[B-Greek] Singular Rel-pro in Rev 13:8; the plural Rel-pro in Rev 17:8

virgil newkirk virgilsalvage1 at msn.com
Tue Nov 8 12:17:06 EST 2005




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu>
Cc: "virgil newkirk" <virgilsalvage1 at msn.com>; "B-Greek B-Greek" 
<b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2005 12:07 PM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Singular Rel-pro in Rev 13:8; the plural Rel-pro in 
Rev 17:8



On Nov 7, 2005, at 1:36 PM, virgil newkirk wrote:

> Carl,
>
> I wasn't thinking or suggesting that the phrasing in 17:8 was actually
> "derived from" 13:8; what was in my mind was, here is the author
> essentially
> writing again about all the people living on the earth and their
> attention
> to the beast ( I guess I am assuming it's the same subject..should
> I not?)
> and yet he writes EPI TO BIBLION where before he wrote in a similar
> description of things EPI TWi BIBLIWi; should I think that his
> Greek went
> from good to bad in this short span ? (Please, I am not being
> sarcastic..I
> just don't understand) Or am I distorting what you've suggested
> about the
> flux of Greek ? If it is a case of solecism or bad Greek it puzzles
> me why
> it occurred so close together in two different manifestations ?

Virgil, you're asking questions that I'm not prepared to answer. It
may very well be that the author had in mind the phrasing or the idea
from 13:8 when composing 17:8, but if so, he phrased it differently
although probably with the same intent. I don't think it's all that
unusual for an author to use somewhat different phrasing when he/she
expresses the same idea within a single document as here: EN TWi
BIBLIWi in 13:9, EPI TO BIBLION in 17:8, pretty clearly with the same
intended sense; EN TWi BIBLIWi is a construction we might expect with
GEGRAPTAI while EPI TO BIBLION is not what we might expect; that's
why I said it might be a solecism, with which this book of Revelation
is replete, or it might even be an instance of use of the accusative
as the standard object-of-prepositon case used with any preposition
-- as in Greek of later periods.

_________________________

Dear Carl,

I was not able to embrace what you stated above,(I didn't really understand 
why not) that is, until I learned a lesson. The lesson learned was that I 
was (without being aware of it at the time) attempting to understand what 
the Greek was saying ...from an English and place in time perspective. Both 
in English and in 2005 a book to me is something you write (whatever it is 
that you're going to write) you write that stuff "in" the book; that book 
being that thing with all those pages along with the book's construction. We 
wouldn't write about things "on" our books; as in EPI TO BIBLION, so I 
couldn’t get my thinking around how that could be in Rev 17:8. It wasn't 
until for some reason I found myself reading Rev 17:8 in my NASB/NIV 
interlinear that I noticed under the Greek word BIBLION there 
was(fortunately)the gloss "scroll." Aha ! I said (being embarrassed and 
corrected) you can expect one to write in Rev 17:8 EPI TO BIBLION ! On a 
scroll (accusative)...but not necessarily in English and the year 2005... 
"on a book."




Virgil Newkirk
Salt Lake City 



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