[B-Greek] Luke 4:18 hOU hEINEKEN

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Jun 17 09:34:12 EDT 2007


On Jun 17, 2007, at 8:41 AM, Jonathan Robie wrote:

> Luke 4:18 hOU hEINEKEN ECRISEN ME EUAGGELIASQAI PTWCOIS
> Luke 4:18 οὗ εἵνεκεν ἔχρισέν με  
> εὐαγγελίσασθαι πτωχοῖς
>
> According to http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2001-March/ 
> 016006.html, this apparently means "because".
>
> Is this some particular kind of Greek, e.g. LXX Greek or classical  
> historial Greek or some such? It seems marked
> compared to more common ways of saying "because".

This is a citation from the LXX, Isaiah 61:1-2. There are a few  
expressions in older Greek that are sometimes called "postpositions"  
because they follow upon a word, often in the genitive, which they  
govern. The most common of these are DIKHN ("like" or "in the fashion  
of"), CARIN ("for the sake of") and hENEKA ("for the sake of").  
hEINEKA or hEINEKEN is a variant of hENEKA, hENEKEN -- hENEKA is the  
primary form. The combination hOU hENEKA or hOU hEINEKEN means "for  
the sake of the fact that ... " or "because of the fact that ... "   
Occasionally we find the combined one-word formulation hOUNEKA used  
for "because." I think that's what was intended in Isaiah 61:1. The  
upshot: hOU hEINEKEN is a two-word combination that really means the  
same thing as EPEI or DIOTI or hOTI (when hOTI means "the fact being  
that ... " = because of the fact that ... "

I don't know that it's really marked. It's from the LXX, which Al  
Pietersma tells us is "schoolboy Greek translation." You might  
compare the English equivalents of GNT  For what it's worth the MT  
has the word Ya'aN as the particle meaning "because."

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/





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