stoicheion

Greek used this word for a letter of the alphabet, then for the opening lessons of any field of study. A student of music began with the basics of music, a student of geometry with the basics of geometry. The picture is of the small, plain building blocks you are handed before you can handle anything demanding.

Hebrews uses it as a rebuke. By now the readers ought to be the teachers, and instead someone still has to walk them through the first lessons of God's word. The writer drives it home with a second picture in the same breath: they are still on milk rather than solid food.

A close neighbor sits right beside it in that verse, the word for a beginning or a first place (ἀρχή). That word names where something starts. This one names the plain pieces a beginner actually works through.

Ancient writers spoke of the world as built out of a few basic substances: earth, water, air and fire. When a Greek writer used this word of the world rather than of a school subject, that is usually what he meant, the raw material of everything there is.

Second Peter puts it in a picture of the end. The heavens pass away with a roar, the elements catch fire and dissolve, and the earth and everything done on it is laid bare. Whatever exactly is burning, the point is that the fabric of the world is not permanent, and that this ought to change how people live now.

What the word points to here is genuinely argued. Some scholars read the four substances just described. Others notice that the verse pairs the word with the heavens passing away and take it of the sun, moon and stars. English versions divide the same way, some printing "elements" and others "heavenly bodies".

Paul uses this word inside a set phrase, "the elements of the world," and it is one of the most argued phrases in his letters. What he says about them is plain enough. People were held in servitude under them. They are weak and poor. Going back to them is going backwards. Dying with Christ means dying away from them. What they actually are is far from plain.

Three readings are alive:

• Some take them as the physical stuff of the world, so that the old religion tied people to the created order rather than to its Maker.
• Some take them as spirit powers that ruled the world, which fits the way Colossians goes on to speak of rulers and authorities (ἐξουσία) that Christ stripped and paraded in public.
• Some take them as the basic religious rules that both Jews and Gentiles lived under, since Colossians sets the phrase beside human tradition and Galatians goes straight on to the keeping of days, months, seasons and years.

The readings are closer in practical effect than they look. On all of them Paul is saying that the religious life the Galatians want to return to belongs to a world Christ has already broken them out of, so going back is slavery rather than progress.