From: Harold R. Holmyard III (hholmyard@ont.com)
Date: Sat Jan 20 2001 - 11:53:31 EST
Dear Iver,
You say:
>The UBS Translators' Handbook and the majority of Bible translations
>favour your
>ASV and NET alternative and I would agree with it.
>There are strong grammatical reasons to take the first prepositional phrase in
>v. 2 (in the middle of its street) as a constituent of the sentence that
>begins
>with KAI in v. 1. The main argument is the conjoining word KAI which
>appears in
>v. 2 after the prepositional phrase. When KAI conjoins two elements they
>are at
>the same level. It can conjoin words, phrases or clauses/sentences, and in
>this
>text, the only reasonable suggestion is that it conjoins two sentences.
What do you mean that the *only reasonable suggestion* is a conjoining of
two sentences? What is wrong with the conjoining of "of its street" and "of
the river."
>The
>Semitic flavour of Revelation with all its sentence initial KAIs supports
>this.
Surely it could, but every sentence does not have to start with KAI.
>(As far as I can see the UBS and Nestle-Aland Greek texts were wrong in
>placing
>a full stop at the end of v. 2, but I do not know their arguments for such an
>interpretation. As I said above almost all translations, including UBS ones,
>disagree.)
Do you mean at the end of verse 1? Earlier you were talking about the break
between verse 1 and verse 2
>Concerning ENTEUQEN KAI EKEIQEN I would take them as substantive locatives
>with
>a word like "side" or "place" implied. The words "here" and "there" are
>deictic
>in relation to the speaker as are "this" and "that". "Here" means "this place
>where the speaker is" and "there" means "that place away from speaker".
>(This is
>universal linguistics, not just Greek grammar.) There is a similar
>expression in
>John 19:18 (as per Bauer) KAI [ESTAURWSAN] MET' AUTOU ALLOUS DUO ENTEUQEN KAI
>ENTEUQEN - and they crucified together with him two others on this side (from
>here) and on this side (from here). My guess is that John (the author) was
>standing in front of the crosses and did not consider one side to be nearer
>himself than the other, so in English this would be on either side (or on both
>sides). On the other hand, in Rev. 22, John is standing (in his vision) beside
>the angel on one side of the river, and therefore naturally refers to the side
>he is on as this side (seen from here) and the side he is not on as the other
>side (seen from there.)
Some of this reasoning could be gratuitous. The Johannine example can show
that the phrase was idiomatic to refer to either side of something. It is
not necessary to be so precise about "here" and "there." They can simply
represent the two sides.
>Since there is no article in front of XULON ZWHS it is not talking about a
>tree
>already known, and it is therefore not correct to translate it in English as
>"the tree".
That may not be true. Commonly known and used nouns sometimes lack the
definite article because they are well known. This may be the case with the
tree of life.
>Rather there is a life-tree on this side of the river and one on the
>other side. The fact that there was only one life-tree in the Garden of Eden
>does not allow us to jump to the conclusion that there is only one life-tree
>here. There were in fact two special trees in the Garden (apart from all the
>ordinary ones.) Gen 2:9. The tree of knowledge of evil and good is not
>needed in
>the new "Garden" (now a city), so it has been replaced with another tree of
>life. The NLT (New Living Tr.) is more accurate than the meaningless ASV
>and RSV
>when it says: "On each side of the river grew a tree of life", although I
>think
>it would have been slightly more accurate to say "There was a tree of life on
>this side of the river and one on the other side." If needed, it could be
>clarified to "There were two trees of life, one on this side of the river and
>one on the other side.
This is possible, but Jewish literature preserved the idea of the tree of
life, and continued to speak of it as one tree, to my knowledge. John could
be introducing a new idea, I suppose.
Yours,
Harold Holmyard
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