1 John 5:15

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Jun 9 07:16:46 EDT 2002


At 5:44 AM +0100 6/9/02, David Thiele wrote:
>Daniel,
>
>Try this for a hypothetical example:  hO QEOS AKOUEI
>THN PROSEUXHN TOU PETROU.  If I've done that right it
>translates as "God heard the prayer of Peter".
>PROSEUXH is accusative; PETROS is genetive.  When that
>statement is abbreviated you can get this: hO QEOS
>AKOUEI TOU PETROU = God heard Peter.

Quite apart from the admittedly erroneous "heard" for AKOUEI, this is a bit
misleading in that it suggests that hO QEOUS DKOUEI TOU PETROU is an
abbreviated form of hO QEOS AKOUEI THN PROSEUCHN TOU PETROU or hO QEOS
AKOUEI THN TOU PETROU PROSEUCHN, wherein TOU PETROU is a genitive dependent
upon the direct object noun in the accusative, THN PROSEUCHN. But that's
not the case: TOU PETROU is not a "possessive" genitive implicitly
dependent upon any accusative direct object. Rather AKOUW, like several
other verb of perception, notably AISQANOMAI, GEUOMAI, takes a genitive
object, probably originally a partitive genitive. That's more or less
regular in earlier Greek; in Koine I think the accusative is being used
more frequently than earlier, but the genitive is still quite common. So
one should avoid the assumption that this genitive direct object is an
abbreviated "possessive" expression with an implicit accusative direct
object.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
Most months:: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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