[B-Greek] 70 X 7 or 77 Luke 18:22
Daveat168 at aol.com
Daveat168 at aol.com
Sun Feb 12 05:54:21 EST 2006
In an email dated Sun, 12 2 2006 1:35:33 am GMT, "Bert de Haan" <b_dehaan at sympatico.ca> writes:
>Does hEBDOMHKONTAKIS hEPTA in Matthew 18:22 mean 'seventy times + seven' or
>'seventy times x seven'?
>
>Bert de Haan
>
>
>---
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Dear Bert,
What you should read is seventy times seven, or seventy sevens. Semitic languages do not use the plural case to signify quantity, but to signify variety, hence they write seventy seven, meaning in our idiom, seventy sevens.
However, I have evidence that a scribe in the ancient past, has deleted a seven, seeing it as a repetition. this evidence comes from Ciasca's Latin, from Ibn-at Tayyib's Arabic, from Tatian's Diatessaron, also witnessed by Ephrem Syrus:
seventy seven seven, which means:
seventy (times) seven (times) seven.
The significance is this: The context is forgivenness, and of leaving your offering at the altar, if there is emnity between you and your brother. This is a weekly ceremony of redemption. In the ancient calendar of Our Lord'd time, the year was reckonned as seven days make a week, seven weeks make a pentecost, and seven pentecosts make a year. There is of course an error of 3 weeks and a day and a quarter, and this is set aside to a different reckonning.
Hence seven sevens of weeks, (ceremonies of redemption) make a year, and a man's life is reckonned as 'three score and ten' or seventy years. Thus the phrase meant: 'every week, for the length of his days', or , more simply, every time, for ever'.
This could be seen as not being relevant to B-Greek, but I'll offer it anyhow...
--
Best regards,
Dave Smith.
(B.A.2,1, Science & Technology, Open Univerity.)
168 Bristol Road,
Frampton Cotterell,
Bristol, BS36 2AX,
U.K.
eMail <DaveAt168 at aol.com>
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