My friend and colleague Steve Runge recently blogged about "Paying Attention to 'This' and 'That'" on the Logos Bible Software blog. He was showing how paying attention to ουτος and εκεινος can pay dividends in your study of the NT.

For a bonus on the difference between 'near' and 'far', check this Sesame Street clip from YouTube (thanks for the reference, Steve) where Grover makes sure we get the difference between the two.

Now that that's all cleared up, I ran into a stellar example of the difference between ουτος and εκιενος this weekend while reading Second Clement. Here's the text of 2Cl 6.3-5 from Holmes' second edition; pay particular attention to verse 4:

(3) ἔστιν δὲ οὗτος ὁ αἰὼν καὶ ὁ μέλλων δύο ἐχθροί.
(3) This age and the one that is coming are two enemies.

(4) οὗτος λέγει μοιχείαν καὶ φθορὰν καὶ φιλαργυρίαν καὶ ἀπάτην, ἐκεῖνος δὲ τούτοις ἀποτάσσεται.
(4) This one talks about adultery and corruption and greed and deceit, but that one renounces these things.

(5) οὐ δυνάμεθα οὖν τῶν δύο φίλοι εἶναι· δεῖ δὲ ἡμᾶς τούτῳ ἀποταξαμένους ἐκείνῳ χρᾶσθαι.
(5) We cannot, therefore, be friends of both; we must renounce this one in order to experience that one.

Holmes, M. W. (1999). The Apostolic Fathers : Greek texts and English translations (Updated ed.) (110-111). Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books.

Also interesting is the use of δε in v. 4. This implies development of a point, whereas use of αλλα would likely heighten the contrast.

You may remember this post, that had the below picture, and a pleas for a caption:

Captions have been submitted; so now please vote for your favorite by visiting this poll. Available captions are:

• In the voice of Robert DeNiro: "Are you talkin' to me?"
• Elect Ella: She'll work for you!
• "Here's looking at you, kid"
• It's YOUR copy of the Nestle-Aland 27 Reverse Interlinear I want, mister
• "Who's my daddy!"
• What was it that Isaac the bartender always used to say ... ?

Voting will close sometime on Monday (maybe Tuesday, who knows).

What book will the winner get? I think the winner will be able to choose from:

• Decker's Koine Greek Reader (amazon.com)
• Guthrie & Duvall's Biblical Greek Exegesis (amazon.com)
• Wilson's Mastering New Testament Greek Vocabulary through Semantic Domains (amazon.com)

So vote!

Here's some fun stuff from J.D. Denniston's Greek Particles (amazon.com). These are from the introduction so they are necessarily generic.

The different methods of connexion.These are, broadly speaking, four: (a) Additional, (b) Adversative, (c) Confimratory, (d) Inferential. But the divisions are everywhere fluid. (Denniston, Intro, xlvii)

...

(b) Adversatives are of two kinds: eliminative adversatives, used often where on of two contrasted members is negative, the true being substituted for the false (par excellence μεν ουν and normally αλλα), and balancing adversatives, where two truths of divergent tendency are presented (δε, μην, μεντοι, etc.) (Denniston, Intro, xlix, bold mine)

Note that "eliminative" and "balancing" are Denniston's way of saying "strong" and "weak" adversatives, respectively. Then, the money quote (for my purposes):

(7) Abnormalities of reference in connexion. The connexion established is, normally, of course, between consecutive units of speech: words, phrases, clauses, or sentences. There are, however, certain exceptions. In dialogue, owing to the quickness of thrust and parry, or the self-absorption of one of the participants, a speaker sometimes links the opening of his speech to his own preceding words, not to the intervening words of the other person. ... In S.El.1035 (p. 443) αλλʼ ουν looks back to 1017-26: or perhaps it would be truer to say that its point d'appui is the general situation, the whole attitude of Chrysothemis, rather than any particular set of words, an explanation which applies also to E.Alc.713 (και μην, p. 354), and IT 637 (μεντοι, p. 405). (Denniston, Intro, l, bold mine)

