ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

The closest in 2009 edition (A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint) that Muraoka gets to defining κεφαλή as referring to a position of authority is this:

Definition #4: he who or that which plays a leading role.

And even then, the context of his entry makes it clear that “leading” refers to prominence not authority. The full entry for this sense looks like this:

First, note that “in a societal group” is considered as questionable by Muraoka (the “?”).

Let’s look at these cited examples more closely:

Numbers 1:2: Λάβετε ἀρχὴν πάσης συναγωγῆς υἱῶν Ισραηλ κατὰ συγγενείας αὐτῶν κατ̓ οἴκους πατριῶν αὐτῶν κατὰ ἀριθμὸν ἐξ ὀνόματος αὐτῶν κατὰ κεφαλὴν αὐτῶν, πᾶς ἄρσην

The Hebrew text reads, “head by head,” which the LXX translates as “κατὰ κεφαλὴν αὐτῶν.” And this may very well be a reasonable Greek translation of the Hebrew: “by their heads,” as in count them by their heads. And even if it refers to “heads of families,” is the emphasis on “heads of families” as leaders of families or “heads of families” as representatives of families? Which would be more likely with regard to a census?

Numbers 1:20 is identical to this.

Deuteronomy 28:13

καταστήσαι σε κύριος ὁ θεός σου εἰς κεφαλὴν καὶ μὴ εἰς οὐράν, καὶ ἔσῃ τότε ἐπάνω καὶ οὐκ ἔσῃ ὑποκάτω, ἐὰν ἀκούσῃς τῶν ἐντολῶν κυρίου τοῦ θεοῦ σου, ὅσα ἐγὼ ἐντέλλομαί σοι σήμερον φυλάσσειν καὶ ποιεῖν

Here the context refers to Israel position among the nations. If they obey him, they will be the head (εἰς κεφαλὴν) not the tail (μὴ εἰς οὐράν). No authority here. Just Head/Body imagery. This image returns in 43-44:

ὁ προσήλυτος, ὅς ἐστιν ἐν σοί, ἀναβήσεται ἐπὶ σὲ ἄνω ἄνω, σὺ δὲ καταβήσῃ κάτω κάτω, 44 οὗτος δανιεῖ σοι, σὺ δὲ τούτῳ οὐ δανιεῖς, οὗτος ἔσται κεφαλή, σὺ δὲ ἔσῃ οὐρά.
The foreigner who is among you will go up against you, very high over you, but you will be brought down, very low. He will lend to you, but to him, you will not lend. He will be the head, but you will be the tail.

Authority? Or Social Status? Definitely the latter.

Isaiah 9:14: καὶ ἀφεῖλεν κύριος ἀπὸ Ισραηλ κεφαλὴν καὶ οὐράν, μέγαν καὶ μικρὸν ἐν μιᾷ ἡμέρᾳ, 14 πρεσβύτην καὶ τοὺς τὰ πρόσωπα θαυμάζοντας( αὕτη ἡ ἀρχή) καὶ προφήτην διδάσκοντα ἄνομα( οὗτος ἡ οὐρά).
And the Lord will cut off from Israel the head and the tail, great and small in one day, elders and the τοὺς τὰ πρόσωπα θαυμάζοντας [?] (these are the head) and the prophets teaching falsely (these are the tail).

This one is a little more difficult – and I’m not sure how to translate τοὺς τὰ πρόσωπα θαυμάζοντας (literally: those who marvel before faces??? Not sure.). In any case, considering that “leader” is not a natural Greek meaning for the word and there’s nothing explicit in the text that would suggest “leader,” I’ll default against it for this one. But as always, comments on this one are welcome.

Isaiah 19:15: καὶ οὐκ ἔσται τοῖς Αἰγυπτίοις ἔργον, ὃ ποιήσει κεφαλὴν καὶ οὐράν, ἀρχὴν καὶ τέλος.
And there is no work for the Egyptians that they can do – head or tail, beginning or end.

