From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sun Dec 10 2000 - 09:51:27 EST
At 1:39 PM +0100 12/10/00, Roe wrote:
>Dear B-Greekers,
>
>On November 16, Carl Conrad responded to a very general enquiry:
>
>> ... an aorist indicative may ... refer to
>> something that has happened in the past and happens repeatedly
>> (gnomic aorist).
>
>
>And on December 7, Kimmo Huovila responded to comments Mark Wilson's had
>forwarded:
>
>> ... Gnomic aorists are still perfective. This is
>> the difference from gnomic presents, which are imperfective.
>
>
>I wonder about the function of the indicative aorist: whether a gnomic
>aorist can signify past time -- i.e., whether a gnomic aorist can refer
>to something that repeatedly happened in the past, but no longer does.
It seems to me that such a notion is excluded by definition; a "gnomic"
aorist expresses a proverbial "timeless" truth; what happened repeatedly in
the past but no longer does must fall into the category of what Whitehead
once called "the immortality of past objective fact"--but that is
fundamentally different from saying "the sun has risen in the morning"
(ANEDU ho hHLIOS PRWI)--a fact, not only of this morning or yesterday but a
timeless truth. I would think that the "law" formulated 'definitively'
after careful experimentation has validated a hypothesis would be stated in
Greek in a gnomic aorist: this is the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth about water, as demonstrated by experimentation, it has
frozen, i.e. does freeze, at 32 degrees F. The same might be said of what
my fifth-grade teacher told my class that she was taught by her New Orleans
'Irish Channel' schoolteacher: "IS is a voib: as long as you live and a
thousand years after you're dead, IS is a voib." It is a timeless fact.
>My example text is Hebrews 7:2a:
>
>hWi KAI DEKATHN APO PANTWN EMERISEN ABRAAM
>
>**Totally apart from the context** (which leads me to think the writer
>is referring to a one-time act of giving a tenth, to Melchezidek), does
>the writer's choice of the indicative aorist EMERISEN signify a one-time
>act, or does it merely allow it?
>
>I would think that if the writer had wanted to say that Abram
>repeatedly, or customarily, gave a tenth to Melchezidek, he would have
>chosen the indicative imperfect EMERIZEN.
I don't think EMERISEN in Heb 7:2a is a gnomic aorist at all; I think it is
simply a factual statement about a past event. Why would anyone even think
of this particular aorist as an instance of a gnomic aorist? Am I missing
something about it? I don't see this even as something that "repeatedly
happened in the past, but no longer does"--but rather as a one-time
happening, a historical event of a particular time and place.
--
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/
---
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