[B-Greek] AFISTAMAI or AFISTHMI
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Mar 28 08:18:51 EST 2004
At 5:02 AM -0800 3/28/04, Eddie Mishoe wrote:
>I've run across AFISTHMI several times in Culy/Parsons
>Acts but the UBS dictionary seems to relate it to
>AFISTAMAI. Is there any difference between these two?
>
>Also, I've been led to believe that AFISTAMAI denoted
>a religious or military apostasy, while Luke is
>comfortable using AFISTHMI as a simple "left" or
>"departed" without any such implication in some
>passages. I'm inclined to see AFISTHMI as a verb
>denoting "departing" regardless of which context it is
>used in, or to ask it another way, does this word
>denote a certain kind of departure?
(1) You should be careful to distinguish between the active AFISTHMI (aor.
APESTHSA) and the middle AFISTAMAI (aor. APESTHN). The active verb means
"cause to move from a settled position"--it's regularly causative; the
middle verb means "move (oneself) from a settled position"--whether that's
in a concrete sense of a place where one is temporarily settled ("leave,
depart") or in a metaphorical sense of a stance or belief-status ("recant,
desert").
The verb appears 5 times in Acts (5:37, 38, 12:10, 15:38, 19:9, 22:29. Only
the first of these APESTHSEN in 5:37 is active (caused to rebel), the rest
are all intransitive in the aorist; although a parser will give you the
lemma (or dictionary heading) as AFISTHMI, you must nevertheless realize
that all of these aorists in APOSTH/APOSTA are intransitive and correspond
to the present middle AFISTAMAI.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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