Actually, this verse is rather suggestive that κεφαλὴ could potentially mean “beginning,” which is suspiciously similar to “source.” Semantically speaking, it’s only a very small metaphorical step.

Psalm 17:44 ῥύσῃ με ἐξ ἀντιλογιῶν λαοῦ, καταστήσεις με εἰς κεφαλὴν ἐθνῶν, λαός, ὃν οὐκ ἔγνων, ἐδούλευσέν μοι,
You will deliver me from the arguments of the people. You will appoint me as head of nations; a people whom I did not know, served me.

I’d say that this is our best candidate for “leader” we’ve seen yet, but thus far, one out of seven isn’t that great.

Psalm 117:22: λίθον, ὃν ἀπεδοκίμασαν οἱ οἰκοδομοῦντες, οὗτος ἐγενήθη εἰς κεφαλὴν γωνίας
A stone that the builders rejected, this became as the head of the corner

Nope, nothing here. I’m not even sure why it’s listed in the “in a societal group” section…

This marks a distinct change from the 2002 edition of the lexicon, which looked like this:

What do you think? Is the change for the better or worse? Why?

What citations would you have included here that he leaves out?

James Spinti of Eisenbrauns just posted the following to the B-Greek list:

I just received Danker’s new Concise Lexicon and thought you might like
to know a bit more about it.

In the preface, he says that it is not an abridgement of BDAG, although
it owes much to it. It is also not a reworking of his earlier (1983)
Concise Lexicon. Rather, it is a fresh work that owes a bit to many
sources, including a modern Greek, a Ms. Krug, who offered insights that
he found helpful (this follows nicely with the recent thread on Greek NT
scholarship by modern Greeks). In fact, they even changed the title page from
the original  to include her name.

The entries are short, with a brief etymology (where known), a
definition, glosses, and references for the gloss. As befitting a work
of this sort, many irregular verb forms are listed, referencing the
correct lexical form.

I especially liked where he stated in the preface that Greek does not
exist to serve the translator and is unapologetic for coining
neo-logisms where English is inadequate.

This work certainly won’t replace BDAG, but it isn’t intended to. At
$55.00, it is more affordable for the beginning student, but I would
hope that whoever purchases it would eventually/soon use BDAG also.

(reposted with permission & with corrections, original HERE and HERE)

A couple days ago, I wrote:

Why in the world should we be translating generics with a “generic” he or man when even the people who claim that English hasn’t changed accidentally misinterpret English generics as only having a male referent???

Nathan Smith was interested in examples to back up this question

Joel thought such an approach might be valid for familiar phrases, but even then he wouldn’t consider it acceptable.

I agree with Joel – and I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you at all…

As for Nathan, yes, I do have a very prominent example. One that appears in a book that had the major thesis arguing masculine gender generics should always be represented in translation if possible: The Gender Neutral Bible Controversy byVern S. Poythress and Wayne Grudem (you can download it HERE, if you’d like). In this book, Grudem & Poythess in their discussion of ANER, failure to recognize the word “man” from the 19th century as generic even though, in context, it clearly is:

The Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon, Ninth Edition with Supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), gives the following meanings for anēr:

I. man, opposed to woman (anthropoi being man as opposed to beast). II. man, opposed to god. III. man, opposed to youth, unless the context determines the meaning … but anēr alone always means a man in the prime of life, esp. warrior. IV. man emphatically, man indeed. V. husband. VI. Special usages [several idioms are given] (p. 138).

It is significant that neither of these two standard lexicons indicates that the word loses its male marking in any of its usages.  In the present controversy, we should be suspicious of any attempts to overthrow such well-established boundaries to the range of meanings of a word, especially in a time when major forces in the culture are pressing us to eliminate male oriented language (and therefore male markings on words!), and
especially if these attempts are accompanied by no new data, but only appeal to the same old data that scholars have seen for centuries (Page 309).

I’ve bolded the words in question. “Man,” in this case, is generic. If this entry being written today, the sense would most definitely be listed as, “II. human, opposed to god” rather than “man.” But Gruden & Poythress write in their following paragraph as if this instance of “man” is a male referring word rather than a generic. And they are wrong on this point.

