Non-imperatives in Romans 12:9-13.

Why can’t we translate the non-imperative clauses in Romans 12:9-13 as something other than imperatives? I don’t see any reason why not. In fact, I believe that translating these non-imperative forms as commands puts too much emphasis on our human effort that just isn’t in the text at this point. The introduction of 14 commands in this passage also has the effect of hiding the more relevant theme that must be continuing in this passage of the Spirit’s control of our minds (cf. Rom. 8:4ff; 12:2,6). The tension within the ethics of the New Testament is that we are frequently commanded to do what we are only able to do through the gift of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The pages of the New Testament do also give plain descriptions of what Spirit-regenerated life looks like, and these should not all be reduced to the rhetoric of direct instructions.

Understood descriptively, vv. 9-13 offer a detailed picture of what love looks like after the preceding discussion of gifts (analagous to 1 Cor. 12-13). It is not a series of orders, but it would have been heard as an attractive description of what love does. Certainly this should motivate us to those actions, but the real power behind any of these loving behaviors is the control of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. These aren’t just mitigated commands. The expository nature of the text leaves more room for figuring in the role of the Spirit.

The real difficulty is how to translate this passage into English when there are some surprising subject-verb agreement features of the Greek text that can’t be automatically carried over into English. The first phrase says “Love (singular) [is] unhypocritical (singular),” but the following supporting phrases are all plural verbal participles (e.g. “abhorring (plural) evil, clinging (plural) to the good…”).

I think the main reason all our English translations go the way of expressing all 14 of these clauses as commands where there isn’t a single imperative verb is this: in trying to do justice to the apparent discrepancy of the lack of number agreement between the first singular clause and the following plural participles, making them all commands apparently solves this problem in English.  By supplying an implied command (“let be”) for the first clause (“let love be unhypocritical”), there is no longer any lack of agreement between the subject of the first clause and the assumed plural “you” subject of all the following participles. The subject now is always ‘you’.

The big problem, however, is that the grammatical subject of this whole paragraph is ‘love’. The traditional English solution loses that and shifts the entire focus to ‘you’. A second person plural subject is not expressed in any form in any of these 14 clauses in vv. 9-13 (nor in the previous 5 verses).

A better understanding of the apparent mismatch in the Greek subject-verb agreement of vs. 9 is that Greek normally allows the semantics of the situation to dictate the forms of the subject and verb. This is regularly seen in various disagreements for person and number when there are compound subjects, and for a variety of semantic reasons (see my summary of the issues here). In Rom. 12:9 the disagreement comes about because the true initial subject of the paragraph is the singular notion of love, but Paul is talking about love that is expressed by the multiple members of the body of Christ. The mismatch in number agreement happens when the singular abstract concept of ‘love’ is introduced and then described by participles that are plural due to the multiple agents in view.

Here’s my first attempt at a translation. Notice that the first command does not occur until vs. 14…

⁹ Love is unhypocritical: it is people abhorring evil, clinging to the good, ¹⁰ affectionate to one another with brotherly love, leading the way in showing honor to one another, ¹¹ not shrunk back in eagerness, boiling over in the Spirit, serving the Lord, ¹² rejoicing in hope, enduring suffering, persevering in prayer, ¹³ sharing their possessions for the needs of the saints, pursuing love between strangers. ¹⁴ Bless the ones pursuing you; bless and do not curse.

After translating this passage to more carefully reflect what is happening in the original text, a few things stand out that are not so apparent when all the dependent clauses are translated as separate commands…

The single sentence that includes vv. 9-13 starts off with the broad thematic content of the paragraph, namely, that love is unhypocritical. This theme is illustrated by a broad movement in the following participles from showing love to the brothers in the community who are called saints to a love that endures suffering and is sought after even between strangers.

The transition from the string of participial and adjective phrases in vv. 9-13 to the commands in vs. 14 is marked by the double use of DIWKW ‘pursue’ in vs. 13 in the sense of ‘hospitality’ (or more literally “pursuing love between strangers”) and in vs. 14 in the sense of “bless the ones pursuing (i.e. persecuting) you.”

Understood as a description rather than a series of commands, it also becomes more reasonable to understand the TW PNEUMATI as “the Spirit” rather than as the human spirit that one can manipulate. And that, I believe, is the whole point of Paul using participles in this paragraph rather than imperative verbs. It’s the Spirit’s work, first of all, before it is our own.

Translation Day 7: the wind also hears

9 Days of Translation Checking

Today is Day 7 of this celebration of checking Luke in the Onnele translations last month.

