7.7–25 is telling the story of Israel in relation to the law. The character Paul refers to as ‘I’ is the whole people of Israel, from before the giving of the law, through that moment and on to Paul’s own day. This rhetorical device of the ‘I’ enables Paul to tell this large, complex story as his own – which indeed it is, albeit seen now in retrospect – rather than distancing himself from the problem, and from the people of Israel, by saying ‘they’ or ‘them’. One important result of this is that we would be mistaken to probe the chapter for elements of ‘Paul’s spiritual autobiography’. That’s
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