked, and we are not persuaded?”, μὴ πειθώμεθα (mē peithōmetha); “and you will not be persuaded?”, οὐ βούλει πείθεσθαι (ou boulei peithesthai); the ruled must be πειθήνιοι (peithēnioi), compliant. In the whole exposition of the verse he does not once reach for ὑπακούω (hypakouō) or ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō). A native speaker preaching the verse as rule still kept its verb; Clement, wanting subjection, had changed it.

Theodoret, expounding the letter a generation after Chrysostom, did supply the plain verb: the writer “exhorts the disciples to obey the teachers”, ὑπακούειν τοῖς διδασκάλοις (hypakouein tois didaskalois), and “at the same time roused the teachers too to greater eagerness, for he teaches them to keep watch and to dread the audit”, τὰς εὐθύνας (tas euthynas). It is the ordinary verb for obeying, not Clement’s verb of subjection; and the parties he names are not ruler and ruled, as Chrysostom’s were, but disciples, τοῖς μαθηταῖς (tois mathētais), and their teachers, the word Luther’s Lehrern would give the leaders (“The tradition’s word”). He re-words the writer’s verbs elsewhere too, the plain verb among them: at 11:8, where the writer says Abraham obeyed, ὑπήκουσεν (hypēkousen), Theodoret says he believed the one who called him and followed, ἠκολούθησεν (ēkolouthēsen). A paraphrase restates the verse’s force, conceded under “The imperative”, in its own words; the writer had this plain verb in the letter, used it of obedience to God and to the Son, and did not use it here (“The words not chosen”).

Chrysostom still allowed no following where the faith itself is corrupted: if the leader is wicked “in regard to Faith, flee and avoid him; not only if he be a man, but even if he be an angel come down from Heaven”.⁴¹ So far the limit is one the letter makes room for (its leaders are those who spoke the word of God, 13:7, and its next warning is against strange teachings, 13:9): a native hearer of πείθεσθε (peithesthe) did not take the command as unconditional, and where the work is betrayed the claim lapses.

But he drew the limit there and no wider. He read the command as resting on 13:7 (“having said above, whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation, he then said, Obey”), and therefore on leaders already commended, the premise these notes work from too. Where the fault lay in a leader’s life, though, he told his hearers not to be over-curious, and that he took not from Hebrews but from Matthew 23:2–3. The verse he had just quoted asks the hearers to consider the outcome of their leaders’ way of life; his rule for the leader whose life fails is to “attend, not to their life, but to their words”. Set beside 1 Clement (taken up under “And yield to them” above), it is the same move again.

Within a generation of the letter, the subjection verb the writer had not used was put into his phrase; three centuries on, the verse was being preached as obedience with its limit drawn at doctrine alone, and a generation after that it was paraphrased with the plain verb for obeying. All three are reception, and reception is not what the writer chose (“The verb the next generation supplied” above). His choice is in his words, examined under “Follow those who lead you” and “And yield to them”.⁴²

“They themselves keep watch over your lives”

Ἀγρυπνοῦσιν (Agrypnousin) is built on a word meaning “sleepless”. Classically it can mean to lie awake. In use it commonly means to stay alert, to keep watch. Mark 13:33, Luke 21:36 and Ephesians 6:18 use it that way, without requiring that anyone is literally awake through the night. With ὑπέρ (hyper), the watch is kept for someone. The lexica put this verse on the side of care: BDAG gives one sense of the verb for the watchfulness of Mark 13:33 and Luke 21:36, being on guard in the face of danger, and files ἀγρυπνεῖν ὑπὲρ τῶν ψυχῶν ὑμῶν (agrypnein hyper tōn psychōn hymōn) under another: “to be alertly concerned about, look after, care for”. The fair pictures are a shepherd and a night-watch. “Keep watch” is as much as the usage will carry.

