[B-Greek] Two Greek expressions in Luke 2

Ken Penner ken.penner at acadiau.ca
Wed Jun 6 08:12:30 EDT 2007


See BDAG under KATA.
Hebrews has KAT' ENIAUTON κατʼ ἐνιαυτόν in 9:25; 10:1, 3.
KAQ' hHMERAN appears in Mt 26:55; Mk 14:49; Lk 16:19; 22:53; Ac 2:46f; 3:2; 16:5; 17:11; 19:9; 1 Cor 15:31; Hb 7:27; 10:11.

You're right that both are nouns in hHMERAS hODON ἡμέρας ὁδὸν, but I'm not sure what the difficulty is, especially since English has an equivalent construction, "a day's journey." The genitive noun further specifies the other noun: A journey; more specifically, a day-type journey. Similarly, the accusative hODON limits the verb: they travelled; more specifically, they travelled a day's journey.

Ken
Ken M. Penner, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies,
Acadia Divinity College,
Wolfville, Nova Scotia,
Canada B4P 2R6.
(902)585-2213
http://purl.org/net/kmpenner/

> According to Zerwick, KAT ETOS (κατ ἔτος, used in Luke 2:41) 
> means "every year", and occurs only here in the GNT. Can KAT 
> also be combined with other time frames, e.g. KAT hHMERAS 
> (κατ ἡμέρας)? Is it any particular kind of Greek, e.g. 
> particularly educated or regional, or why doesn't this common 
> phrase occur in the GNT?
> 
> Also, in Luke 2:44, the phrase HLQON hHMERAS hODON (ἦλθον 
> ἡμέρας ὁδὸν) makes perfect sense to me as long as I don't try 
> to think about it analytically, but when I do, hHMERAS and 
> hODON both look like nouns to me, and are tagged as such in 
> the version of Tauber's morphologically tagged GNT that I'm 
> looking at. Should I think of this as a fixed expression, or 
> is there a way that nouns like these combine that I don't grok yet?
> 
> Jonathan


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