So, why do we claim that these sorts of generics are still understandable today, when we don’t understand them today?

Why are they acceptable in translation?

I’ve finished two books that I plan on writing reviews for:

Grammatical and Exegetical Study of New Testament Verbs of Transference: A Case Frame Guide to Interpretation and Translation (Library of New Testament Studies) by Paul Danove

Articular Infinitives in the Greek of the New Testament: On the Exegetical Benefit of Grammatical Precision (New Testament Monographs) by Denny Burk

But I cannot decide which I should review first. The two books are very different animals in terms of method & focus – much of which can be recognized from the titles. But there is a significant relationship between them in that Burk makes some incredibly critical comments about Case Grammar, the linguistic framework that eventually morphed into Construction Grammar which Danove uses in this most recent book.

So what do you think:

So I sat down to finish up the last two posts reviewing lexical entries in Muraoka’s new lexicon today. They have been sitting around in my Windows Live Writer half written for a few weeks now.

But much to my dismay, they were gone when I opened it up this afternoon. At some point, it seems that I accidentally deleted them.

Sigh.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to take the time to redo them again. So if you were looking forward to the rest of that review, well, don’t keep your hopes up.

Sorry.

Sometimes the glosses provided in lexicons are just silly. And this isn’t a criticism of just LEH. All lexicons do this at some point – there are some funny definitions in BDAG if you’re willing to take the time to look.

And in defense of LEH here, the gloss is originally LSJ’s. BDAG is better, as is GELS’.

In any case, its the gloss suggested for ἀναβοάω.

Here’s the entry:

Now “to cry out” is fine, though it doesn’t fit all contexts.

But please, tell me, if you will, how in the world can you not should “aloud”???

What glosses or definitions have you come across in lexicons that are silly or completely obvious? There should really be a list of these things.

In 2 Samuel 17:28, we find an interesting list of nouns that cannot translate directly into English:

28 ἤνεγκαν δέκα κοίτας καὶ ἀμφιτάπους καὶ λέβητας δέκα καὶ σκεύη κεράμου καὶ πυροὺς καὶ κριθὰς καὶ ἄλευρον καὶ ἄλφιτον καὶ κύαμον καὶ φακὸν 29 καὶ μέλι καὶ βούτυρον καὶ πρόβατα καὶ σαφφωθ βοῶν καὶ προσήνεγκαν τῷ Δαυιδ καὶ τῷ λαῷ τῷ μετ̓ αὐτοῦ φαγεῖν, ὅτι εἶπαν Ὁ λαὸς πεινῶν καὶ ἐκλελυμένος καὶ διψῶν ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ.

The issue relates to how English and Greek treat certain types of nouns. In English, we have a variety of noun classes. Two classes that we’re interested in today are Mass and Count nouns. Count nouns are nouns that you can modify with a numeral:

1 cat, 2 cats, 5 ducks, 37 coins, 39 Greek grammars, 32 Greek lexicons, and so forth.

Mass nouns cannot be modified in this way:

10 rices, 5 waters, 1 barley.

You get the idea. And you can probably tell as an English speaker that all of these nouns have similar semantic properties, right? We “count” mass nouns by putting them in a genitive phrase modifying a count noun:

5 gallons of water, 22 lbs of rice (or 10 kg, if you will), 3 jars of honey, etc.

And we shouldn’t expect this system to be universal across languages. It isn’t. The Greek sentence above has a number of nouns whose English “equivalents” don’t quite match.

πυροὺς – wheat

κριθὰς – barley

ἄλευρον – meal

ἄλφιτον – grain

κύαμον – bean

φακὸν – lentil

μέλι – honey

βούτυρον – butter

Now some observations:

There seem to be two main differences between Greek mass nouns as English ones. The first of these is pluralization: πυρός (wheat) is a mass noun in Greek, but it can also be pluralized. Something that “wheat” cannot do in English. The same is true for κριθή (barley), ἄλευρον (meanl/wheat flour), and ἄλφιτον (grain), μέλι (honey), βούτυρον (butter). The English equivalent of this appears to be “some wheat,” “some barley,” and so on. Granted there are a few mass nouns in English that can be pluralized: oats is one that seems to allow that.

