[B-Greek] On Jussives
Donald Vance
donaldrvance at mac.com
Sat Nov 12 01:06:49 EST 2005
What you have stated here is a common understanding, but research,
particularly from the linguistic side of things, has narrowed the gap
considerably between Greek and Hebrew with regards to our understanding
of the "precision" of the one over the other. Each has areas where they
can be more precise than the other. The two languages can be quite
specific in terms of aspect and temporality, but they do so in
different ways. Hebrew is, in fact, not appreciably more limited in
terms of tense/aspect than koine, especially when you deal with the
languages in the Hellenistic and later periods.
As to the second part of our discussion, the handling of the tense,
aspect, and mood of the Hebrew text by the LXX seems like a potentially
fruitful area of research. Perhaps there is a graduate student lurking
on the list looking for a dissertation topic.
Donald R. Vance, Ph.D.
Professor of Biblical Languages and Literature
Oral Roberts University
dvance at oru.edu
donaldrvance at mac.com
On Nov 11, 2005, at 10:59 PM, Dr. Don Wilkins wrote:
> For precision I basically mean the many more grammatical options that
> Greek has in comparison to Hebrew, with the exception of the voices
> (or what I call voices in Hebrew for the sake of convenience, as e.g.
> the niphal, hiphil, hithpael etc.). Then, with the fewer options in
> Hebrew, great flexibility in grammatical meaning is unavoidable (a bad
> thing for specifying meaning); for example, the relative absence of
> cases and the very limited forms in tense/aspect. As for mood, Hebrew
> has perhaps two, three, or none at all, depending on how you look at
> it in terms of form and excluding infinitives and participles. But I
> suspect you know all this better than I do. As to the LXX, identifying
> correspondences is sometimes problematic because of translation Greek.
> Sometimes the Greek is a formal equivalent, and at other times it is
> interpretive. For example, a Greek 3p imperative is mostly routine for
> the 3p jussive in Hebrew, but as we saw in the example I cited, a
> different Greek mood (e.g. optative) might be used for the jussive if
> the translators treat the latter as a wish.
>
> Don Wilkins
>
> On Nov 11, 2005, at 11:40 AM, Donald R. Vance, Ph.D. wrote:
>
>> You speak of greater precision in the Greek. How so? With regard to
>> the optative, has anyone done a study that elucidates the
>> correspondences (if any) between the moods of Greek and Hebrew as
>> reflected in the LXX? For example, is an optative in the LXX usually
>> reflective of a jussive (or something else) in the Hebrew (when the
>> LXX and MT have the same text)?
>> Donald R. Vance, Ph.D.
>> Professor of Biblical Languages and Literature
>> Oral Roberts University
>> dvance at oru.edu
>> donaldrvance at mac.com
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