Romans 9:3 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

That myself were accursed, &c.— That I myself were to be devoted to death [or made a sacrifice] after the example of Christ. Pere Simon has it, For the sake of Christ:—Propter Christum. But the first is preferable. See also Dr. Waterland's Sermons, vol. 1: p. 77. The word rendered accursed is 'Αναθεμα, by which the LXX translate the Hebrew word חרם cherem, which signifies "persons or things devoted to destruction and extermination." The Jewish nation were now an anathema, destined to destruction. St. Paul, to express his affection to them, says, he could wish, to save them from it, to become an anathema, and be destroyed himself. Elsner, with Dr. Clarke, joins 'Απο του Χριστου with Ηυχομην, I could wish, or desire from, or of Christ, that, &c. And he shews well, as has been frequently done, how very absurd it would be to suppose that the Apostle meant, that he could be content to be delivered over to everlasting misery for the good of others. "I am so far from taking pleasure," says the Apostle, "in the rejection of the Jewish nation, that on the contrary it gives me continual pain to think of it; insomuch, that [as Moses formerly when God proposed to cut them off, and in their stead to make of him a great nation, begged that he himself might rather die, than the children of Israel be destroyed, so] I could even wish that the exclusion from the visible church, which will happen to the Jewish nation, might fall to my own share, if thereby they might be kept in it." See Locke, and Grotius, and the note on Exodus 32:32; Exodus 32:35.