Just a translator's note: "de" in Greek (always the second word in a
sentance) is a paragraph marker. As such it is really shown in English
by the indentation. But it "feels" funny if a Greek word is not shown
with an English word.
art
Greg Hellings wrote:
Vladimir,
I believe your problem can be resolved with a little expounding of
Greek grammar. Both of the depictions are actually correct. I would
tend to lean towards the markup you have from Sword as being "more"
correct, but allow me to explain it with the following:
The Greek, with the direct "interlinear" style translation under it reads:
tauta de autou enthumethentos
these things but he while thought
I don't usually work with Strongs, but if I can guess what Strongs is
doing here it comes down to this:
Word 1161 is the particle "de" which is loosely translated as "but"
although it simply means a continuation of the story, action or
thought and is equally well translated "and, so" etc.
Word 846 is probably actually "autou" - which in this case is the
genitive form of the pronoun "he."
Word 1760 is the genitive "enthumethentos" - the genitive participle
of "thought on."
Word 5023 is clearly the plural verb "tauta" which means "these" or
"these things."
When the genitive pronoun is combined with the genitive participle
(the words "autou enthumethentos") the result is what is called, in
Greek, the "genitive absolute." Normally when a noun appears in the
genitive it indicates possession of something, but when it is combined
with a participle, the result could mean almost anything. Most
translators would understand the phrase to mean "while he was
thinking" but genitive absolutes have to be translated a bunch of
different ways, all depending on the context. Sometimes it could
equally well be "because" or "after" or "before" or any other number
of meanings. The translator has to figure it out from the context.
So, essentially, the word "while" does not, strictly speaking, appear
in this passage. However, most of the time in your Bible that you see
the word "while" and sometimes even the word "because" and so on, the
Greek actually has this same exact construct. So the word "while"
could be thought of as either part of the noun (word 846) or as part
of the verb (word 1760). So both versions of the Strong's markup are
technically valid, but the one you get from Sword is more accurate.
Ideally, the word "while" would somehow be indicated as a supplied
word in the English translation, if the reader is supposed to be
working from the Greek. Many older KJV bibles had this feature by
means of italicizing words. However, for everyday readers, this
results in less clarity because they think that the italicized word
has greater importance, whereas the italics usually mean that the use
of this word was *more* of an interpretive decision than the words
around it. So you might say that the following is a better parsing of
the text:
1161 -> But, and, so
while -> understood from context, also valid as "because" or other
possible meanings
846 -> he
1760 -> thought on
5023 -> these things
Hope that helps more than it confuses. If you really want to learn
more, get a good Greek grammar that will teach you something about the
genitive absolute construct. Or, better yet, do that anyway and learn
some Greek so you can read the Bible in Greek... actually, I wouldn't
recommend that course of action; it takes too long and is usually too
time consuming even when have have learned Greek :).
--Greg
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