[B-Greek] Third-person commands

Glenden Riddle glendenpriddle at yahoo.com
Wed Nov 9 23:01:32 EST 2005


Don,
You made it fine until you left home plate; from there you're not even heading toward first base. Your basic assumption that imperative FORMS must be COMMANDS simply does not stand. Not in English; not in Greek; not in Hebrew. Because of this faulty assumption you end up with faulty deductions, such as "That brings me back to 1 Cor. 7:15. Grammatically, "let him leave" is
a command to the unbeliever, with no ambiguity." 
Example #1--A police officer addressing a man with a gun on a bridge: "Put the gun down, George. You know you don't really want to do this." In Parsing 101 we classify "put" as an imperative verb. In pragmatics, the police officer is not ordering anything. He is very gently encouraging/asking the man to act sensibly.
Example #2--A friend tells me he thinks the Libertarians had the last presidential election stolen from them. I say, "Oh, get out of here!" In Parsing 101 we would correctly classify "get out" as an imperative. In the language event I'm expressing amazement at such a statement. No imperative intended.
My only point is is that imperative verb forms do indeed find many more uses than giving commands.
Since you're not accepting Dan Wallace's excellent description, how about Blass/Debrunner/Funk, section 387: "The imperative in the NT keeps for the most part within the same limits as in classical usage. As in the latter it is by no means confined to commands, but also expresses a request or a concession: Mt 8:32 HUPAGETE, 2 C 12:16...."
Robertson & Plummer (ICC) are correct: "If, therefore, the heathen partner seeks divorce, the Christian partner may consent. The Christian partner is under no slavish obligation to refuse to be set free."
So, "let" does not clash with the idea of the imperative unless you take the imperative totally out of context of the language and assume (incorrectly) that it only communicates orders or commands.
glen riddle
albuquerque, NM

"Dr. Don Wilkins" <drdwilkins at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
Hi everybody,

I would appreciate input on an issue that's bugged me for some time, 
the possibility of a third-person command's being substituted for 
second-person permissive command. It's complicated, so I apologize in 
advance for taking considerable space to explain it. As a translator, 
I have to deal with the issue of what to do with "let" used in a 
third-person command. The problem is an old one: "let" is usually 
read as permission, which clashes with the idea of an imperative. We 
run into the same problem with Hebrew (the use of the jussive), which 
I'll use as a point of comparison. We're all familiar with "let" 
commands by deity (e.g. "Let there be light"), where "let" obviously 
can't be permission because God doesn't need permission to create. 
But where things get really thorny is in a passage like 1 Cor. 7:15: 
"...if the unbeliever leaves, let him leave...." I have always taken 
this to be a command to the unbeliever following the third-person 
grammar, and I still do, but I'll bet that 95% or more of the Greek- 
challenged English Bible readers see it as a command to the 
congregation to permit the fellow to leave. Maybe even some listers 
see it that way as well. To the latter I would suggest Matt. 27:42 as 
a grammatical parallel: "...let Him now come down from the cross, and 
we will believe in HIm." Clearly this command is not addressed to the 
crowd, asking their permission for Jesus to leave the cross, but is a 
derisive command or dare addressed to Jesus himself.

Now then, lately it occurred to me that there might be some grounds 
for the idea that a third-person imperative could be addressed to a 
superior from an inferior in the sense of a request. A good example 
would be the idea of a command addressed to God as a request. To 
illustrate this, consider a passage like Ps. 31:17: "...let the 
wicked be put to shame, let them be silent." Again, the "let" is 
problematic, but permission is not an option as an interpretation, 
and in fact the grammar is actually two commands (jussives) addressed 
to the wicked. I thought the LXX would have third-person imperatives 
here, but instead it has optatives, which makes sense and shows that 
the translators were aware of the grammatical issue. I don't know off- 
hand whether the LXX always handles the issue the same way, but I 
know that the translators paid attention to the context of these 
third-person commands, because in Gen. 1:3 they use the Greek 
imperative for "Let there be light." In this case it would be wrong 
to have the optative, "May there be light," because God is 
commanding, not wishing for it.

A passage like Ps. 31:17 finds its NT counterpart in such passages as 
Matt. 26:39: "My Father...let this cup pass from Me" where Jesus (or 
Matthew in translation) uses the third-person imperative. Putting 
aside questions about what language Jesus was speaking etc., the 
grammar is a command to the cup, but it seems more likely that the 
real intent of the command is a request to the Father, where the LXX 
mode might be optative ("may this cup pass"). So what we seem to have 
here is a situation where the command does and does not express 
permission. It seemingly does in the sense of the speaker's intent, 
but grammatically it does not, with "let" serving only as a poor 
English substitute for the third-person imperative. That is, the 
average reader might be right in thinking that Jesus was asking the 
Father to permit the cup to pass, but he would be right for the wrong 
reason.

That brings me back to 1 Cor. 7:15. Grammatically, "let him leave" is 
a command to the unbeliever, with no ambiguity. But is it possible 
that Paul's intent is to order the congregation not to stand in the 
unbeliever's way, and the third-person command is a polite way to 
express this, i.e. a third-person being substituted for a second- 
person command?

Now I anticipate that someone will be tempted to quote Dan Wallace to 
me (GGBTB on or near p. 485), something like "The imperative 
shouldn't be called the command mode because it does other things as 
well." But IMO Dan is either trying to simplify the situation for 
most Greek students, or he might be making the mistake of allowing 
interpretation to assume too great a role in defining grammar. In the 
case of 1 Cor. 7:15 it is a question of intent and style vis-a-vis 
grammar, not of the meaning of the imperative. So what I am 
requesting here is it that we go beyond his BTB, as fine a work as 
that truly is.

Don Wilkins
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