[B-Greek] ORKIA TEMNEIN ?
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Mar 16 07:47:24 EST 2004
At 9:09 AM +0000 3/16/04, Philip Engmann wrote:
>Gesenius's Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament, Page 416,
>section 3772-3, [1] under the word, KARAT, says:
>
>Some Greek words used to translate KARAT BRITH are:
>
>1. hORKIA TEMNEIN and
>2. TEMNEIN SPONDAS
>
>And this is interpreted as "to make a covenant".
>
>However, I cannot seem to find the specific meanings of the individual
>words, hORKIA TEMNEIN and TEMNEIN SPONDAS in some of the Greek
>dictionaries that I have; Moulton's for example.
>
>What does
>
>1. hORKIA TEMNEIN and
>2. TEMNEIN SPONDAS
>
>mean?
It is unclear to me whether Gesenius intended to do anything more with
these glosses than to offer Greek equivalents to the words in the Hebrew
phrase, KARAT BRITH: as KARAT means "cut" in Hebrew, so TEMNEIN means "cut"
in Greek. hORKIA, a neuter plural noun, is used in older (Homeric) Greek
for the oaths and ceremonies associated with treaty-making; the Homeric
phrase hORKIA PISTA TAMEIN (TAMEIN being the aorist inf. of the root seen
in TEMNEIN) is used for "make a treaty," but this phrase is rarely found in
later historical Greek and it appears nowhere in the LXX or GNT. See LSJ
(on-line at the Perseus site)
SPONDAI means "libations"; in the historical era the pouring of libations
marked the solemnization of a treaty; the standard phrase associated with
that is SPONDAS SPENDEIN; LSJ cites one instance of SPONDAS with TEMNW in
Euripides (Helena 1235): SPONDAS TEMWMEN and suggests that this is based
upon a false analogy (presumably with hORKIA TEMNEIN). This is also not a
Biblical Greek phrase. You may consult LSJ on this also. My guess is that
Gesenius was suggesting parallel expressions for users of his own era who
were expected to have a reasonably exhaustive knowledge of Greek
literature. One would do better to use a more recent lexicon for Hebrew
such as BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs).
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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