Sunday 10 June 2018

Homer Koine Greek and the Verb Greegoreoo

This post is as much a #wordstudy as #biblestudy discussing how a verb used by #Homer was transformed in #KoineGreek usage.

Mark 13 32-37 features the verb Greegoreoo three times first as a Present Subjunctive and then twice as a Present Imperative with a meaning of WATCH BE ALERT AWARE AWAKE

I was looking at related forms to study its meaning and discovered its related to egeiroo and here's the odd thing. The #Koine form that split off from Egeiroo derives from Homeric Perfect usages.

Somehow over the centuries the Perfect / Pluperfect used as Present  Egreegora  e+gree+gor+a got regularized and standardized to follow the -O pattern for the present.

Some users maybe hearing Homeric forms like Egreegoraww seem to have thought Egreegora was perhaps an Aorist and dropped the E.

That these forms appear in Koine perhaps also shows that people was listening to Homeric recitations or reading Homer without an adequate commentary or a teacher to guide them?

It is also an example of the disappearance of perfect forms discussed in Browning's Medieval and Modern Greek.

So why did Mark choose to use this word ? And where did he hear or learn it used in the Koine form rather than using Egeiroo?

Frankly I can't do more than speculate but I suspect he choose it for impact ?

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