Re: Ephesians 5:31 - "cleave to"

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 30 1998 - 16:44:37 EDT


At 9:32 AM -0700 7/30/98, Eric Weiss wrote:
>Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
>> 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 compuuter 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 philosoophy major's determination to call "philosopher's fatigue" the aetiological reference to "God" in explanations of phenomena);
>
>One reason I raised my question was that, if it were a middle/reflexive, I would have expected the future middle form (SOMAI, etc.) rather than the future passive (QHS) form. Is it that KOLLAW/PROSKOLLAW in the future is "deponent" (I know this is not the correct term, based on what you've written before - what I mean to say/ask is: in its future stem, does PROSKOLLAW take the passive morphology as its primary form and hence there is no typical "middle" future form for this verb?)

Sorry, this is the problem with the %%##@&&** traditional terminology. In the traditional terminology, KOLLAW/PROSKOLLAW is a "passive deponent"--which means that it'll have -QHN forms in the aorist and -QHSOMAI forms in the future.

>Also, by "divine passive," since I couldn't figure out why what looks like the simple weqatal of DaBaQ ("and he will cleave to") was changed in the LXX so the implied subject was God ("and he will be joined to" - by YHWH, presumably), I supposed that for some reason the translator saw God at work here and thus decided to translate it with a future passive.>

No, I just don't think it's passive at all. I really do need to revise my little essay on the vagaries of the middle/reflexive voice. My basic proposition, however, is a simple one: (1) the -MAI/-SAI/-TAI endings are fundamentally middle/reflexive in meaning and only secondarily may they take a passive sense when that is particularly appropriate; (2) the athematic aorist forms in -QHN (or -HN) from which are formed futures in -QHSOMAI (or -HSOMAI) are really later developing forms that carry this same middle/reflexive meaning; (3) the traditional way in which voice gets taught in both classical Attic and in NT grammars tends to associate "passive" meanings fundamentally with both the -MAI/-SAI/-TAI endings and the -QHN/-QHSOMAI endings--with the consequence that when one encounters, sooner or later (but more likely sooner than later) a form in -QH or -QHSETAI, one's first inclination is to think that must be a passive--and it "ain't necessarily so."



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