Though perennially popular as devotional reading, the Letter to the Hebrews has always been problematic for interpreters. It is interesting to compare the epithets with which commentators of quite different viewpoints describe it: a ‘riddle’, an enigma', a ‘lonely and impressive phenomenon’, ‘as solitary and mysterious as Melchizedek upon whom its argument turns’; but also ‘a little masterpiece of religious thought’ which ‘rises like a massive column, a soaring grandeur of faith in the edifice of first-century Christianity’; ‘an unknown text’ which yet discloses ‘the beating of a Jewish-Christian heart’. Contradictory and unignorable, there is about the book something complete, ‘perfect’ in its own sense of the word, and therefore enigmatic: standing somewhat apart from the New Testament as a whole and contriving to treat even common New Testament topics in its own terms; combining anonymity with an unquestionable air of authority; seeming always to be concealing more than it discloses. Perhaps that is why, though widely read in the early church, it did not receive clear recognition in the canon till the fourth century.

The aim of this study is to demonstrate that ways into an understanding of this book with all its strangeness may be provided by the social sciences, especially structuralist methods as they have been developed in linguistics, literary theory and, most particularly, anthropology.