Paul includes in the stoicheia of the world “on the one side the Torah with its statutes (4:3–5 …), and then on the other side the world of false gods whom the recipients [of his letter] once served, 4:8f.”123 On this understanding, the elements of the world can “cover all the things in which man places his trust apart from the living God revealed in Christ; they become his gods, and he becomes their slave.”124 This interpretation is preferred here, if only provisionally and in full recognition that