Death of a Master: Belated Thoughts on Alan Treloar

Alan Treloar
Google Images

I've previously mentioned Professor Alan Treloar as a master of languages whom I became acquainted with during a postdoctoral stint of mine at the University of New England, in Armidale, NSW, Australia. He was an amazing man, unfailingly courteous, ever helpful, and profoundly knowledgeable. I was recently reworking an old article of mine on an Egyptian word that surfaces in a Greek text, when I came upon his linguistic analysis:

[I]t seems to me that Neb[t]hietep, which would be Nb[t]hitp in the original, vocalised conventionally by Budge with e's, might be read hiotep. Then if the n is taken to be the article and is dropped, b is replaced by another labial, h is dropped, and the o is lengthened. You get very close to the Coptic term.

Without going into the details of Professor Treloar's analysis, let me just say that this note given to me after he read an early version of my article helped a lot in my research, and I incorporated it into my argument.

Anyway, that note was nearly thirteen years ago, but I was his colleague from 1996 to 1998 and knew him fairly well, so I found myself wondering what had ever happened to this old scholar who knew so many languages and was seeking the Mutter-Sprache of them all, a quest that led him to the Nostratic Theory, as shown by this review he wrote of Nikita Tschenkeli's Einfuehrung in die Georgische Sprache. Did he ever find that holy grail? I ran a search of the internet and found sad news.

He died two years ago, at age 91 (November 13, 1919 - July 22, 2011). Here's his obituary, "Eminent linguist fought for country," written by a former student who also became a scholar, Trevor Evans, appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald (August 15, 2011):

Colonel Alan Treloar was one of Australia's greatest linguists and classical scholars and also a distinguished soldier.

Few could rival his knowledge as a scholar of ancient Greek and Latin. He had a special interest in the Roman poet Horace but had read the entire classical literatures of both languages at least twice.

He had an astonishing gift for languages and would admit, when pressed, to direct knowledge of about 80. He had a formidable command of many, such as Sanskrit, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Hittite. In his early 80s he was investigating Bunuba, a language of the Kimberley.

Alan Treloar was born in Ivanhoe, Victoria, on November 13, 1919, the eldest of four children of John Treloar, who became the first director of the Australian War Memorial, and his wife, Clarissa (nee Aldridge), a music teacher.

His first linguistic interests were in French at six and Latin at 10. He soon took up ancient Greek as well and was learning Japanese by correspondence while at school.

He went to Carey Baptist Grammar School and the University of Melbourne, where he took a bachelor of arts and was the Victorian Rhodes Scholar for 1940 but did not take up the scholarship then because of his service in the Second Australian Imperial Force. He began his military career with the Melbourne University Regiment and went on to serve with the 2/14th Battalion from 1940 to 1944, first in the Syrian campaign, during which he was seriously wounded, and later on the Kokoda Track.

His wounding meant he was no longer able to march with the infantry and he was transferred to a staff appointment at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne. After hours, he worked for his master of arts degree from the University of Melbourne, which he took in 1943. He then transferred to the Australian Army Intelligence Corps from 1944 to 1945.

In 1945 he married Bronnie Taylor, a fellow linguist and diplomatic staff cadet.

On release from the army, Treloar was a lecturer in classics at the University of Melbourne and tutor at Trinity College, Melbourne, before taking up his Rhodes Scholarship. At Oxford, he chose to read classical moderations and greats.

He also served with the British Army of the Rhine in 1946 and from 1949 to 1950 was assistant lecturer in ancient history at the University of Nottingham. He then went to the University of Glasgow from 1950 to 1959. During this period, he was attached from the Australian Army to the University of Nottingham Training Corps and then the Glasgow Highlanders, then was transferred to the Territorial Army.

In 1959 the Treloars moved back to Australia. He became first warden of Hytten Hall and reader in classics at the University of Tasmania in 1959 and, in 1960, moved to the University of New England, where he was master of Wright College (1960 to 1966) then reader in comparative philology (1966 to 1984).

He also continued his military involvement, transferring back to the Australian Army to serve with the Tasmania Command and then the Sydney University Regiment in command of New England Company until retiring in 1969.

Academic retirement came nominally in 1984 but in fact ended only with failing health in the past few years. He continued to be sought out for expert advice by scholars from around the world and to make his skills available as an inspirational teacher to a string of students.

