ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ: objective or subjective genitive?

[Stephen Carlson]

My 1996 copy does say subjective, as Andrew suggests. It does look like this was fixed.

Mine is copyrighted 1996 too, and there is no indication of a revised or corrected printing, though there must have been. If I am reading the printing information correctly on the copyright page, I have the 19th printing from 2007.

I suspect I have the first printing, there is no mention of an earlier printing on the copyright page that I can see. I know I got it in 1996 or 1997, I just verified that by searching the B-Greek archives.

There should be a row of numbers on the bottom of the copyright page. The left ascending ones are the year and the right descending ones the printing. You read the outside / lowest ones.

[Andrew Chapman]

The abridged version, called Basics of New Testament Syntax, copyright 2000, 'AER Edition January 2009', still has 'subjective' at page 54.

Andrew

[Jonathan Robie]

I suspect I have the first printing, there is no mention of an earlier printing on the copyright page that I can see. I know I got it in 1996 or 1997, I just verified that by searching the B-Greek archives.

There should be a row of numbers on the bottom of the copyright page. The left ascending ones are the year and the right descending ones the printing. You read the outside / lowest ones.

Here are the numbers:

96 97 98 99 / DH / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

[Stephen Carlson]

96 97 98 99 / DH / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

1st printing from 1996.

[cwconrad]

I think you know what ὁ βασιλεὺς Ἰσραήλ means. I don't think the metalanguage is helping you. The labels aren't a way to figure out what the text means, the labels just say how you decided to interpret it. At best, they can be a checklist of possibilities to consider. In most cases, if you pay close attention to the context and the subject matter, that is more helpful than the checklists.
....
So I turned to BDR for an authoritative answer, and read: "Division into objective genitive, subjective genitive, etc. is merely an attempt to emphasize some of the many possible uses of the adnominal genitive".

I realize that this thread has long outlived its clarification of the original question posed -- all for the sake of exposing the history of a typo in the earlier edition(s) of GGBB and its derivative abridgment. What I fear may have been lost in the wild-typo-pursuit is a key point that Jonathan has called attention to in the above citation from BDR (and BDF?). It seems to me that there are two or three good lessons to be learned here.

Thei intent underlying the organization and exposition of GGBB seems to have been providing guidelines for students of Biblical Greek to convert Greek as a coded form of English phraseology into proper English phraseology. I may conceivably be caricaturing that intent, but if it wasn't the intent, it seems to me the consequence of the pedagogy represented by GGBB. It is the bane of the grammar-translation pedagogy that it seems or is focused upon converting an alien mode of thought and expression into the familiar mode of thought and expression of the student's native tongue. Rather than learning to think in the manner of a Koine Greek-speaker one learns to decipher Koine Greek into formulations in one's native language. For several years now on B-Greek we have been having fun with each other at the expense of GGBB's "frog's hair split four ways" analysis of the Greek adnominal genitive, an analysis devolving ultimately into the "Aporetic Genitive" (the grammrians' equivalent to the Abbott-and-Costello "I don't know who's on third" punch-line.

The line cited from BDR says it all about the adnominal geniitive. This construction is not a bearer of any particular semantic distinction whatsoever but a marker of any sort of realtedness. As much as I have come to despise the neologisms of Linguistic jargon, I think that "polysemy" and "polysemous" are very useful terms. The adnominal genitive is "polysemous" just as the middle voice (ἑαυτικὴ διάθεσις) is "polysemous": it serves to indicate relatedness in any of a broad variety of kinds without specifying which one.

I think too that Jonathan's comment on metalanguage's usefulness is itself worth consideration. Understanding what an expression in Koine Greek means is a matter of intuition, not of analysis in terms formulated by a metalanguage. Rather the metalanguage assists us in discussing with each other how the expression in Kone Greek can bear the meaning that it does. The adnominal genitive in Greek is pretty much like an English prepositional phrase with "of" attached to a noun. We really don't need any metalanguage to help us decipher the meaning of expressions such as "the love of language" and "the language of love." We may say that "of language" represents an "objective" function of the prepositional phase "of language" and we may say that "of love" represents a "subjective" function of the prepositional phrase "of love" -- but we understand what the two phrases mean before we give any consideration to explaining their grammatical function.

[Andrew Chapman]

We really don't need any metalanguage to help us decipher the meaning of expressions such as "the love of language" and "the language of love." We may say that "of language" represents an "objective" function of the prepositional phase "of language" and we may say that "of love" represents a "subjective" function of the prepositional phrase "of love" -- but we understand what the two phrases mean before we give any consideration to explaining their grammatical function.

If you will bear with me trying to apply Wallace's way of classifying genitives to the above, I could recognise 'the love of language' immediately as an objective genitive, but I am not quite convinced that 'the language of love' is a subjective one. If 'language' is to be seen as a verbal noun then the verb must be 'speak' or 'communicate' or somesuch, and then we have some thought like 'love speaks' or 'love communicates', which is intelligible, and perhaps is a possible interpretation of 'the language of love'. But to me, 'the language of love' probably answers the question 'what type of language' and so the prepositional phrase 'of love' is fulfilling a descriptive, adjectival function - in fact one might use the term 'love language'.