The preposition needs a word of its own. Ὑπέρ (Hyper) here is “for”, on behalf of: the watch is kept for the hearers’ sake, and nothing in the Greek places the watchers above them. English “over” in “watch over” is the idiom’s word and not a rank: one watches over a sleeping child or a flock, and the “over” is where the watcher stands, not what the watcher is. “Watch for”, Lane’s choice and Laub’s suggestion before him, carries the preposition, but English also watches for what it expects to appear, a ship or a signal, and “keep watch for your lives” can be heard that way; “on your behalf” would carry it and drop the picture. “Keep watch over” is kept because in English it is the phrase of care, and the rank taken out of the two commands above is not in it. But the Greek says “for”, and a reader who hears rank in “over” is hearing the English, not the letter.

Koester’s translation takes the preposition so, “keeping watch for the sake of your souls”, and his note adds that ἀγρυπνεῖν (agrypnein) is not a technical term for the oversight of a community, in contrast to ἐπισκοπεῖν (episkopein): the word for oversight existed, and this is not it.

And the one time this letter uses the verb of oversight, it gives it to everyone: ἐπισκοποῦντες (episkopountes), “see to it that no one falls short of the grace of God” (12:15), is said to the whole gathering. The letter’s other verbs of care run the same way: “see to it, brothers, that there is not in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart… but exhort one another every day” (3:12–13); “let us consider one another, to stir up love and good works… encouraging one another” (10:24–25). Exhorting, παρακαλεῖν (parakalein), is the letter’s word for what it is doing itself (13:22), and it gives that work to everyone. The leaders’ watch is that common work carried by particular people, not a different kind of thing.

Moffatt’s parallel for the phrase is Epictetus’s Cynic, whose right to rebuke comes not from bodyguards and arms, as a king’s does, but from his conscience, when he knows “that he has kept watch on behalf of human beings”, ὑπερηγρύπνηκεν ὑπὲρ ἀνθρώπων (hyperēgrypnēken hyper anthrōpōn) (Discourses 3.22.94–95).

Chrysostom drew the picture the watch implies: the leader who is despised ought not to avenge himself, “for neither is it possible for the physician, despised by his patient, to avenge himself, but to weep and lament”; that groaning, he goes on, is itself his great vengeance, ἡ πολλὴ ἄμυνα (hē pollē amyna), and worse than any, ὁ γὰρ στεναγμὸς πάσης ἀμύνης χείρων (ho gar stenagmos pasēs amynēs cheirōn), because God takes it up against the hearer (Homily 34). The physician is the figure the verb’s own users reach for when they say what being persuaded by a person is, as “The letter’s register” shows (Epictetus 2.15.15; Xenophon, Apology 20).

Ψυχή (Psychē) starts from breath: the living self. The Greek Old Testament almost always uses it for Hebrew nephesh: life, person, the inner living being. First-century Greek can also use ψυχή (psychē) for a separable soul (Wisdom 3:1; Matthew 10:28). “Lives” is used here because of how this letter uses the word, not because that other sense was unavailable.

In this letter the word has weight beyond ordinary wellbeing. Hebrews names ψυχή (psychē) with πνεῦμα (pneuma) at 4:12, as the depth of the person the word of God pierces, and calls hope an anchor of the ψυχή (psychē) at 6:19. At 10:39 it sets the keeping of the ψυχή (psychē) against shrinking back to destruction, and at 12:3 it warns the hearers against growing weary and giving out in their ψυχαί (psychai). The leaders’ watch is over the hearers as people whose standing before God can be kept or lost.

That spiritual weight is why traditional versions relied on “souls”, but the word falls short today. “Lives” is chosen because the letter’s concern in this sentence is the whole person holding on or shrinking back, not a detachable, ethereal part of them.⁴³ The rendering is not alone: the Complete Jewish Bible also prints “your lives” in this verse.