His publications reflect the diversity of his interests and include The Importance of Music (1987) and Lyra (1994), as well as academic and military papers.

Treloar was a reserved and dignified man of honesty and integrity and a warm and generous friend. In 1992, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of New England.

Alan Treloar is survived by his children, Anna and Jeannie, son-in-law James and grandchildren Sarah, Katy and Alex. Bronnie died in 1991, as did daughter Meg, in 1995.

Professor Treloar told me some of these stories, but I learned still more from this obituary. For those interested in learning yet more about such an impressive scholar, go to this three-part remembrance of the man by a former colleague.

As for me, I knew him only for about two years, but I'll remain impressed with him all my life.

Gerard Delanty on Rémi Brague

Gerard Delanty

(Image from University of Sussex)

Yesterday, I linked to Gerard Delanty's article on European identity, "Conceptions of Europe: A Review of Recent Trends" (European Journal of Social Theory, 6(4) 2003), which reviews nine books presenting views of Europe. The article dates from 2003, which is not so long ago, but given the enormous changes since then, especially Europe's ongoing economic crisis and its surging immigration, the debate over European identity has probably moved on. Delanty's article remains valuable, however, especially for it succinct presentation of various views, including the summary of Rémi Brague's understanding of European identity, so I'll post it here for readers' convenience:

Europe as a Philosophical Idea

Works on Europe as a strictly philosophical idea are rare. A few notable exceptions in recent times are Derrida (1992), Gadamer (1992), Kristeva (2000) and Patočka (2001). The English translation of Rémi Brague's La voie romaine is a major contribution to the constitution of Europe as an object of philosophical reflection. Originally published in 1992 in response to the Maastricht Treaty, this subtle book can be easily misunderstood. This is an essay about the philosophical essence of Europe and it is Brague's argument that this is to be found not in the content of European traditions but in their form: the uniquely European is to be found in the nature of the transmission of culture rather than in any specific cultural content. Europe is based on a particular cultural form that transforms that which it takes over but does not have a culture of its own. The essence of Europe is its capacity to transform culture. For Brague, Europe cannot be defined by geography, by politics or by a disembodied Platonic idea. It is not a place or a particular political order. Europe is a variable notion and defined as a particular kind of cultural belonging, which Brague associates with Rome. 'Europe is not only Greek, nor only Hebrew, nor even Greco-Hebraic. It is decidedly Roman' (p. 26). This may sound extraordinary, but Rome for Brague denotes something more European than Greek, Judaic or Islamic modes of belonging because Rome is not European at all in its fundamental nature -- 'this culture is not Latin, or European, but foreign' (p. 92).

For Brague, Europe has always defined itself through otherness, a condition that he associates with Rome. 'The Romans have done little more than transmit', he argues (p. 32). Roman culture was based on innovation, commencement, a search for the new. To say that we are Romans is the contrary of identifying ourselves with a great ancestor; it is to recognize that fundamentally we have invented nothing, but simply that we learned how to transmit the cultures of others. Thus what distinguishes Europe is its mode of relating to itself, which is one of distance: 'The distance that separates us from the ancient Greeks is not in principle, less than that which separates us from other modern cultures' (p. 142). Europe constantly has to confront a consciousness of having borrowed everything from sources that can never be regained. Brague associates with Rome a form of cultural translation in which something new is always created in the act of interpretation. In contrast, in Islam, the original content is retained to a greater extent whereas in Europe the origin is always foreign. The ancient world can only be known in its traces. This leads Brague to his thesis that at the heart of the European consciousness is the phenomenon of 'secondarity': Europeanness is based on the act of cultural creation in which all cultural content is never a copy of an origin. This capacity for self-transformation leads to the interesting insight that Europe does not belong to the Europeans, who do not exist as such. 'Europe is a culture' and cannot be inherited but only created (p.149) is the conclusion Brague reaches.

