Reflections on Rom 7:7-25 – Part 3

Thesis 3: The “I” is a composite character.

There are echoes of Adam, Israel, and especially God-fearers who tried to live under the law but see in hindsight that they had always failed to keep it. To begin with, there are some striking parallels between Genesis 2–3 and Rom 7:7-25. For instance: “The serpent deceived me, and I ate” (Gen 3:13) and “sin … deceived me and through it killed me” (Rom 7:11). The sequence of sin leading to death (Rom 7:9-11) reflects the introduction of death with the “Fall” of Adam (Gen 3:19). These parallels show that the experience of the “I,” who is deceived into sin leading to death, recapitulates the experience of Adam in the Garden of Eden. At a bare minimum we could confidently affirm that the subject of the speech has discovered within themselves the dark vestiges of the Adamic-self. In addition, the “I” language of Rom 7:7-25 might represent Israel under the law. The anxiety of the speaker is reminiscent of the Psalms where the Psalmist oscillates between the “I” and “Israel” as the subject of the Psalm (e.g., Pss 130, 131). The phrase “you shall not covet” is a clear allusion to the Decalogue (Exod 20:17; Deut 5:18) and evokes the image of Israel’s reception of the law. So Rom 7:7-25 may well have as its subject the position of the Jew under the law, becoming gradually or latently aware their inability to obey the law. Finally, given Paul’s Gentile audience, perhaps Paul is trying to get the Roman Christians, who were drawn mainly from the ranks of God-fearers, to reflect on how, from the vantage point of faith, they can now see that their prior life under the law was a continuous moral struggle where they were never able to arrive at a sense of assurance that they were right with God and belonged to God’s people. The law was able to remind them of their sin but unable to redeem them from it. A Gentile God-fearer seems a very likely candidate for the “I” considering the fact that the speaker refers to a time when he did not “know” the law (vv. 7-8), a time when he was “alive apart from the law” (v. 9), and only later did the commandments come and make him cognizant of his sinful desires (vv. 9-10). With respect to the identity of the speaker then, as Tobin avers, it is most naturally identified as one of the Roman Gentile Christians, who came to know the law through their association with local synagogues, and Paul verbalizes how he imagines their prior experience of the law now looks to them. Whereby, “The speaker is describing the situation of someone in whom Paul thinks the Gentile Roman Christians will see themselves and their own experience of trying to observe the commandments of the law” and “Paul uses the speech-in-character to illustrate something he hopes the Roman Christians will see reflected in their own experience so that, through seeing this reflection they come to understand how the law can be both good yet limited and something by which believers in Christ are no longer bound.”