I am new here having just joined today. I am working to acquire some facility in Koine Greek. I already have some facility with Hebrew and have just begun with Latin.
I am working my through and greatly enjoying Genesis in the LXX and there is something that puzzles me and I wondered if anyone can explain it. This is from Gen. 11:13
My question surrounds the phrase: καὶ ἔζησεν Καινὰν μετὰ τὸ γεννῆσαι αὐτὸν τὸν Σάλα.
I know that the phrase means as a whole, but am interested in how αυτον is functioning here.
Is αυτον here functioning as an object of γεννησαι (αυτον being in the accusative) so that it is paired up with the article to make αυτον τον Ζαλα or is it functioning in some way to express a “posessive” relationship with μετα το γεννησαι to indicate something like “after his (αυτον) begetting”;–a kind of equivalent to the Hebrew הולידו
, which is an infinitive construct with 3ps possessive suffix. Though it would seem logical to me in my ignorance then to expect a genitive rather than an accusative, though I do realise my puzzlement probably arises from my ignorance of Greek idioms somewhere as there is no exact one-to-one correspondence between any language and another.
Good question. You’ve nearly got it. αυτόν is not the object but the subject of γεννῆσαι.
μετὰ τὸ γεννῆσαι αὐτὸν τὸν Σάλα is a prepositional phrase meaning “after he (αυτὸν) begot Sala.” τὸ is the neuter article, here accusative, governed by μετά “after”; and τὸ in turn governs the infinitive γεννῆσαι, which has—as infinitives often do—both an accusative subject (αυτόν, i.e. Kainan) and an accusative object (τὸν Σάλα). τὸ γεννῆσαι αὐτὸν τὸν Σάλα is a noun phrase (a common function of τό).
We’ve just been told ἔζησεν Καινὰν ἑκατὸν τριάκοντα ἔτη, καὶ ἐγέννησεν τὸν Σάλα “Kainan lived for 130 years and sired Sala” (i.e. at age 130, I presume this means) and now we get the continuation: “and after he sired Sala (μετὰ τὸ γεννῆσαι αὐτὸν τὸν Σάλα [this could also be translated “after his siring of Sara,” but the construction is quite different] he lived for 330 years …”.
One of the problems all language learners face is trying to fit strange constructions into our mental framework of how a language “should” work. Infinitives that take accusatives as subjects rather than objects is definitely on that list. When I first came across infinitives with articles (expressing intent) that looked weird because we just don’t do that in English, nor in Hebrew. It takes a while to wrap one’s head around this stuff. Sometimes we have to stop analysing it too much and just accept it en-bloc and not try to break it down too much into its constituent parts. Sometimes things are just the way that they are and that’s it. Even what we call the accusative does not have to function in another language quite the way we think of it in English. πάροικός εἰμι ἐν γῇ ἀλλοτρίᾳ, it takes a while to adjust . . . .
Thank you both for this thread, which was an eye-opener for me, too, for those exact reasons that @thestuffedowl explains. An accusative as the subject of a verb? Well, well. Whatever next!
Well let’s not go overboard over this. We’re talking of the accusative as the subject of an infinitive, and there’s nothing weird about that, it’s perfectly regular, and extremely common. Even in English we can say “I believe him to be an idiot” (Lat. credo eum esse stultum, Gk. νομίζω αὐτὸν εἶναι μῶρον). The acc.&inf. is one of the commonest constructions in Greek and even more so in Latin.
