From: Carl William Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu Jan 22 1998 - 13:13:37 EST
On Thu, 22 Jan 1998, Ken Litwak wrote:
> I haven't been able to find a commentator who has elucidated this for
> me, so maybe someone on the list can. I'm trying to figure out how, in
> Luke 1:57,
> TH DE ELISABET PLHSQH (O CRONOS TOU TEKEIN AUTHN
> to construe AUTHN. It looks like it should go with TOU TEKEIN as the
> accusative subject of the infinitive, but that yields a sense like
> And the time was fulfilled for Elizateh she gave birth and gave birth to a
> son. Since TEKEIN, and GENNAW in the following clause both mean roughly
> the same think I think, it might make more sense to construe AUTHS with
> CRONOS,
> And for Elizabeth, her time was fulfilled to give birth, and she gave
> birth to a son.
>
> Anytone have suggestions on the syntactical relations here? Please
> respond to me directly as I am not a list member. Thanks.
Ken, you have it exacty right but you evidently didn't realize it: TEKEIN
is an articular infinitive in the genitive dependent upon CRONOS, and the
AUTHN is indeed the subject of TEKEIN. While it's true that GENNAW and
TIKTW can both refer to giving birth, GENNAW is a more general verb: it's
the one used of begetting in the long formulaic series of "X begot Y" in
Mt 1; TIKTW on the other hand is only used of a woman delivering a child
(and metaphorically, I might add, of an investment bearing
interest--TOKOS). So what we have is two separate clauses, the first
ending with an articular infinitive: "The term was completed for her to
give birth"--then the conjunction and the second clause: "... and she
bore a son."
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:38:58 EDT