Author: Micheal Palmer

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Reflections on τηρέω

Louw and Nida’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains lists τηρέω in more than one semantic domain, one of which groups it with φυλάσσω (section 36.19) and explains the meaning as “to continue to obey orders or commandments — ‘to obey, to keep commandments, obedience.’”

The more I read Greek from the same period as the New Testament, the more I doubt that τηρέω actually had that meaning as a real possibility. LEH (Septuagint lexicon) does not list “obey” as a possible meaning of τηρέω. I don’t have access right now to BDAG, so I can’t check that one. What leads me to the conclusion that Louw and Nida have made a faulty connection here, though, is not other lexica. It is the contexts in which I find this word outside the New Testament.

The fields of meaning for τηρέω center around notions of maintaining, safeguarding, caring for… not right and wrong conduct. Τηρέω is in an important sense an opposite of λείπω (leave, abandon, forsake).

Take John 14:21, for example.

ὁ ἔχων τὰς ἐντολάς μου καὶ τηρῶν αὐτὰς ἐκεῖνός ἐστιν ὁ ἀγαπῶν με

The sense here is probably, “The one who has my commandments and does not abandon them is the one who loves me.” Keeping the commandments in this sense implies remembering them, being aware of them, not forgetting or ignoring them, etc. While this clearly implies following the commandments, the emphasis is not on obedience—something that can be forced—but on willing faithfulness.

This may seem like a minor distinction, but I think it is an important one. There were other ways to talk about “obedience,” the kind of thing a servant does in relationship to a master, and this was clearly an accepted model for talking about the relationship between a person and God in early Christianity. Paul referred to himself as a δοῦλος Χρισττοῦ Ἰησοῦ (Rom. 1:1, Gal. 1:10), for example.

I am not arguing that this is a foreign image to early Christianity, but that the word τηρέω was not used for this purpose. When τηρέω was used in relation to commandments, the emphasis was on remembering them, being aware of them, safeguarding them, etc. It is a positive image, not one of dominance.

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Scope of a Hellenistic Greek Grammar IV: the now-defunct BDF project

I would like to follow up on three entries I wrote on January 30 and February 1, 2010 on the scope of a Hellenistic Greek grammar.

At about that same time (Feb. 2, 2010), Mike Aubrey posted an outline over at ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ of what he would like to include in a grammar, and I thought of the various outlines those of us working on the revision of the Blass-Debrunner-Funk grammar had come up with 12 years earlier.

Today while reorganizing my office, I found a document mailed by Daryl Schmidt on January 30, 1998 to those of us working on the revision.  It included his outline of the grammar as he perceived it at that point.

The outline he sent was definitely not final, and was the subject of much debate. It was one of several being discussed at the time. While the people on the committee had a good grasp of traditional Greek grammar, we had varying degrees of familiarity with the most recent models of linguistic theory, so there was a great deal of unease about terminology as well as the organization of the grammar.

I had many disagreements with Schmidt’s outline as it stood at that time, but understood it as representing his evolving understanding of the project, not a mandate for the form of the grammar. It was as a tool to prompt discussion.

I’m posting it below to invite your comments. The discussion of linguistics and Biblical Greek has come a long way over the last 12 years since it was written. Feel free to suggest where you would have made changes.

I, for example, would not structure a major portion of the grammar around the notion of “sentence” and would have much more to say about semantics and arguments structure. I’m sure Steve Runge (after a good laugh) could tell us clearly what’s wrong with the rudimentary section on “discourse” too.

Here is what Schmidt’s provisional outline included in January of 1998:

Introduction:

Sources: texts and mss
Grammar and Linguistics
Syntax: Words; Sentence types and patterns; Discourse units

Part 1: Grammar of Words

A. Introduction: rationale for categories

Lexical categories (“parts of speech”)
Formal features (morphology)
Grammatical features (e.g. gender, case, voice, aspect)

B. Major (“open”) classes: (heads of phrases)
noun, verb, adjective, adverb

C. Minor (“closed”) classes: (“function words”)
determiners, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions

D. Subclasses:
Lexical properties
Syntactical features

Part 2: Grammar of Simple Sentences

A. Sentence structures

1. Elements of a sentence
agreement of subject & verb
2. Equative sentences

a. nominal (verbless)
b. with equative verb

3. Intransitive
4. Transitive

B. Nominal Phrases

1. Introduction: constituents (determiners, adjectives, nouns)
modifiers and modifier roles
2. Functions
3. Pronouns
4. Substantival (headless)
C. Verb Phrases (predicate clauses)

1. Introduction: constituents (verbs and adverbials)
2. Verb features
3. Verb chains
4. Adverbials
5. Complement patterns

