[b-greek] Re: Gnomic Aorist / Heb 7:2a

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sun Dec 10 2000 - 12:57:48 EST


At 5:28 PM +0100 12/10/00, Roe wrote:
>Carl Conrad wrote:
>
>> ... 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"
>
>[snip]
>
>> >hWi KAI DEKATHN APO PANTWN EMERISEN ABRAAM
>
>> 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
>> ... a one-time
>> happening, a historical event of a particular time and place.
>
>
>That was my inconclusive "feeling" about it... So, had the author
>wanted to express Whitehead's "immortality of past objective fact", what
>would he/she have used, the imperfect? Or is it at all possible to
>express this with the aorist?

The imperfect could express it as a habitual action in the past that need
not be continuing into the present. NUKTOS DE OIKOI HSQIOMEN "We used to
eat at home at night"--that is: the imperfect in that instance points to an
incipient or recurrent action with a past point of reference; although we
may no longer eat at home at night, we did at some point in the past
regularly do so. The imperfect, however, doesn't mean that the activity
doesn't continue to the present or isn't still going on--it could be that
we started eating during the night and haven't yet stopped; the imperfect
simply indicates that an incompleted action started in the past; it tells
nothing about whether or when the action may have stopped.

On the other hand the perfect could express it as well as could the aorist:
KAI hO LOGOS SARX EGENETO or Pilate's hO GEGRAFA GEGRAFA or even Jesus'
TETELESTAI; I think that Latin does this more definitively, as in Vergil's
FUIT ILIUM: "Troy was (but is no more) or Cicero's VIXERUNT "Their life is
over" (of the Catilinarian conspirators just executed).

At 5:12 PM +0000 12/10/00, Mark Wilson wrote:
>The "gnomic" of any tense is not morphologically encoded. To me, referring
>to a "Gnomic Aorist" seems awkward, and perhaps unintentionally misleading
>to those with little (like myself) or no Greek. I think we should refer to
>this as something like: "Gnomic Verbal Idea."
>
>What determines the gnomic sense is the context (this is larger than just
>the verbal idea). I think Carl's examples of the gnomic were right on; in
>each instance the context suggested the gnomic sense, not the morpheme.

There's no question that the Present Tense can commonly be used in a
"gnomic" sense, but I don't think we speak very commonly of a "Gnomic
Present"; we DO speak of a "Gnomic Aorist" because we think of Aorist
indicatives more generally as referring to a particular past event, whereas
when the Aorist is "gnomic" the focus of the assertion is on the timeless
truth rather than upon the past event.

>Carl, can you tell I've been reading Mari? :o )
>(In fact, I'm off the Emory today. Reading her book saves
>me about $80.00)

Looks like it, but you're being very cryptic--do you mean in a library?


--

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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