Consider is the verb that was translated “take heed” in verse 12, but the context gives a quite different meaning. Here no warning is involved; Paul is just asking the readers to give special attention. One may also express this as “Think about.”

The people of Israel is literally “Israel according to the flesh” but has no unfavorable meaning here. Paul adds the words “according to the flesh” because he thought of the church as fulfilling God’s promises to Israel, and therefore as being, in a sense, the true or spiritual Israel. So he needed an expression, here as in Rom 9.4, to speak of non-Christian Jews. Today there is little danger of confusing Israel with the church. For this reason Revised Standard Version and Good News Bible omit the words “according to the flesh.” Modern translators could render this as “the Jewish people,” as Bijbel in Gewone Taal has done. Barclay has “Look at actual Jewish practice and belief,” and Revised English Bible has “Jewish practice,” which fits the context well.

The second part of the verse, from those who eat …, begins a series of rhetorical questions. There are four of them, according to the UBS Greek text and the punctuation. Revised Standard Version translates the first as a question and Good News Bible renders it as a statement. As in verse 16, Paul is appealing to well-known facts and common beliefs. The sentence is concise and may need to be expanded in translation. For example, “those who eat the sacrifices share with one another in the sacrifice to God made on the altar.” When an animal was sacrificed by the Hebrews to God, part of it was burned on the altar, and part of it was eaten by the people who were performing this act of worship. The underlying thought, then, is that by sharing in the sacrificial meal, Jewish worshipers enter into a relationship with God that also unites them with one another. Paul’s readers would know, of course, that although some sacrifices had to be burnt whole, there were others that priests, Levites, and even ordinary people could share by eating part of the flesh (see Lev 10.12-15; Deut 18.1-4).

Quoted with permission from Ellingworth, Paul and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, 2nd edition. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1985/1994. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .