I still struggle sometimes trying to understand what’s happening grammatically with certain relative clauses, and the bolded clause below is one I can’t seem to get my head around:
Why is ὧν in the genitive case here? Is this an example of relative attraction? Or is it just to make it agree with τούτων (i.e. τῶν ζῴων) in the matrix clause?
“Of the animals whose blood is brought in (lit. Of which animals the blood is brought in) …, their bodies …” It’s ugly but it’s Greek. We could recast as “The bodies of the animals whose blood is brought in …,” but εἰσφέρεται is the salient word, to be contrasted with what happens to them outside. In less condensed form ὧν ζώων would be τῶν ζώων ὧν, but as it stands τούτων naturally picks up the opening relative.
Johannes your rewrite won’t work, since it eliminates the connection between τούτων and τὰ σώματα. Perhaps you meant not τούτων but τῶν (deleting the comma), matching the τoῖς in Smyth’s quoted sentence, though that too would spoil the sequence of thought.
The comma is misplaced yes. It should be τὰ σώματα τούτων ζῴων, ὧν τὸ αἷμα εἰσφέρεται περὶ ἁμαρτίας εἰς τὰ ἅγια διὰ τοῦ ἀρχιερέως, κατακαίεται ἔξω τῆς παρεμβολῆς. What I have done is taken the relative clause which occurs before the antecedent and inserted it after the antecedent, but grammatically the sentence is doing exactly the same thing as the original.
So what you’ve done is shuffle the words around. But you’ve deprived τούτων of the function that it served in the original sentence, where it referred back to ὧν at the outset.
