[B-Greek] Solecisms in the book of Revelation
Vasile Stancu
stancu at mail.dnttm.ro
Mon Aug 18 04:28:04 EDT 2008
-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Leonard Jayawardena
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 9:05 PM
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [B-Greek] Solecisms in the book of Revelation
Leonard Jayawardena wrote:
... there seems to be a genuine grammatical error in Revelation 7:9: The
participle "clothed" (PERIBEBLHMENOUS) is accusative plural, whereas we
would expect it to be nominative plural (PERIBEBLHMENOI) to agree with the
noun phrase 'great multitude' like the participle 'standing' (hESTWTES).
Again, hESTWTES and PERIBEBLHMENOUS are plural in spite of the subject
OCHLOS being singular because of notional concordance (?), but the relative
pronoun following the same subject in v. 9 is hON, whereas consistency would
demand that it be hOUS.
A solecism can be regarded as deliberate if there is any discernible
intention behind it but what conceivable purpose could there have been, for
example, for the first-mentioned irregularity mentioned in the preceding
paragraph, i.e., why is "clothed" in the accusative instead of in the
nominative?
-----------------------------------
Could it be that the accusative is used here in order to emphasise more
strongly the idea of (passively) "being clothed by somebody else" as
compared to the middle voice action of "just having clothed themselves"?
Vasile STANCU
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