Re: Ephesians 5:31 - "cleave to"

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 30 1998 - 16:44:37 EDT


At 9:32 AM -0700 7/30/98, Eric Weiss wrote:
>Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
>> After carefully checking LSJ (on Perseus, not the new one with the Glare
>>appendix), I find that the particular sense of "cleave to"--or as my
>>wife, perhaps from old-time Appalachian mountain dialect, says, "be stuck
>>fast to" ("Carl's stuck fast to the compuuter again")--I find that not
>>only PROSKOLLAW but even KOLLAW appears especially in "passive"
>>morphology in this distinct sense (pardon the anacoluthon, please).
>>
>> I rather think that this is an instance of the distinctive
>>middle/reflexive sense of which I have written before and intend to write
>>again sooner or later: the verb takes this middle/reflexive form that
>>ought NOT to be understood as a PASSIVE ("divine" or otherwise--I think
>>I've said before that I think this particular category of "divine
>>passive" belongs in the same basket as the philosoophy major's
>>determination to call "philosopher's fatigue" the aetiological reference
>>to "God" in explanations of phenomena);
>
>One reason I raised my question was that, if it were a middle/reflexive, I
>would have expected the future middle form (SOMAI, etc.) rather than the
>future passive (QHS) form. Is it that KOLLAW/PROSKOLLAW in the future is
>"deponent" (I know this is not the correct term, based on what you've
>written before - what I mean to say/ask is: in its future stem, does
>PROSKOLLAW take the passive morphology as its primary form and hence there
>is no typical "middle" future form for this verb?)

Sorry, this is the problem with the %%##@&&** traditional terminology. In
the traditional terminology, KOLLAW/PROSKOLLAW is a "passive
deponent"--which means that it'll have -QHN forms in the aorist and
-QHSOMAI forms in the future.

>Also, by "divine passive," since I couldn't figure out why what looks like
>the simple weqatal of DaBaQ ("and he will cleave to") was changed in the
>LXX so the implied subject was God ("and he will be joined to" - by YHWH,
>presumably), I supposed that for some reason the translator saw God at
>work here and thus decided to translate it with a future passive.>

No, I just don't think it's passive at all. I really do need to revise my
little essay on the vagaries of the middle/reflexive voice. My basic
proposition, however, is a simple one: (1) the -MAI/-SAI/-TAI endings are
fundamentally middle/reflexive in meaning and only secondarily may they
take a passive sense when that is particularly appropriate; (2) the
athematic aorist forms in -QHN (or -HN) from which are formed futures in
-QHSOMAI (or -HSOMAI) are really later developing forms that carry this
same middle/reflexive meaning; (3) the traditional way in which voice gets
taught in both classical Attic and in NT grammars tends to associate
"passive" meanings fundamentally with both the -MAI/-SAI/-TAI endings and
the -QHN/-QHSOMAI endings--with the consequence that when one encounters,
sooner or later (but more likely sooner than later) a form in -QH or
-QHSETAI, one's first inclination is to think that must be a passive--and
it "ain't necessarily so."

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/

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