[B-Greek] future indicative in Jonah 1:11

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Thu May 19 04:17:42 EDT 2011


Justice egrapse
>I was wondering if you all can help explain the use of the future indicative
in Jonah 1:11 after the subjunctive in the sailors' question. It seems to me
the future mainly marks a result in this type of construction. Is this
something inherent within the semantics of the future, or is this a special
pragmatic use in certain types of interrogative clauses, or subjuntive
settings? I think the same thing happens in the last clause of Matthew
13:15>

Jonah, of course, is translation and here it is simply mimicking the MT as
closely as it can. the Hebrew is using pragmatics to express a purpose/
result. It fronts a verb to the vav "and" but does NOT use the sequential
tenses in order to show the special pragmatics for the verb. Here the
yiqtol becomes markedly modal, which leads to the "intended result"
interpretation of the 'and'.

so far so good.

Matt 13:15 itself is simply following our LXX.
However, the LXX has one tiny little quirk. (Yea, two. See below.)
It only shifts to the future for the last verb even though the Hebrew
text used sequential verb forms for the last TWO verbs. The OG
translators could have mimicked the Hebrew form more closely, but
they didn't. I assume that they treated the last verb similarly to how
Greek speakers were learning to use 'translationese' like in the
case of Jonah 1.11 above.

More importantly for the interpretation,
the OG translators ignored the imperatives of the Hebrew and turned
them into indicatives. That removes some of the inherent irony of
the Hebrew text where the prophet was commanded to cause such
a result. (The OG readings do not follow the consonantal text either.
Even if they read the first imperative as a passive indicative, the
following two verbs do not fit with their Hebrew subjects in ways that
could support the OG.) Apparently the OG translators didn't want to
leave things 'ironic' when it came to interpreting God's intentions.

-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicallanguagecenter.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life


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