[B-Greek] ESTIN at Matthew 1:20

Dave Smith dave at musicsmythe.com
Sun May 28 14:28:04 EDT 2006


I believe George is correct on this matter. The noun and the adjective agree
in case, number, and gender, therefore it is most natural for it to be a
modifier. It would need to be a predicate nominative or predicate accusative
to allow the translation "is holy." It may repay the effort to examine other
instance where Matthew splits the noun and adjective with ESTIN/EIMI. It
looks like Matthew, in his grammatical style, sometimes chooses to divide
referents and modifiers/adjectives w/ ESTIN (5:34, 35; 10:26); we may
attribute it to a form of hypotaxis that is common in Greek, though not in
languages, such as Hebrew or English, that tend to be bound by juxtaposition
of words.

I don't believe that this has any significance to the meaning of the passage
at hand.

Dave Smith
Hudson, NC



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