[B-Greek] Heb. 1.7: PNEUMATA-FLOGA

Elizabeth Kline kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Tue Feb 6 13:55:59 EST 2007


Having received some significant help with this off list (thank you  
Iver), I will now return to the question of linguistic evidence in  
regard to identifying the objects and predicates in Heb 1:7.

  HEB. 1:7 KAI PROS MEN TOUS AGGELOUS LEGEI:
hO POIWN TOUS AGGELOUS AUTOU PNEUMATA
KAI TOUS LEITOURGOUS AUTOU PUROS FLOGA,

Should we understand TOUS AGGELOUS and TOUS LEITOURGOUS as the  
objects or the predicates of POIWN? Several of the serious  
commentators make dogmatic pronouncements on this question without  
IMO bringing to bear lucid and compelling evidence.

Borrowing from the field of cognitive linguistics, relevance theory  
and specially R.DeBlois' treatment of cognitive frames, I have  
divided the solutions to this problem into two camps (admittedly an  
over simplification).

The first camp takes the words hO POIWN TOUS AGGELOUS AUTOU PNEUMATA
KAI TOUS LEITOURGOUS AUTOU PUROS FLOGA and places them within a  
cognitive framework of first century Judaism, specifically the idea  
of the mutability of TOUS AGGELOUS who are created daily and return  
to the "fire" after giving a days service. TOUS AGGELOUS and TOUS  
LEITOURGOUS are understood as the objects with PNEUMATA as PUROS  
FLOGA the predicates.

The second camp takes the same words and places them within a  
cognitive framework of a storm theophany, a common theme in the  
Psalms and OT prophets. Thus PNEUMATA and PUROS FLOGA are understood  
as the objects with TOUS AGGELOUS and TOUS LEITOURGOUS as predicates.  
This approach places more emphasis on the cognitive framework for  
Psalm 104.

This illustrates a theme within recent linguistics (last 30 years)  
that semantics is not just about the meaning of words. You cannot  
solve a problem like this one if you limit your notion of meaning to  
lexical sense and reference.

Elizabeth Kline







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