[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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