Then again, when I see 'the language of love' I also understand the thought that love is a language, with its own semiotic structure, so to speak, in which case perhaps the genitive could be seen as appositional: the language that is love?

Andrew

[Stephen Hughes]

The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction.

I have been wondering how Keller's perception of the world changed when after the tap on the forehead, she realised there was language and that language could exist beyond the reality that she had previously lived in.

If you will bear with me trying to apply Wallace's way of classifying genitives to the above

May I ask you, Andrew, what you will achieve by doing that? What is the benefit of knowing what name every useage of the genitive has?

[David Lim]

We really don't need any metalanguage to help us decipher the meaning of expressions such as "the love of language" and "the language of love." We may say that "of language" represents an "objective" function of the prepositional phase "of language" and we may say that "of love" represents a "subjective" function of the prepositional phrase "of love" -- but we understand what the two phrases mean before we give any consideration to explaining their grammatical function.

If you will bear with me trying to apply Wallace's way of classifying genitives to the above, I could recognise 'the love of language' immediately as an objective genitive, but I am not quite convinced that 'the language of love' is a subjective one. If 'language' is to be seen as a verbal noun then the verb must be 'speak' or 'communicate' or somesuch, and then we have some thought like 'love speaks' or 'love communicates', which is intelligible, and perhaps is a possible interpretation of 'the language of love'. But to me, 'the language of love' probably answers the question 'what type of language' and so the prepositional phrase 'of love' is fulfilling a descriptive, adjectival function - in fact one might use the term 'love language'.

Then again, when I see 'the language of love' I also understand the thought that love is a language, with its own semiotic structure, so to speak, in which case perhaps the genitive could be seen as appositional: the language that is love?

I think you may be thinking of a different way of taking the phrase "the language of love", that is, "the language that is love". In that case I would say that it is an English idiom as I doubt the Greek genitive can be used that way. Instead, the Greek genitive attached to a noun phrase seems always to simply modify it, whether to specify it or to describe it. As I mentioned in another thread, a simple rephrasing that I think captures most of what little meaning the genitive-ness gives is as follows:
"the love of language" = "the love that pertains to language" which implies "the love that one has for language"
"the language of love" (the one others are assuming) = "the language that pertains to love" which implies "the language that love speaks"
"ο βασιλευς του Ισραηλ" = "the king that pertains to Israel" which implies "the king that rules Israel"
I would say that this is better than using labels like objective or subjective genitives because those characterizations don't clearly indicate that the relationship is actually strictly unidirectional, no matter how it may look after rephrasing according to the context and the relation between the words involved.

Here are some other examples that show that the English "of" (excluding the idiomatic uses) has about the same flexibility as the (non-idiomatic) Greek genitive:
"the God of Israel" ~ "the God that Israel believes in and worships"
"the God of my salvation" ~ "the God that gave me salvation"
"the God of my fathers" ~ "the God that my fathers worshipped"
"the trees of forests" ~ "the trees that are in forests"
"the forests of trees" ~ "the forests as collections of trees" (hmm this rephrasing uses "of" in exactly the same way...)
"the number of rows" ~ "the number that you get when you count the rows" (note that "a number of X" is an English idiom for "some X")
"row of numbers" (from Stephen 1) ~ "row consisting of numbers"
"mode of thought and expression" (from Carl) ~ "the mode by which it is thought and expressed"
"variety of kinds" (from Carl) ~ "variety in terms of kinds"
"matter of intuition" (from Carl) ~ "matter involving intuition"
"way of classifying ..." (from you) ~ "way to classify ..."
"the benefit of knowing" (from Stephen 2) ~ "the benefit obtained by knowing"

[Jonathan Robie]

"What kind of bird is that", she asked me.



"What bird do you mean?"

"That bird over there on the bird feeder."

"Tell me about that bird."

"The brown bird with the short, stubby beak, eating seeds from the bird feeder. I see them all the time, but I don't know what kind it is."

"What color is it?"

"It has a gray head, white cheeks, a black bib, a rust-colored neck. It's a pretty colorful bird. I guess it's probably a male."

"What does it sound like?"

"It's pretty noisy - oh, listen, that's what it sounds like! A chirping sound, sometimes with some chatter."

"How does it behave?"

"It flutters down to the bird feeder, sometimes it picks bugs off the grill of the car in the driveway. They hop around a lot, they are good fliers. Why aren't you telling me what kind of bird this is?"

"You already know what kind of bird it is. You are asking what we call this kind of bird. We call it a house sparrow."

[Jonathan Robie]

I think too that Jonathan's comment on metalanguage's usefulness is itself worth consideration. Understanding what an expression in Koine Greek means is a matter of intuition, not of analysis in terms formulated by a metalanguage.

Of course, a beginner has little intuition for Koine Greek, and none of us have the level of intuition that we have in our native language. Most of us are somewhere in between. So we have to find ways to educate that intuition.

I think the lists of categories can be used as a set of examples of kinds of things the genitive can mean. Don't bother with memorizing analytical terms and figuring out how to prove which category a genitive fits into, but reading through the examples is very helpful. The text that explains how to force this meaning into a particular category is sometimes much less helpful. When it's too forced, ignore the explanation and think about the meaning of the example.