[B-Greek] GENNAW
Iver Larsen
iver at larsen.dk
Sat May 28 06:57:21 EDT 2005
Just one short comment below:
> > The normal way in the NT to speak of a
> > child being born is by using a passive form of GENNAW. Of the 44
> > occurrences of passive GENNAW in the NT, the interlinear I was checking
> > glossed it with "born" 43 out of 44 times. Only one was narrowed down by
> > context to refer specifically to conception.
>
> I also looked at all the contexts in the NT. (And more.) My take
> was that when
> a female is in the context, 'born' makes more sensible English,
> male in the
> context, 'begot'. But that's because of English, NOT the Greek.
<snip>
> >
> > In English, the broader term is "born" rather than "conceived"
>
> I'm not sure I agree. 'Born' to me focuses on the female role. English
> dictionaries second that opinion. But I'm not interested in how best to
> TRANSLATE it, just whether the semantic domain of the Greek includes the
> 'male mode' also in John 3 in particular. At this point I'm
> satisfied that it does.
Both TIKTW and GENNAW are divalent verbs, requiring an agent and patient
when used in an active form. The same applies to English "bear" which is
rare in ordinary English - and "beget" is even rarer. ("Beget" is used quite
a bit in the KJV, but dropped completely from modern English versions like
the NLT.)
If the form is passive, the agent is suppressed out of focus. That means
that the focus is on the patient, the person being born, rather than the
female or male role behind the birth. I think it is the same in English.
When I say that I was born in Denmark, the focus is on me, not my mother who
bore me or my father who begot me. That is why I was talking about all the
passive forms of the word.
In John 3:3 the focus is on the person being born, and the main point is
"all over again". In 3:4 Nicodemus focuses again on the person being born.
How can he/she come back into the womb and be born once more? It is in v.
5-6 that Jesus then focuses on the contrast between the two types of birth,
physical and spiritual. For this last contrast, I suppose you could use a
different word and translate by "begotten", but it is better to keep the
same word for the sake of consistency in the dialogue. To use "beget" in v.
3 and "born" in v. 4 would throw the reader off in the wrong direction, as
if that difference was significant.
Iver Larsen
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