At the end of the story of Jesus calming the storm, he and the disciples ask a few questions in Luke 8:25…

And He said to them, “Where is your faith?” They were fearful and amazed, saying to one another, “Who then is this, that He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey Him?” (NASB)

Earlier drafts of the Onnele translations did not include anything to express the meaning of ‘even’ in the phrase “even the winds and the water.” It’s the kind of word that can probably be left out and it doesn’t make much difference. After all, if you leave the word out, the implied information of the verse still conveys the meaning of ‘even’. But during this last translation workshop, we became much more aware of many intricacies of Onnele grammar and the function of little discourse particles that are often difficult to translate. So we didn’t have to leave out an explicit expression to convey the meaning of ‘even’.

The Goiniri Onnele translation now reads like this (with literal English back translation)…

Ka wu yalile nu nanrona, “Bilip empo pone sa waiye pei?” Nu disaipol nemnum ka flilineri ka nemnalile none kore nanrona, “Empo wu yangke ommo namo, mana mee wu sa fina? Wu yire mi kelo ka rapu re yane nupi kepe nupu mi wunini.”

And he asked them this, “Belief of you, it is where?” The disciples were afraid and they were amazed and they asked one another this, “Since he does these things, man here he is who? He speaks strong talk and wind also and water even hear his talk.”

So we added re ‘also’ to the translation, but we had to be careful where it was added. If re was added after rapu yane nupi “wind and water,” then it would mean something like “water in addition to the wind.” But the meaning of ‘even’ in this verse is functioning to say that the wind and rain are not the sorts of things that they would expect to be obeying his instructions. “People, yes, but not the creation!” But no, it was true. Even the wind and the water — the wind re and the water — hear his talk.

It’s really fun in the process of translation checking to recognize that a little word like re ‘also’ can fit grammatically into the sentence at various places, but the meaning changes depending on just where it fits in. The Onnele translators were really happy to add that little word in and hear how it really emphasized the same point that the original text was emphasizing.

This verse also includes several other examples of linguistic insights that have only recently come to my attention. Knowing these things means I can advise the Onnele translators that much better…

1. Most verbs are regularly inflected at the beginning of the word to identify the person and number of the subject. So, for example, kali ‘I ask’, yali ‘you/he/she asks’, mali ‘we ask’, pali ‘you-PL ask’, nali ‘they ask’. But what I only recently learned is that quite a few verbs can also optionally mark the direct object for singular or plural with a suffix. For the verbs yalile ‘he asked them’ and nemnaline none ‘they asked themselves’ in Luke 8:25, the -le and -ne suffixes mark a plural direct object.
2. Some verbs can also include a prefix that doesn’t inflect with the person and number of the verb’s subject. Thus, in Luke 8:25 the verbs nemnum ‘they were afraid’ and nemnalile ‘they asked them’ both include the prefix nem-, which can be glossed as ‘around’ or ‘about’, as in ’round about’.
3. The discourse particle kepe (and its shortened form ke) is used to mark counter-expectation. Therefore, its inclusion in Luke 8:25 also contributes to expressing the meaning of ‘even’ in “even the wind and the water hear his talk.” These little particles also seem to be used more frequently at points of mounting tension around the climax of a narrative. That makes sense if the climax is understood as the tension that comes from not knowing what to expect next in the sequence of narrative events. A climax may thus be marked by several events in sequence, each marked with this particle that signifies counter-expectation.

Tomorrow: sailing without a sail

Online: Journal of the Linguistics Institute of Ancient and Biblical Greek (JLIABG)

I learned from Rick Brannon at ricoblog that the Linguistics Institute of Ancient and Biblical Greek has published its first online issue:

Runge, Steven E. 2008. “Relative Saliency and Information Structure in Mark’s Parable of the Sower.” JLIABG 1:1-16.

From the Institute’s website:

“The Journal of the Linguistics Institute of Ancient and Biblical Greek (JLIABG) is a fully refereed on-line journal specializing in widely disseminating the latest advances in linguistic study of ancient and biblical Greek. Under the senior editorship of Stanley E. Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell, the journal looks to publish significant work that advances knowledge of ancient Greek through the utilization of modern linguistic methods.”

You can subscribe here to an RSS feed of the journal or sign up to receive email notices of journal updates.

According to the Institute’s page on Areas of Research Under Investigation in the LIABG, their research interests correspond very closely to several areas that I have been investigating in the Greek text of James (i.e. discourse function of conjunctions, paragraphs as discourse units, and the discourse function of vocatives). From their website…

The following list provides an indication of some the open questions for research that are currently being investigated or are of interest to the members of the Institute.

• developing a discourse grammar of conjunctions
• the identification and classification of the paragraph as a unit in Greek discourse
• discontinuous constituents in Greek syntax
• the quantitative and qualitative analysis of register
• the morphology, grammar and discourse function of the vocative case
• a Systemic-Functional analysis of voice in Greek