From: dalmatia@eburg.com
Date: Tue Apr 07 1998 - 09:47:19 EDT
Micheal Palmer wrote:
>
> At 4:24 PM -0800 4/4/98, Paul Zellmer wrote:
> >
> >In James 1:3, I have a word order question on which I hope some of you
> >will comment. The phrase TO DOKIMION hUMWN THS PISTEWS seems to tie
> >the possessive pronoun with the testing. Yet each of the English
> >translations I've consulted causes it to modify the faith. If this
> >were the case, would it not fall between the definite article and the
> >noun PISTEWS? What am I missing here?
>
> Yes, Paul, the genitive case form hUMWN does function syntactically as an
> argument of the noun DOKIMION. In fact, but hUMWN and THS PISTEWS function
> this way. They are two genitive case complements (objective genitives) of
> DOKIMION in a way very similar to a double accusative construction with the
> verb DOKIMAZW. The constuction assumes that 'you' (hUMWN) are tested and
> (your) 'faith' (THS PISTEWS) is tested. The translations are simply
> adapting to the limitations of English. "Test" in English cannot have a
> double accusative construction (two direct objects). It would sound really
> strange to say "the testing of you the faith." And even if it didn't sound
> strange, few readers would understand it properly (to mean testing you and
> testing your faith). "The testing of your faith" is a less-than-perfect,
> but necessary accomodation to English usage.
One further note on this word order is that the hUMWN, falling between
testing and faith, is thereby 'distributed' to them both.
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