Elementary New Testament Greek, 2014a

Mrs. Davis pondered a coyote in the grocery store.
Ms. Allen made a coyote out of cardboard in the grocery store.
Mr. Pickwick incinerated a coyote in the grocery store.
You can see that…even though all of these sentences t into the same grammatical
pattern of “Somebody ‘blanked’ a coyote”… it is impossible to invent one label
to cover all the roles played by the coyote. In one example a coyote comes into
existence, while in another it goes out of existence (pretty ultimate stuff, from the
point of view of the coyote!). In some examples the coyote undergoes change,
while in others nothing actually happens to change the coyote. In some examples
the changes are mild, in others, they are drastic. In some examples the coyote feels
something, while in others it feels nothing. In some examples the coyote willingly
participates, while in others desperately avoids participation. In some examples, no
tangible coyote even exists!
Now you can see the difculty of nding an appropriate label to cover all of these
circumstances. Any label we might try (like Patient, Experiencer, Undergoer, Object,
or Receiver of Action) might describe the role of the coyote in some sentences, but
not all. The good news is that somehow we can intuitively recognize that “coyote”
lls the slot in this empty sentence: “Someone blank-ed a coyote”, and that each
sentence above uses this same pattern. Put another way, we know what ‘got blanked’
in each sentence above. A coyote “got blanked”!
The Genitive Case
Angels are giving crowns
Angels are giving crowns
Angels are giving crowns
In our experimental sentences above, “crowns” are described as being “of gold.”
Because we know what a crown is, and know that gold is a precious metal used to
form various artifacts, we discern that “of” is an English way of linking an “artifact”
to the “material” out of which it is made. Similar expressions might be:
a house of cards
a cloud of dust
a tower of rock
a block of steel
But as we discovered with the accusative case, languages are amazingly complex and
resourceful. For example, the English word “of” can link two nouns bound together
in a wide variety of logical relationships:
In the experimental sentence we have been using (O Teacher, angels are giving
crowns of gold to apostles!), something ‘got blanked’. What ‘got blanked’? Crowns!
So we should expect to nd this word in the Greek accusative case. The Greek word
for crown is , and it uses the same pattern of endings as does .
The accusative plural form, then, would be . We can now expand our
sentence accordingly, and at the same time demonstrate how “tagging” this word as
an accusative allows us to vary the word order considerably without jeopardizing the
meaning of the sentence. (Read each sentence and its translation aloud to feel the
full effect.)
Greek Sentence
English Translation
Angels are giving crowns
Angels are giving crowns
Angels are giving crowns
a tower of rock
a man of wisdom
a barrel of water
the love of country
the love of a mother
a river of life
a woman of Scotland
the farm of Mr. Jones
a piece of pie
….and so on…
the ‘of’ links tower to the material out of which it is
made.
the ‘of’ links man to the character or quality he exhibits.
the ‘of’ links barrel to the contents it holds.
the ‘of’ links love to the object which is loved.
the ‘of’ links love to the actor who does the loving.
the ‘of’ links river to the effect it can deliver.
the ‘of’ links woman to her origin.
the ‘of’ links farm to its owner.
the ‘of’ links piece to the whole from which it was
taken.
3: Nouns and Their Cases
38