Romans 3
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1 Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the benefit of circumcision? 2 Great in every respect. First of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God.
The natural question, after Paul has lumped everyone into the category of being sinners, and proving that even the outward does not matter as it is what happens on the inside, is what advantage there is to being a Jew. Why would anyone then want to be a Jew? Secondly, what is the physical benefit of circumcision. He is asking what the advantage is of having the ancestry of a Jew. Why would God even choose a race of people of things are the way he just described them in . He answers that it is much in every respect. In other words, in every area that it touches, having the ancestry of a Jew has much advantage. The word “advantage” is περισσὸν, which BDAG says means, “pert. to that which is not ordinarily encountered, extraordinary, remarkable” [1].
First of all, it really is extraordinary, and it really is an great advantage that they were entrusted with the oracles/words/sayings of God. This occurred in and onward when Moses went to the top of Mt. Sinai with Aaron:
1 Then God spoke all these words, saying,
It was to them that the Word of God came, and not to anyone else.
[1] William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 805.