From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 11 2000 - 06:51:41 EST
At 9:17 PM -0600 1/10/00, Juan Stam wrote:
>Greetings! I have a question about the Greek of Rev 7:4-8. Recently Aune &
>Beale have both insisted that "of of (EK) the tribes of Israel" etc must be
>partitive, so that the 144,000 and each of the groups of 12,000 should be
>seen over against the larger group of which they are a part. How much force
>does this argument from EK with the genitive carry in this passage? Could
>it also mean "12,000 members of Judah" etc (wtih no intended contrast to the
>resto f that tribe), or "12,000 for Judah", representing Judah, 12,000
>Judahites. If it is partitive, it would be important the determine what
>larger group the author is thinking of, of which they are a part.
I think that in fact we have an initial hEKATON TESSERAKONTA TESSERES
CILIADES used with a PARTITIVE genitive EK PASHS FULHS hUIWN ISRAHL, where
the key word for our purposes is PASHS: the 144,000 are drawn "from every
tribe of the children of Israel"; what we are then given in sequence is the
constitutive group from each of the tribes contributing to the 144,000
total. I can't see how the sequence here can be understood in any other
way. Actually the author is consistent in using EK + genitive for the
partitive usage: note 7:9 IDOU OCLOS POLUS ... EK PANTOS EQNOUS KAI FULWN
KAI LAWN KAI GLWSSWN ... and 7;13 KAI APEKRIQH hEIS EK TWN PRESBUTERWN
LEGWN MOI ... This usage of EK + genitive looks very much to me like a
Latinism (cf. UNUS EX MILITIBUS, "one of the soldiers").
>A similar problem arises with 14:4: if the 144,000 are "firstfruits", must
>we infer from that a larger group as the full harvest?
>
>Thanks in advance for your opinions,
It's good that you put it this way: that it is a matter of opinions rather
than any general consensus on questions such as these. My own opinion is
that the successive tableaux of this book are not meant to be understood as
offering any sort of precise eschatological timetable but as shifting
kaleidoscopic images of eschatological events wherein the figures depicted
and the numbers as well are symbolic and allusively drawn from the entire
tradition of Israel's literature and experience. This is not a forum proper
for discussion of the interpretation of Revelation as a whole, but my own
opinion is that it would be a mistake to attempt too precise a coordination
between the images and numbers of any one tableau in the entire book with
the images and numbers of all the other tableaux.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
--- B-Greek home page: http://sunsite.unc.edu/bgreek You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu] To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-329W@franklin.oit.unc.edu To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:40:53 EDT