[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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