From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 30 1998 - 07:21:38 EDT
<x-rich>At 7:21 PM -0500 7/29/98, Eric Weiss wrote:
>Why is PROSKOLLAW in the future passive - "will be joined to his wife"
-
>here in Ephesians 5:31, quoting from the Septuagint of Genesis 2:24,
>when the Hebrew is active, i.e., "will cleave to"? This is a
Septuagint
>translation question rather than an Ephesians translation question.
Is
>this an instance of the Septuagint translators using a "divine
passive"?
>If so, are there frequent LXX instances of such?
After carefully checking LSJ (on Perseus, not the new one with the
Glare appendix), I find that the particular sense of "cleave to"--or as
my wife, perhaps from old-time Appalachian mountain dialect, says, "be
stuck fast to" ("Carl's stuck fast to the computer again")--I find that
not only PROSKOLLAW but even KOLLAW appears especially in "passive"
morphology in this distinct sense (pardon the anacoluthon, please).
I rather think that this is an instance of the distinctive
middle/reflexive sense of which I have written before and intend to
write again sooner or later: the verb takes this middle/reflexive form
that ought NOT to be understood as a PASSIVE ("divine" or otherwise--I
think I've said before that I think this particular category of "divine
passive" belongs in the same basket as the philosophy major's
determination to call "philosopher's fatigue" the aetiological
reference to "God" in explanations of phenomena); rather they are like
German "es handelt sich um ..." and Spanish "aqu’ se habla espa–ol" and
French "il s'agit de ...": some of these expressions are impersonal,
yet they take a quasi personal subject. In English perhaps they come
closest to those stative expressions using the verb "be" with a
participle so that they look passive but aren't really, e.g. "That
field is prepared for planting"--meaning, of course, NOT that the field
is IN PROCESS of being prepared, but that it is IN A STATE of
preparedness. In my review of LSJ listings for this sense I found it in
the middle/reflexive or "passive" aorist & future morphology in Plato,
Herodotus, and, one of the most striking instances of all, in
Aeschylus' _Agamemnon_, where it is said of the whole lineage of
Tantalus:
GENOS KEKOLLHTAI PROS ATAi "The clan is stuck fast upon doom."
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
</x-rich>
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