D. Sentence Variations

1. Reflexive & Passive
2. Negation
3. Questions
4. Commands

E. Coordination

1. Within phrases and clauses
2. Compound Sentences
3. Comparison

Part 3: Grammar of Complex Sentences

A. Formation of complex sentences

1. Introduction

a. Subordinate conjunctions
b. Infinitive & Participle

2. Functions of Embedded Sentences

B. Nominal embeds

1. Indirect Discourse

a. Indirect Questions
b. Indirect Statements
c. Indirect Commands

2. Other Nominal Embeds
3. Nominal uses of subordinate conjunctions: summary
4. Nominal uses of infinitive, with

a. Verbs of discourse
b. Verbs of commanding
c. Causative verbs (ποιέω)
d. Impersonal verbs

5. Nominal uses of participle

C. Adnominal Embeds (adjective clauses)

1. Relative pronouns (incl. “substantive”)
2. Participle (incl. “substantive”)

D. Adverbial Embeds (adverbial clauses)

1. with subordinate conjunctions
2. infinitive (with τό, ὥστε)
3. participle (incl. Gen. Abs.)
4. conditionals

Part 4: Grammar of Discourse

Stylistics
Rhetoric
Discourse Structures
Narrative grammar

Appendices:

A. Phonology, Orthography, Accents
B. Morphology (incl. paradigms)

word-formation
catalogue of verbs
loan words & cognations

C. Sumaries & Lists

grammatical/syntactical category functions
e.g. case functions
use of participles & infinitives
correlation with traditional categories

So, what do you think a reference grammar of Hellenistic Greek should include? How would it be different from Schmidt’s model?

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Infinitival Clauses

Have any of you seen Christina Sevdali’s dissertation, Infinitival Clauses in Ancient Greek: Overt and null subjects, the role of Case and Focus? I have not added it to my bibliography because I don’t know if it addresses any texts from the Hellenistic Period. According to the abstract, the last chapter addresses an issue in Modern Greek, but it is not clear whether “Ancient Greek” includes the Hellenistic Period in Sevdali’s work.

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Update to Lesson 17 on the Greek Present

I just added a short paragraph to the section on usage of the Greek present. Here’s what I added to the end of that section:

    What you can know for sure when you encounter a Greek present form is that the focus is not on when the action begins or ends. The Greek present form indicates imperfective verbal aspect. That is, it conveys a focus on the ongoing action, not on the beginning or end of the process.

This does not change anything I had already said. It just makes the connection to verbal aspect theory a little clearer.

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Punctuation in Ancient Greek Texts, Part II

Here is a good example of what I had to say in my last post about the lack of punctuation and spacing in Ancient Greek. The image is from Codex Sinaiticus, Philippians 1:1-2.

Philippians 1:1-2 in Codex Sinaiticus
Philippians 1:1-2 in Codex Sinaiticus

Here is the same text with spaces added between the words:
ΠΑΥΛΟΣ  ΚΑΙ  ΤΙΜΟΘΕΟΣ  ΔΟΥΛΟΙ ΧΥ  ΙΥ  ΠΑΣΙΝ  ΤΟΙΣ  ΑΓΙΟΙΣ  ΕΝ  ΧΥ  ΙΥ  ΤΟΙΣ  ΟΥΣΙΝ  ΕΝ  ΦΙΛΙΠΠΟΙΣ  ΣΥΝ  ΕΠΙΣΚΟΠΟΙΣ  ΚΑΙ  ΔΙΑΚΟΝΟΙΣ  ΧΑΡΙΣ  ΥΜΙΝ  ΚΑΙ  ΕΙΡΗΝΥ  ΑΠΟ  ΘΥ  ΠΑΤΡΟΣ  ΗΜΩΝ  ΚΑΙ  ΚΥ  ΙΥ  ΧΥ

Notice in addition to the lack of punctuation and spacing, the regular use of abbreviations for the words God (ΘΕΟΥ - ΘΥ), Lord (ΚΥΡΙΟΥ – ΚΥ), Jesus (ΙΗΣΟΥ – ΙΥ), and Christ (ΧΡΙΣΤΟΥ – ΧΥ). In Codex Sinaiticus as in all of the early manuscripts, such abbreviations are marked by a macron (¯) over the letters. I was not able to do that when I typed out the version with the spaces above. By including both the first and last letters in the abbreviation, the CASE of the words in question is clear (Genitive in this context for all of them), so even the abbreviations present minimal difficulty for a reasonably fluent reader of Hellenistic Greek.

To see the earlier discussion, go here:

On January 6, 2013 I added a third post on the topic of punctuation:

Important! [Added Jan. 19, 2015]
While the earliest manuscripts of the biblical texts did not contain punctuation, it is usually clear to a competent reader of Ancient Greek where the punctuation belongs.

