[B-Greek] Acts 7,26A

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Mar 22 06:15:47 EST 2004


At 11:29 PM -0500 3/21/04, Polycarp66 at aol.com (i.e. George Somsel) wrote:
>In a message dated 3/21/2004 10:27:16 PM Eastern Standard Time,
>edmishoe at yahoo.com writes:
>THi TE EPIOUSHi hHMERAi WFQH AUTOIS MACOMENOIS KAI SUNHLLASSEN AUTOUS EIS
>EIRHNHN EIPWN,
>
>The NET Bible goes like this:
>
>7:26 The next day Moses saw two men fighting, and tried to make peace between
>them, saying,
>
>The passive WFQH is somewhat hard to translate in my thinking. The NET
>translators apparently thought so and gave it an active sense (he saw).
>How does
>WFQH AUTOIS MACOMENOIS fit together syntactically?
>_________
>
>With all due respect to the translators of the NET Bible, they got this one
>wrong.  It does not say that Moses saw them but rather that "he appeared"
>(Lit:
> "he was seen by them").  Check some other translations and you will see that
>this is the way it is usually translated.  While I don't recommend simply
>following what everyone else has done, one should have a good reason when he
>wishes to take "the road less travelled."  At the very least, the NET, which
>usually has copious notes (or so I've been told), should have noted how
>they >were  departing from the normal translation and the reason.

In earlier posts on the Greek texts of Acts, Eddie Mishoe has been citing
Parsons & Culy; this time he apparently didn't look there, but he should
have: they note: "In the passive voice, this verb means 'to appear'" and
refer to Wallace, GGBB, p. 165.n.72. While it has sometimes been
fashionable to view the construction WFQH + dative as an instance of dative
of agent with a passive verb, I think the truth of the matter is that the
form WFQH should be understood as an aorist intransitive middle: "made
himself seen" ("got himself seen").
-- 

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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