The choice has a cost. “Keep watch over your lives” can be heard in English of bodily safety, a watch kept by guards, and the letter’s weight, the self that can be kept or lost, comes through in “lives” only for a reader with 10:39 in mind. The alternatives cost more: “souls” imports the separable soul; the New International Version, in 1984 and 2011 alike, lets the noun go entirely, its leaders simply “keep watch over you”; the Common English Bible’s “your whole being” explains where the Greek names. “Lives” is kept as the least loss, not as no loss.

“As those who will have to render an account”

Λόγον ἀποδώσοντες (Logon apodōsontes) is a fixed phrase: hand in the reckoning, produce the account. It is the language of stewards and officials. Luke 16:2 uses the same idiom of the steward who must give the account of his management. The future participle marks these leaders as people who are going to have to do that with the lives entrusted to them. Lane takes ὡς (hōs) with the future participle as avowed purpose rather than obligation, “as those who intend to give an account”. That construction presents the reckoning as the leaders’ own expectation, and either English can carry it. The ESV and Koester, like the rendering here, keep the obligation, which the steward’s phrase carries whatever the particle adds.

It might be said that whoever must give account of people must have charge of them: the steward of another parable is set over the household (Luke 12:42). The verse names their charge, and it is a watch: what they will answer for is lives they have kept watch over. The Old Testament figure who keeps watch and answers for lives is Ezekiel’s watchman (3:17–21; 33:1–9), and his account is drawn narrowly: he answers for whether he warned, never for whether he was heeded. If he warns and the hearer does not turn, the watchman has delivered his own life (33:9), and of the one who hears the trumpet and takes no warning, “his blood shall be upon himself” (33:5). His instrument is a warning, his account is for giving it, and the loss for not heeding falls on the hearer: the shape of this verse clause by clause, down to “no gain to you”. The likeness is of picture and not of wording; the verb of this verse is not in those chapters.⁴⁴

“So that they may keep that watch with joy and not groaning”

The ἵνα (hina) clause states the aim of the two opening commands. Westcott and Moffatt read it so: the clause goes back to πείθεσθε (peithesthe) … ὑπείκετε (hypeikete), and what lies between is parenthetical. Lane reads the ἵνα (hina) as imperatival instead, “let them do this”. That would print “let them” where this rendering prints “so that”, but it does not change what the clause asks for: either way, an unresisted watch.

Τοῦτο (Touto), “this”, most naturally resumes the main verb, the watching. The words about the account stand nearer, but they are subordinate to the main verb. The rendering fixes τοῦτο (touto) there, “keep that watch”, where most versions keep the bare “this” and leave the reader to attach it. The verb is a present subjunctive, imperfective in aspect: it presents the doing as ongoing without placing it in time, which suits the continuing watch better than a single future audit, though aspect alone would not settle it.

Some take it instead as the rendering of the account: Vaughan, and Lane, who cites a close parallel in the Shepherd of Hermas, where the Church, speaking to its leaders, asks them to be at peace among themselves so that she may stand joyfully before the Father and give account of them all (Vision 3.9.10). The parallel is real evidence for that reading.

Against the account reading, Dods observed that ἀλυσιτελές (alysiteles) would be far too mild a word for a bad audit: a leader groaning as he hands in his account is not merely “no gain” to the hearers. Koester, who takes τοῦτο (touto) with the account, answers him: the word is understated, he says, and the consequences are terrifying (10:31; 12:29). If Koester is right, a mild word does not rule out a bad audit, and the reading adopted here cannot lean on Dods alone.

It rests on the syntax set out above, and more lightly on the aspect. It is also the older reading and the more common one. Bengel fixed τοῦτο (touto) on the watching in 1742; Alford argued it from the present tense of ποιῶσιν (poiōsin), as this section argues it from the aspect; Westcott, Dods, Moffatt and Ellingworth read it so, and so, as Koester reports, does Hegermann.⁴⁵

The rendering could have left the choice open with the Greek’s bare “this”, as most versions do. It resolves it, because a translation that argues for a reading in its notes and withholds it from its text is asking the notes to do the text’s work. The choice is one the Greek allows rather than one it forces, and a reader who prefers the account loses nothing of the aim, which either way is an unresisted watch.