The page references are references to further discussion within Denniston. So, p. 443 gives us the context of the citation that Denniston mentions:

1035 ('Well, since you refuse to help me (1017-26), do at least realize what that refusal means'). (Denniston, 443)

So Denniston supports the idea that αλλα can provide a link between discontinuous text; or that the adversative/contrast/whatever you want to call it can be a response to a general idea floating in the ether (the "general situation", as Denniston calls it). Both of which support contentions I previously posted on in The αλλα Funnel.

Amy took Ella in for portraits yesterday. We didn't get prints of this one made, but it is hysterical! It is not staged, it is not posed, it is not photoshopped. This is the picture as it was taken.

It is a photo in need of a caption. So please, use the comments to leave your caption suggestions. Any inappropriate comments will be deleted.

After a few days, if there are enough comments, I'll aggregate them and we can vote on 'em (so make sure I can identify you from the comment; if you leave your email it will be submitted to me but not posted on the blog). Then who knows? I may even have a free book for the winner!

Update (2008-04-14): Great responses, keep 'em coming! For those who don't know what Eli is talking about in his comment, you obviously never watched "The Love Boat" in the 70's-80's. He's referring to this picture of Isaac Washington, the chief bartender on the boat, played by Ted Lange:

Update (2008-04-17): OK, I've taken the comments (Chuck Grantham, I'm only allowing one per, so I went with your first one) and created a poll. You can vote once a day (er, one IP address can vote per day). Heck, link to this post and the poll on your own blog and have your own readers vote too. I don't care how you go about such things. I'll let the poll run through sometime this weekend. The caption with the most votes wins. If there is a tie, I'll simply choose the caption I like best (from the ties). The winner gets a book. I'm not sure which one yet. We're in the process of painting the new office, which means most of my books are in boxes. I'll try to have a few options for the winner by the weekend.

So, treat it like a Chicago mayoral election: vote early and vote often!

Reading grammars for more information on αλλα, I came across this paragraph from Funk's Hellenistic Grammar, §611 (Chapter 41, "Function Words/Negatives":

Negatives, conjunctions, sentence connectors, and subordinators may be termed function words (Fries: 87-109) or structure signaling words (Roberts, 1958: 151f., 224ff.). The point of these labels is that such words are nearly lexically empty, i.e. they have little or no dictionary meaning of their own. However, they are grammatically significant in indicating the structure of sentences and parts of sentences (cf. §§001ff.). Some of them are so common as to require acquaintance at the grossest level of the language. This simply means that one must learn how they function early in the process. One may guess at the meaning of lexically full words, or leave them blank when reading (cf. §003), but one must know the grammatical "meaning" of function words to be able to proceed at all. It is the case, of course, that some function words are  more pervasive and significant than others. (Funk 475, bold added)

I think this statement from Funk gets at the problem that most people have when approaching conjunctions. They approach them as "lexically full" words. Words that have a reliable and relatively consistent translation.

But they don't. As Funk writes, they're "lexically empty". They have oodles of grammatical meaning and tons of information to shed on how the text is read, but they have no reliable functional equivalent. If our approach to conjunctions is like:

• δε means "but"
• και means "and" (except for when it means "also")
• ουν means "therefore"
• γαρ means "for"
• αλλα means "but" (but it's a stronger 'but' than δε, of course)
• etc., etc.

Then it's no big surprise that we miss so much when we attempt to stitch our glossed-up English word-swapping into something coherent that truly represents the Greek we're supposedly translating (but more realistically, we're decoding). I say this knowing I'm as guilty (or more guilty) of it as the next person; I'm not innocent here.

What's the way out of the slough of despond? Buck up, Pilgrim, because Funk hints at it in this very paragraph: "This simply means that one must learn how [function words] function early in the process."

