[B-Greek] Mt 1:18 hEUREQH EN GASTRI ECOUSA
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at ioa.com
Wed Feb 1 08:23:13 EST 2006
There have been some interesting discussions in the last week or so
on what has been called, for want of a better name (pity!)
"biblioblogs" that would, I think, have been (or be) of interest to B-
Greekers. For instance, Loren Rosson, on his "Busybody" blog (http://
lorenrosson.blogspot.com/), followed by Mark Goodacre (http://
www.ntgateway.com/weblog/), Wayne Leman (http://
englishbibles.blogspot.com/), Stephen Carlson (http://
www.hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2006/01/morton-smith-on-mark-152-so-you-
say.html) and others (you can find back-and-forth links readily on
the spots) have been discussing the problematic SU LEGEIS spoken by
Jesus to Pilate at Mk 15:2 (not really resolving the problems, IMHO,
but thrashing through the significant alternative ways of looking at
it). Mark Goodacre also started a fresh discussion of Mk 7:19
KAQARIZWN PANTA TA BRWMATA (http://ntgateway.com/weblog/2006/01/did-
jesus-declare-all-foods-clean.html) that's been further discussed by
others as well.
Now two weeks ago Wayne posted a discussion (http://
englishbibles.blogspot.com/2006/01/can-you-stomach-this-translation-
poll.html) of the phrasing in Mt 1:18 about Mary's conception of the
infant Jesus, and conducted a poll on how best to English that phrase
(the winner among options available, although the polling sample was
pretty small, was "she learned she was pregnant." On Monday, Suzanne
McCarthy, a pretty sharp young lady, posted further on this phrase
(http://englishbibles.blogspot.com/2006/01/she-became-pregnant.html)
and concluded, with pretty good reason, that the fundamental sense is
simply "she became pregnant." Much of the focus in this discussion is
over the verb form hEUREQH, and (obviously) that's what made me sit
up and take notice. The traditional versions (even the generally more
sensible NET) have the woodenly-literal "she was found to be
pregnant" or some variant of "she was found to be ..."
One of the questions regarding this verb-form and its meaning is
whether we should understand it as semantically passive or middle.
Despite what 20,000 Frenchmen may claim, it's hard to figure out who
on earth, if not Mary herself, found out that she was pregnant.
Peterson's "Message" says Joseph noticed (after all, the next verse
deals with his quandary and decision regarding the embarrassing
"discovery") and perhaps that protruding belly was beginning to be
obvious, but I don't think that solves the problem. hEUREQH is middle
and my own simple version was that Mary "found out that she was
pregnant." Now in fact Suzanne McCarthy took the matter further and
noted that French versions have forms of "se trouver" and German
"sich finden" and that these reflexive verbs have the semantic force
not so much of "find oneself (in x state)" as rather "become" or "get
to be." Is that the case also with hEUREQH? Apparently so. And the
meaning of our phrase, hEUREQH EN GASTRI ECOUSA, is in fact best
Englished as "she became pregnant."
BUT -- can we really say that hEURISKOMAI in the middle-passive forms
is synonymous with GINOMAI? Well, it's not so simple as that. Of the
3 Middle forms of hEURISKOMAI in the GNT only one clearly has this
sense (1 Cor 15:15 hEURISKOMEQA DE KAI YEUDOMARTURES TOU QEOU ...)
and a second is a bit different, although clearly related (Heb 11:5
ENWC OUC hEURISKETO "Enoch wasn't there" -- clearly the sense here is
not that somebody or everybody went looking for Enoch and couldn't
espy him, but rather that he "went missing" (to use the current
police procedural jargon). There are 29 instances of the verb in the -
QH- "passive" inflections; a few of these might best be understood in
a real passive sense (Parable of the Prodigal Son Lk 15:24 HN
APOLWLOS KAI hEUREQH); others seem to have the sense "was next
seen" (Acts 8:40 FILIPPOS DE hEUREQH EIS AZWTON) or "proved to
be" (Rom 7:10 EGW DE APEQANON KAI hEUREQH MOI hH ENTOLH hH EIS ZWHN,
hAUTH EIS QANATON -- where the MOI is not an agent pronoun, I think,
so much as it is an "ethic dative" or "dative of reference" --"in my
case/so far as I personally was concerned").
BDAG for our text notes usage derived from Heb. NiMTSa "be found,
appear, prove, be shown (to be)" I rather think that the Hebrew verb
(Niphal) is like the reflexives noted above, sich finden and se
trouver. BUT I don't think this is quite equivalent to GINOMAI,
which also is used in the sense of "become/get to be." Rather, I
think that hEURISKOMAI involves a notion of surprise or -- yes,
DISCOVERY of an unexpected fact or truth (Paul's realization that the
commandment was "death-dealing"). So the sense of hEURISKOMAI is not
so much simply "become/get to be" as it is "prove to be" or "turn out
to be."
There may be still more to this story, but it's been an eye-opener to
me. I know we've discussed instances of hEUREQH before and my
arguments that it should be understood as a real passive (e.g. http://
lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2002-December/023610.html) but I
still don't think so; I think that it is, as Suzanne McCarthy has
discovered independently, a distinct idiomatic sense of the NT Greek
verb.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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