Ephesians 5:31 - "cleave to"
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Jul 30 07:21:38 EDT 1998
At 7:21 PM -0500 7/29/98, Eric Weiss wrote:
>Why is PROSKOLLAW in the future passive - "will be joined to his wife" -
>here in Ephesians 5:31, quoting from the Septuagint of Genesis 2:24,
>when the Hebrew is active, i.e., "will cleave to"? This is a Septuagint
>translation question rather than an Ephesians translation question. Is
>this an instance of the Septuagint translators using a "divine passive"?
>If so, are there frequent LXX instances of such?
After carefully checking LSJ (on Perseus, not the new one with the Glare
appendix), I find that the particular sense of "cleave to"--or as my wife,
perhaps from old-time Appalachian mountain dialect, says, "be stuck fast
to" ("Carl's stuck fast to the computer again")--I find that not only
PROSKOLLAW but even KOLLAW appears especially in "passive" morphology in
this distinct sense (pardon the anacoluthon, please).
I rather think that this is an instance of the distinctive middle/reflexive
sense of which I have written before and intend to write again sooner or
later: the verb takes this middle/reflexive form that ought NOT to be
understood as a PASSIVE ("divine" or otherwise--I think I've said before
that I think this particular category of "divine passive" belongs in the
same basket as the philosophy major's determination to call "philosopher's
fatigue" the aetiological reference to "God" in explanations of phenomena);
rather they are like German "es handelt sich um ..." and Spanish "aquí se
habla español" and French "il s'agit de ...": some of these expressions are
impersonal, yet they take a quasi personal subject. In English perhaps they
come closest to those stative expressions using the verb "be" with a
participle so that they look passive but aren't really, e.g. "That field is
prepared for planting"--meaning, of course, NOT that the field is IN
PROCESS of being prepared, but that it is IN A STATE of preparedness. In my
review of LSJ listings for this sense I found it in the middle/reflexive or
"passive" aorist & future morphology in Plato, Herodotus, and, one of the
most striking instances of all, in Aeschylus' _Agamemnon_, where it is said
of the whole lineage of Tantalus:
GENOS KEKOLLHTAI PROS ATAi "The clan is stuck fast upon doom."
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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