The other difference is lexical. There are a number of words that in English are more like count nouns than mass nouns. Beans can be counted. Why that’s the case, I have no idea. Is there an idiom somewhere for counting beans? But in Greek, κύαμον (bean), it is definitely a mass noun. Its used collectively in the singular in Ezekiel 4:9 and as a plural mass noun in Pausanias, Description of Greece (book 1, chapter 37).

As for Lentils…they’re kind of like oats in their mass/count semantic properties. Perhaps it would be best to say English also has a mixed category. Technically one would say that we can count lentils and oats, but it just doesn’t happen in normal usage – perhaps beans are in this one too.

The preeminent example:

LSJ:

παραζώνη, ἡ, girdle, Lxx2Ki.18.11.

LEH:

παραζώνη,-ης N1F 0-1-0-0-0=1

2 Sm 18,11

belt; neol.

GELS:

Anyone want to guess…?

Wayne Leman at the Better Bibles Blog has a great post about common language in translation that’s worth taking a few moments to read and comment:

Common language Bible versions

And Rod Decker has found and announced Danker’s new concise lexicon, which will also be discussed at SBL this fall:

New: Danker, Shorter Lexicon (U/Chg, 2009)

To get a better idea of the strengths & weaknesses of Muraoka’s new lexicon (Eisenbrauns – $128; Amazon $132 – actually the cheapest from “Scholar’s Source is Eisenbrauns, so you might as well support them directly) compared to the other lexicon used for the Hellenistic period, we’re going to do some comparisons between BDAG, LSJ, LEH, & the new GELS.

A couple of notes: Now, I know there are significant issues with coverage of various words since LEH & GELS are the only Lexicons completely focused on the LXX (which in of itself has its issues, cf. HERE). I’m using digital editions of BDAG, LSJ, & LEH and will provide a picture of GELS. This also means that LSJ has the revised 1996 supplement integrated back into the main body (only the Logos edition does this). Finally, the word we’re looking at are not entirely random. For one, they all appear in all four of these lexicons and they also all appear in the second half of 2 Samuel/Reigns/Kingdoms.

After I look at four or five entries in individual posts, I’ll post my more general observations and conclusions about GELS in relation to its brothers and sisters.

BDAG:

LSJ:

LEH:

GELS:

(pardon the curve from the page).

Notes:

Structure: BDAG & LSJ provide two main divisions for this wordform: “child” / “little boy” versus “young slave.” LEH makes no distinction structural distinction beyond its three provided translation glosses. GELS gives three divisions: a) young male child: “boy” b) young male: of working age – foreman and c) childhood.

Comments: 1) LEH does nothing to make distinct separate lexemes and senses other than provide multiple translation glosses. I’m rather cynical about exactly how helpful this is for understanding the usage of a word. 2) It’s striking that GELS does not provide an explicit equivalent definition that parallel’s BDAG & LSJ’s “young slave” and LEH’s “servant.” See below in my comments on the Definitions.

Definitions: BDAG & GELS are only lexicons that provide actual definitions – though this is less relevant on this entry since the cognitive concept of “child” tends to be relatively stable across languages. This is one of the few instances where “gloss” and “definition” are not that different in practice. With that said, there is still a significant difference in methodology.

Comments: 1) This first lexical entry doesn’t provide much clarity in terms of the superiority of definitions (BDAG & GELS) over standard translation glosses (LSJ & LEH). LSJ, LEH and GELS provide a usage that BDAG does not suggest ἐκ παιδαρίου from childhood (though LSJ provides the gloss “from a child,” but if you look at the text HERE, you’ll see that “childhood” is clearly the sense). Though in defense of BDAG, this phrase does not appear in the NT, Apostolic Fathers, Josephus, Philo, or Pseudepigrapha. It only occurs once in the LXX, though since its also in Plato, I’d be willing to bet that it does occur elsewhere in Hellenistic literature.

