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BBG workbook chapter 9 line 14 (second edition)

Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2003 2:04 am
by Bert
This line reads as follows; "[size=150]ἐν τοῖς λόγοις δαυὶδ τοῖς ἐσχάτοις ἐστὶν ὁ ἀριθμὸς υἱῶν λευὶ ἀπὸ εἰκοσαετοῦς καὶ ἐπάνω[/size]
This sentence means something like; "by the last words of David, this is the number of the the sons of Levi, from twenty years old and over."
My question is; I have to supply the pronoun 'this' in order to make sense of this line. Without having the context of this sentence, can I know for sure that I supplied the right word? I tried translating at first having 'the number' as the subject (the number is ... ) but I could not find a word in the nominative to fill in the blank.
I feel a little uncomfortable just adding a word. If the context indicated the possibility, would it be grammatically possible to add the word 'high' (...the number of the sons of Levi is high...)?

Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2003 8:05 am
by mingshey
Searching in the Blue Letter Bible(http://www.blueletterbible.org) the quote is from 1Ch 23:27. :)

I hope it helps. Anyway it's a translation of a hebrew sentence...

Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2003 10:22 am
by Skylax
Literal translation is "The number of sons... is in the last words (or "discourses", or something)...". We can translate the ἐστί as "there is".

Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2003 1:54 am
by Bert
Skylax wrote: We can translate the ἐστί as "there is".
Is this a common thing that the pronoun (there, this, that, etc) is implied with this verb?

Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2003 3:11 am
by Paul
Hi Bert,

In Greek every verb is a complete sentence. Its stem is the predicate, its ending the subject.

After Monro, in the sentence ἐς‐τι, the predicate ἐς means 'is', the subject τι means 'it' (or 'he', 'she'). Similarly, in the sentence ἤλθο‐μεν, the predicate ἤλθο means 'came', the subject μεν means 'we'.

He then notes that "..the Endings of a Verb may always be translated by Personal Pronouns..". Obviously, 'there' is not a personal pronoun, but it's not much of a stretch from 'it is' to 'there is'.

Cordially,

Paul

Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2003 3:16 am
by mingshey
Bert, I remember the verb εἰμί also means "exist".
Jesus said πρὶν ἀβραὰμ γενέσθαι ἐγῶ εἰμί(Jn 8:58 ).

Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2003 3:17 pm
by klewlis
Yes, it is quite common, and you don't need to feel bad about putting in the "extra" word. :)