[B-Greek] Ephesians 5.14 EGEIRE
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Feb 11 17:41:39 EST 2005
At 12:25 PM -0800 2/11/05, CJ Armstrong wrote:
>Dear B-Greekers:
>
>What I'm sure is a very simple lexical question struck me in preparing the
>text of Eph 5.8-14. It's the last part of 14: DIO LEGEI EGEIRE, hO
>KAQEUDWN, KAI ANASTA EK TWN NEKRWN, KAI EPIFAUSEI SOI hO CRISTOS.
>Specifically, I'm interested in your thoughts on the pres act impv use of
>EGEIRE. Of course the context demands some kind of intransitive, parallel
>to ANASTA, but I'm just tripping over a verb I want to make transitive, or
>at least ambiguous. I must admit, I've not yet checked BAGD on its
>intransitive use in the NT, nor have I attempted to search the BGreek
>archives yet, but your direction would be appreciated.
And there's old friend and colleague CJ again, and asking about something
I've had my eyes on for some time. The verb commonly lemmatized as EGEIRW
should perhaps actually be lemmatized in the middle as EGEIROMAI inasmuch
as this intransitive middle is the fundamental form of the verb "arise,
wake up", while the active EGEIRW is more the causative: "raise, awaken."
There are 20 imperative forms of this verb: 3x 2pl middle: EGEIRESQE, 1x
2sg passive EGERQHTI and 1x spl passive EGERQHTE. I'd argue that these
middle and passive forms are identical in meaning: "wake up" or "rise up."
But there are 15x present active imperatives; of these 1 is causative 1 pl
pr imptv EGEIRETE (NEKROUS EGEIRETE, Mt 10:8), but the other 15 are all 2
sg. active EGEIRE. Curiously all of these are intransitive and seem almost
adverbial commands: "Up"--it seems an idiomatic usage, like IDOU for
"voilà" "take a gander!" although EIDON normally has active forms, or like
DEURO which is properly not a verb-form at all but an adverb, "Here! Come
here!"
--
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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