Gnomic Aorist / Heb 7:2a

Mark Wilson emory2oo2 at hotmail.com
Sun Dec 10 12:12:55 EST 2000



David:

You wrote:

>That was my inconclusive "feeling" about it...  So, had the author
>wanted to express Whitehead's "immortality of past objective fact", what
>would he/she have used, the imperfect? Or is it at all possible to
>express this with the aorist?


The "gnomic" of any tense is not morphologically encoded. To me, referring 
to a "Gnomic Aorist" seems awkward, and perhaps unintentionally misleading 
to those with little (like myself) or no Greek. I think we should refer to 
this as something like: "Gnomic Verbal Idea."

What determines the gnomic sense is the context (this is larger than just 
the verbal idea). I think Carl's examples of the gnomic were right on; in 
each instance the context suggested the gnomic sense, not the morpheme.

This is a guess on my part, but I would think that the "immortality of past 
objective fact" would be expressed by the Aorist form, but not by itself. 
That is, I would think that CONTEXT (subject matter, other deictic 
indicators) must contribute to this sense. And it seems to me that the 
Aorist + context expresses this idea quite frequently, am I right Carl?

Kimmo mentioned the difference between the Aorist form and the Present form 
as denoting Perfective and Imperfective aspects. What occurs to me is that 
some words, by virtue of their lexical aspect, may not be used in a 
particular grammatical aspect. For example, I would imagine that "died" 
would not be used in an Past Imperfective sense. (We would not portray 
someone who was died-ing.)

Carl, can you tell I've been reading Mari?  :o )
(In fact, I'm off the Emory today. Reading her book saves
me about $80.00)

Thank you,

Mark Wilson



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