It is a serious mistake to assume that the absence of punctuation in those manuscripts means a person who does not read Greek is free to choose where to put the punctuation in an English translation. To make decisions about where the punctuation belongs it is necessary to read Ancient Greek very well. Many options that would seem to be available in an English text are ruled out by the structure of the Greek text.
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Punctuation in Ancient Greek Texts, Part I

Recognizing that readers of this blog represent various levels of competence in reading Ancient Greek and levels of familiarity with Hellenistic Greek texts, I am posting an email I wrote to a user of Greek-Language.com back in 2005 in response to the question, “Did Ancient Greek use punctuation?” If you already know the answer to that question, just skip this post! (Or better yet, comment!)

On Mon, August 29, 2005 I wrote:

Dear __________:

Thank you for your letter. Your question is an interesting and important one, and we have considerable evidence with which to answer it.

The ancient Greeks did not have any equivalent to our modern device of punctuation. Sentence punctuation was invented several centuries after the time of Christ. The oldest copies of both the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament are written with no punctuation.

In addition, the ancient Greeks used no spaces between words or paragraphs. Texts were a continuous string of letters, with an occasional blank line inserted to mark the end of a major section, though even this was not always done.

They also had no equivalent to our lower case letters. Texts were written in all capitals.

While this clearly creates some challenges for Bible translation, those challenge are seldom very large. As a simple test, try reading the English text in the following line:

WHATDOESTHISSAY

With very little difficulty you can probably tell where the spaces should be and what kind of punctuation belongs at the end. You can tell this because you are a native speaker of the language in which the text is written, so you can easily recognize the words as well as the implication of the word order. Native speakers of Ancient Greek, in the same way, could recognize where one word ended and another began even though the spaces were not written. They could also distinguish a question from a direct statement without the need of punctuation.

Here’s the real problem: You and I are NOT native speakers of Ancient Greek.

While I read Ancient Greek quite well, I did not grow up speaking it. All modern scholars, including those who grew up speaking Modern Greek, are in this same situation.

When there is more than one possible way of dividing the words in a sentence or paragraph, or when there is more than one possible set of punctuation, we must look for clues as to what the author intended in order to correctly determine which is the correct division and what punctuation the author would have used if it had been available.

Of course there is an element of subjectivity in this process, but many scholars have dedicated the better part of their lives to reading the Biblical documents in the original languages and have come to have a good sense of the style and preferences of each author. As we develop this skill, it becomes easier to see what the author would most likely have intended in each of the few places where a sentence could be divided more than one way.

If you do not read Ancient Greek and Hebrew, it is important to compare various translations to see what the options for punctuation might be. Then you should ask yourself which punctuation results in something that the author would most likely have said. This may not always provide you with the correct answer, but it will be a valuable learning experience.

Thank you again for your letter. I wish you well in your studies.

Micheal W. Palmer
Greek Language and Linguistics Gateway
http://greek-language.com

 

Since the writing of this post on December 27, 2010, two other discussions of the lack of punctuation in Ancient Greek have been posted. You can find them by following the links below:

Another topic tangentially related to this one is available here:

 

Important! [Added Jan. 19, 2015]
While the earliest manuscripts of the biblical texts did not contain punctuation, it is usually clear to a competent reader of Ancient Greek where the punctuation belongs.

It is a serious mistake to assume that the absence of punctuation in those manuscripts means a person who does not read Greek is free to choose where to put the punctuation in an English translation. To make decisions about where the punctuation belongs it is necessary to read Ancient Greek very well. Many options that would seem to be available in an English text are ruled out by the structure of the Greek text.
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Καλὰ Χριστούγεννα (Merry Christmas in Greek)

I wish you all a wonderful Christmas.

The folks over at Omniglot.com provided a recording of the phrase in the title of this post that was used here from 2010 to 2015. My link to that recording ceased to function this year, so I replaced it with a recording of my own. Click the triangle below if you want to learn to say “Merry Christmas” in Hellenistic Greek.

New audio added November 25, 2016
m4a

AAC

mp3

Thanks to Omniglot.com for providing the audio that was used in this post from 2010 to 2015!

A note on pronunciation added in 2014:
The pronunciation from Ominiglot.com was done using Modern Greek pronunciation. While there are several important differences between Modern Greek and the way the language was spoken in the Hellenistic Period (Koine), none of those differences impact the pronunciation of καλὰ Χριστούγεννα. Of course at the time of Jesus and Paul no one would have said καλὰ Χριστούγεννα since Christmas was not yet celebrated. When it did come to be celebrated, though, early Christians would have pronounced this phrase the same as it is pronounced today in Greece.

 

A note on spelling (Added 12/15/2015)
There is one small difference in spelling of the Christmas greeting between 300 CE and the present: the system of written accents has been simplified. Contrast the following spellings. Can you see the difference?
Modern: Καλά Χριστούγεννα
Hellenistic: Καλὰ Χριστούγεννα