Στενάζοντες (Stenazontes) is groaning, under strain or grief. Dods caught what the strain is here: “the groaning with which one resumes a thankless task, and with which he contemplates unappreciated and even opposed work”. The gathering is told to follow and yield so that the watch can be done with gladness rather than with that sound. Chrysostom, whose weeping physician is quoted above, read it so, and drew the consequence: “the despised ruler ought not to avenge himself, but his great revenge is to weep and lament” (Homily 34); and if the leader laments, he goes on, God avenges. The sanction he heard is God’s, not the leaders’: the leader has nothing to bring against the hearer but his groaning.

Where the Greek surveyed here puts a penalty behind the verse’s first verb, it names it: Josephus names it of the high priest (Against Apion 2.193–94, quoted under “The letter’s register”), and Plato’s law-code names death (Laws 955d). Hebrews 13:17 names none: only the hearers’ own loss, and the leaders’ groaning. Moffatt, who printed “obey”, drew the same contrast at this verse: the writer “does not threaten penalties for disobedience, however, as Josephus does”.

“For that is no gain to you”

Ἀλυσιτελές (Alysiteles) means not paying the costs, bringing no return. It is commercial language, and Liddell and Scott give no more than that: unprofitable. “No gain to you” keeps the ledger in view. That the word is understatement, a mild word for something worse, is an old reading and not only this page’s: Thayer’s lexicon prints it at this verse, “by litotes, hurtful, pernicious”, and Moffatt, who takes τοῦτο (touto) with the watch as these notes do, calls the last four words “a rhetorical litotes”. The reading is adopted here because a letter this concerned with falling away does not name a cost lightly, and Koester makes it in so many words: “understated”, since the consequences of unfaithfulness are terrifying (10:31; 12:29), as quoted under “So that they may keep that watch”. Koester reads the understatement with the account, these notes with the watch; the understatement is the same either way, which is why Dods’s argument there cannot carry the τοῦτο (touto) question alone. On this reading a resisted watch does not profit the hearers, and it likely costs them.⁴⁶

The reasoning has a parallel in the letter’s century. Epictetus asks who is master on a ship: the pilot, “because the one who disobeys him is penalised”, ὅτι ὁ ἀπειθῶν αὐτῷ ζημιοῦται (hoti ho apeithōn autō zēmioutai); the expert rules the inexpert on every subject, and the sanction is the disobeyer’s own loss (Discourses 4.1.117–118). Xenophon’s Socrates reasons the same way of a ruler who will not be persuaded by good counsel: a penalty lies on him, and it is the penalty of his own error (Memorabilia 3.9.12); for rulers, he holds, are not those who hold the sceptre or have seized power, but those who know how to rule (3.9.10). That is the shape of 13:17: an authority that rests on what its holders know and do, enforced by nothing but what the hearers stand to lose.

Read with the notes behind it, the sentence says this:

Follow the people who lead you, and yield to them. They themselves keep watch over your lives, the selves that in this letter can be kept or lost, as those who will have to hand in a steward’s account. Follow and yield so that they can do that watching with joy and not with groaning. A resisted watch is no gain to you.

The reason given is not a title. It is the work these people are already doing, and the reckoning they will have to give of it.

Where a lexicon, a dictionary or a commentary is cited, the source is named here. Scripture and classical references stay in the text. Where a Greek passage is given in this page’s own words, πείθεσθαι (peithesthai) is rendered for its scene: most often “be persuaded by”, and never “obey” where the scene is counsel; where a published translation is quoted, it is named. The standard English translations of the classical authors commonly print “obey” for the verb, which is the choice these notes examine. The searches behind the counts are published hit by hit, 1,156 rows in 47 tables, in the usage survey, an appendix to this page.