[B-Greek] Ephesians 5:18 PLHROUSQE EN PNEUMATI

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Feb 24 15:13:48 EST 2005


At 1:57 PM -0500 2/24/05, Lo, Chong-Huah  wrote:
>Eph 5:18  .... PLHROUSQE  EN  PNEUMATI
>
>A question from a GNT beginner.
>Can PLHROUSQE be a middle voice imperative ?
>can this phrase be translated as  "Fill yourself with Spirit".

Yes, it can be either middle or passive; I think I'd call it a permissive
form bearing the sense "Let yourself be filled with Spirit." One virtue of
this perspective on the form is that a "PASSIVE" imperative doesn't really
make sense if the addressee does not participate voluntarily in the verbal
action; to be sure, the subject does not PERFORM the action of filling, but
the subject must CONSENT to it. I think this ambivalence is one of the
reasons why Greek originally had only the ambivalent morphology for
middle-passive and why that morphology functions to indicate passive only
in the case of transitive verbs.
-- 

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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