So the answer is, "early in the process", to pay attention to how these words work; not so that you know what to put in the blank on next week's vocab/translation test, or so you know what to slide in when you do on-the-fly translation in your next reading class, or so that you know which words to ignore when you're choosing the 'important' words from next week's sermon text, but so that you can understand what the author/writer is communicating. Because that is the goal. Right?

(side note: That last "but" ... it would be an αλλα if that was Greek, not a δε.)

I've recently finished a first-pass examination of every instance of αλλα in the Apostolic Fathers. While I report numbers here, the big thing to notice are trends; the specific numbers may change as I re-evaluate things between now and November.

There are no surprises in the 352 instances evaluated.

First, αλλα usually occurs with a negated clause or phrase.

• The negator μη (or something very much like it, such as μηδε) is used 82 times.
• The negator ου and its kin are used 188 times (though note some of these are ου μη).

When I say μη or ου, I'm also including things like μη μονον and ουκ μονον and even ουδεν, μηδεν, μηκετι, ουκετι and stuff like that. Maybe not completely and technically accurate, but I have the details down in a spreadsheet I can use later to disambiguate if need be.

There are 76 'clearly' positive (so, no negator on either side of αλλα); there are six that I've found confusing enough to pass on for now. What could be confusing? Sometimes negators are involved, though it is difficult to determine if the entire context is negative, or if something else is going on. These usually involve use of μηδεν.

Recall, my submitted abstract involved examining the "positive" instances, so these instances will be followed up and re-examined.

As mentioned above, the negator occurs both before and after αλλα.

• Of the 82 instances of the negator μη, there is only one that has the negator after αλλα, though there are four instances (e.g. Ign Tral. 5.1) that have negators on both sides of αλλα.
• Of the 188 instances of ου and its kin, 21 instances occur after αλλα (αλλʼ ουκ is a relatively common formation), and seven instances that have negators on both sides of αλλα.

What have I found most interesting? Well, it has to be how the Shepherd of Hermas uses αλλα without negation. Of course, this is the largest item in the corpus of the Apostolic Fathers, but 39 of the 76 'positive' instances are found in the Shepherd. There are some pretty cool things going on in those 39 instances that have no analogue in the New Testament; I'm guessing that I'll end up working through a few of them for the paper as examples of how αλλα functions and what that means for evaluating αλλα from the perspective of discourse analysis.

What's my next step? I have similar data tables for the NT and the Apostolic Fathers. I believe my next step will be to re-evaluate the positive instances in the NT (90 clearly positive instances out of 638; but I have 35 more complex/confusing instances to re-evaluate and classify). After this, I'll be able to really start writing. I've already got a high-level outline in my head, it'll be interesting to see how it fleshes out.

Here are a few random notes that I think are worth mentioning.

1. The Biblical Studies Carnival for April is now up. Chris Weimer at Thoughts on Antiquity (one of the most excellent group (biblio|biblica)blogs out there) did the duty, and did it well. Yep, I'm a bit late in noting this, but it's been a busy week.

2. Next month's Biblical Studies Carnival will be hosted by Dr. Jim West; so keep yer eyes peeled and submit all worthy posts to his keen review.

3. The SBL needs to ditch MetaPress as its JBL host. I've been trying to get in all morning to check out the latest JBL articles to no avail.

4. A few years back, John Derbyshire said, "Pop culture is filth". I agreed then, and I agree now. Only now I think pop culture serves like a virus, and everything else is getting filthier too. Have you looked at the top stories on any news site with any regularity? It makes me cringe. Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, especially since I think Calvin (and his predecessors, like Augustine) had something going with that whole "Total Depravity" thing.

5. I have too many ideas for books to write (or at least examine writing) and not enough time in which to pursue them. But I have too many other things that are worthy that I don't want to skimp on, like, for instance, spending time with the cutest little girl who happens to be my daughter: