Elementary New Testament Greek, 2014a

10: Imperfect Tense
10: Imperfect Tense
Throughout the preceding chapters we have kept our verbs restricted in tense and
mood to the Present Indicative. In the last chapter we expanded our understanding of
Voice to include the Middle (rare) and Passive (fairly common), along with Deponent
Verbs. Now we will explore three more Indicative Tenses [Imperfect, Future and
Aorist] in chapters 10, 11 and 12 respectively.
Reviewing Verb Parsing
Again let’s review the landscape of parsing to remind ourselves where we’ve been
(marked by the bold font):
The Imperfect Tense (logic and basic sense)
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As you remember from Chapter Two, the Tenses of the Indicative Mood express a
combination of Time and Aspect. At each intersection (except for two) stands a set
of forms we call a Tense. As you can easily see from the chart below, the Greek
Imperfect Tense combines the Past Time with Internal Aspect.
Internal Aspect External Aspect Perfect Aspect
Tenses (7):
Present, Imperfect, Future, Aorist, Perfect, Pluperfect, Future
Perfect.
Present Time
The Greek
Present Tense
(no Greek forms)
The Greek
Perfect Tense
Voices (3):
Moods (4):
Persons (3):
Active, Middle, Passive. [Just expanded in Chapter Nine.]
Indicative, Subjunctive, Imperative, Optative. (Later we will
meet the Participle and Innitive Modes.)
First, Second, Third.
Past Time
Future Time
The Greek
Imperfect Tense
(no Greek forms)
The Greek Aorist
Tense
The Greek
Future Tense
The Greek
Pluperfect Tense
The Greek
Future Perfect
Tense
Numbers (2)
Singular, Plural.
You can discern how the combination of Past Time with Internal Aspect sounds in
English in the following expressions:
I was teaching You were being found They were destroying
We were being taught She was leading He was being led
You were going They were being sent It was being spoken
I was throwing
Reexamine each of the examples until you can see clearly just how Past Time and
Internal (continuous) Aspect are combined, whether the Voice of these sentences is
Active or Passive.