[B-Greek] question about heis mia tis
Iver Larsen
iver at larsen.dk
Wed Feb 22 02:14:41 EST 2006
> Dear Sir:
>
> Some people affirm that in Gospel John the tendency to show if a noun is
> indefinite is by the numerals hEIS,MIA, TIS.
>
> is it true?.
No, that is not true for the Gospel of John. If you check the 40 instances of hEIS in John's Gospel, you will see that
none of them correspond to an indefinite article.
For the book of Revelation, the situation is a bit different because of the strong Hebrew flavour of the language here.
This book has several non-standard expressions.
Out of the 25 occurrences of hEIS in Rev, 4 are used in a context that would call for an indefinite article in English.
These are:
Rev 8:13: "I heard an eagle" (RSV, NIV, NET)
Rev 9:13: "I heard a voice" (RSV, NIV)
"I heard a single voice" (NET)
Rev 18:21 "Then a mighty angel" (RSV, NIV)
"Then one powerful angel" (NET)
Rev 19:17 "I saw an angel" (RSV, NIV)
"I saw one angel" (NET)
The NET was apparently thrown off by the use of hEIS as what would correspond to an English indefinite article. It
unnecessarily tries to keep the normal sense of oneness in 3 of the 4 cases.
Iver Larsen
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