2) In this instance, LEH does not appear to be completely dependent upon LSJ for its glosses, a charge it has received elsewhere. Its first two glosses seems to come directly from LSJ, which has the exact same first two glosses, “little boy” & “child.”

3) As for GELS and its definition, “young male: of working age,” my guess is that Muraoka does not view the lexeme as distinct enough to go beyond this definition. Perhaps he views this second meaning for παιδάριον as semantically broad enough to encapsulate “servant/slave,” since the references he cites (Ruth 2.5, 6) fit would fit both his definition as well as BDAG, LSJ, & LEH.

Citations/References: BDAG provides 5 references to the LXX, 2 references to the NT, 1 for Josephus, several Pseudepigrapha citations and several from before the Hellenistic period. It also refers to the papyri generally with “Pap,” & “Oft. pap.” LSJ cites (not surprisingly) a variety of authors, mostly from the 4-6 centuries BC. It gives the fewest references for the relevant historical period with only one: PPetr.2p.128 – iii B.C. LSJ also gives the only late reference of any of the lexicons as well: with another papyri: POxy.3960.28 – A.D. 621). LEH refers only to the LXX, providing 12 occurrences – though also only LEH provides statistics with occurrences per section of the LXX (234). Finally, GELS cites 10 LXX references with another two with semantic parallels. GELS also refers the reader to SIG3 1163.5.

Comments: 1) Had you been in the room as I looked through the citations of primary sources, you would have seen me visibly disappointed. Only LSJ actually cites any papyri for this word – and then only one for the very early Hellenistic period. With that said, I suppose its to be expected. LSJ is the only lexicon of the four that claims to deal broadly with Greek texts. The other three have limited and specific group of texts. Personally, I don’t find it helpful and continue to dream of a complete lexicon of Hellenistic Greek. Right now BDAG is the closest we can get. At the very least, with its, “pap.” and “Oft. pap.” readers are aware that the word in common in the papyri (which isn’t surprising). If it wasn’t for the fact that I also have MM digitally as well and it only takes half a second to pull it up, I’d be annoyed to have to pull another book out. But its there that we find papyri references for the Hellenistic period.

2) I don’t really care either way for LEH’s statistical information. I prefer the actual definitions of GELS or references to occurrences outside of the LXX over LEH’s statistics.

Bibliography: BDAG lists G Simpson’s dissertation (Semantic Study of Words for Young Person, Servant and Child in the Septuagint and Other Early Koine Greek, diss. Sydney ’76), New Documents 1, Schmidt (Synonymik), DELG, MM, & TW (TDNT). LSJ provides no specialized bibliography. LEH lists Scholl 1983 9-12.15; Spicq 1978b, 220-224; Stanton 1988, 476-477; Wevers 1993, 567; & MM. GELS lists Schmidt (Synonymik), Shipp (Modern Greek Evidence for the Ancient Greek Vocabulary), New Documents 1, and Muraoka, 2001a. Separate from the bibliographic section, GELS also lists SIG3 1163.5

Comments: 1) SIG3 is not listed in GELS’ abbreviations. Assuming that this refers to Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum 3rd edition, ed. WDittenberger 4 vols. 1915–24 (which is reasonable), it is also not in the Bibliography. 2) No bibliography is complete. If I want to read all the literature on this word, I’d have to dig through three of these lexicons for sources and then go from there. This is less than helpful.

Other Comments: 1) In terms of derivational/etymological information, only BDAG & LSJ mention that this particular lexeme is a diminutive of παῖς.  2) LEH is the only lexicon that explicitly provides the information “Noun, Second Declension, Neuter.” 3) GELS does provide an abbreviation for the gender instead of the traditional citation of the article following the noun (cf. BDAG & LSJ). 4) Only GELS provides a helpful number of references to semantically related words, which is incredibly important for understanding the semantic range of a word. This functions as a very helpful bridge from the traditional lexicon to lexicons arranged semantically such as Louw & Nida.