John 6:35

c stirling bartholomew cc.constantine at worldnet.att.net
Sat Aug 24 16:30:04 EDT 2002


Greetings Nick,

Thanks for the helpful insight on parallelism. The point about altering verb
patterns in Hebrew poetry is clearly significant for reading and
understanding the LXX.

on 8/24/02 10:48 AM, nick lunn wrote:

> 2. Another possible, and perhaps more likely, explanation, which
> really has little to do with Greek, would be an appeal to Hebrew
> parallelism. Several commentaries take these words as a parallelism.
> Jesus does not really intend to make a distinction between the
> hungering and the thirst - the two clauses make a single semantic
> unit. It is a common feature of such Hebrew parallelism that the verb
> form will vary in the second line. A typical example of this is Psalm
> 2:1, 'Why do the nations rage (qatal); and the peoples imagine
> (yiqtol) a vain thing?'

On the other hand note:

HAB. 3:12 EN APEILHi OLIGWSEIS GHN KAI EN QUMWi KATAXEIS EQNH

where OLIGWSEIS and KATAXEIS both render a qal imperfect 2-m-s. So it
appears that Hebrew parallelism can be used to argue both ways in regards to
the text of Jn 6:35. However, many of the scribes, not having read R. Buth's
article, would be unlikely to understand the important issue you have
raised. And the temptation would be in the direction of correcting the verbs
to have matching forms.


> There is a whole article on this by Randy Buth, entitled 'Taxonomy and
> Function of Hebrew Tense-Shifting', START 15, 1986. (START used to be
> published by SIL/Wycliffe Bible Translators).

Like the scribes, I have not read this article.

thanks and greetings,

Clay

--  
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062





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