This is a decidedly deconstructive reading of European culture as already decentred, 'eccentric' and containing alterity within it. Moreover, it reflects a processual and transformative conception of Europe -- echoing Renan, 'Europe is a continual plebiscite' (p. 5) -- since the political implication, not fully developed by the author, is that Europe is never tied to its origin but can and must constantly recreate itself. To be sure, Brague seeks to tie the idea of secondarity to some notions in Catholic theology, obscuring some of his fascinating ideas and it is indeed arguable that the condition of cultural secondarity needs to be related exclusively to Rome. In more conventional approaches this is often associated with the idea of modernity, as in the work of Blumenberg, who has clearly influenced Brague. But the central thesis that European culture needs to be defined in terms of its form rather than identified with a particular cultural content solves some of the problems of essentialism. It also gives a different twist to the idea of the uniqueness of Europe, since what is claimed is that this consists of the capacity for secondarity. But there is a philosophical slight [sic. sleight] of hand in the seductive argument that '"Eurocentrism" is a misnomer' on the grounds that 'no culture was never so little centred [sic. centered] on itself and so interested in the others as Europe' (pp. 133–4). Notwithstanding this problem which is not adequately addressed, this book offers one of the most important philosophical theorizations of the meaning of Europe. (Gerard Delanty, "Conceptions of Europe: A Review of Recent Trends," European Journal of Social Theory, 6(4) 2003, pages 485-486)

This is a rather good summary of Brague's views, but I think that Delanty exaggerates the degree to which European identity is to be found in its form rather than its content. To be European is not just to be characterized in its form of "secondarity" as a transmitter of foreign cultural contents that transform and are transformed. Europe has a more particular cultural debt to Greek and Jewish culture. I think that Delanty also misstates Brague's point about Islam concerning the manner in which foreign cultures are taken over: "in Islam, the original content is retained to a greater extent whereas in Europe the origin is always foreign." Brague's point about translation in the Islamic world is not that Muslims were more accurate in their translations of foreign materials into Arabic, but that they stuck with those original translations, holding that the Arabic language had perfected the meaning and that there was no reason to return to the foreign sources since the translations were superior. Europeans, by contrast, always sought more accurate translations because they knew that the superior text was to be found in the original. Once they had the originals, of course, they were free to transform these through reinterpretation -- the transformative part of transmission -- but the originals were never considered to be superceded.

I recommend that interested readers go directly to Brague.

Milton's Polyglottal Irony of Eating Death . . .

The Confusion of Tongues (1865)

Gustave Doré

(Image from Wikipedia)

The lines of Milton's Paradise Lost that speak of Eve's Fall offer an ironic contrast between the semantic content and the grammatical analysis:

Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
And knew not eating Death: (PL 9.791-2)

As previously noted, the use of the participle "eating" mimics the use in Greek of the nominative participle after verbs of knowing. The irony here is that Eve does not know that she is eating death . . . or that death is eating her.

We see in process a fall of language here as Eve eats the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, a confusion of tongues prefiguring the biblical story about the Tower of Babel, a confusion suggested by Milton in mixing Greek with English.

The lines thus threaten to break down into two separate languages, and the knowing reader must consciously analyze in both Greek and English to hold Milton's synthesis together. Eve's disobedient act is already causing trouble for her descendents, for knowledge comes dear, as we must work to know both Greek and English if we want to understand Milton's words.

Eve for the time being remains unknowing despite the verb of knowing required by Greek grammar to explain in English her complex action in eating deadly knowledge, an ironic ignorance emphasized by Milton polyglot lines.

Today's babbling 'Babel' of voices is brought to you by Gypsy Scholar . . .

Virgil's Graecism: "sensit medios delapsus in hostis" (Aeneid 2.377)

Flight from Troy (1598)

Federico Barocci

(Image from Wikipedia)

Through my investigations into the grammatical background to the line "And knew not eating death" (Paradise Lost 9.792), I've come across more evidence that Milton would have been very familiar with the possibility in Greek grammar for a participle in the nominative case to follow a verb of knowing or perceiving. He would also have been quite familiar with this grammatical possibility in Latin, for such well-known writers as Virgil borrowed it from the Greek, as in Book 2, Line 377 of the Aeneid:

sensit medios delapsus in hostis

This line occurs in the following context, lines 370-384, in which Aeneas, describing his flight with a number of other Trojans from the fallen city of Troy, recounts how he and his compatriots inadvertently encountered a band of Greek soldiers led by Androgeos:

Androgeos, followed by a thronging band
of Greeks, first met us on our desperate way;
but heedless, and confounding friend with foe,
thus, all unchallenged, hailed us as his own:
"Haste, heroes! Are ye laggards at this hour?
Others bear off the captives and the spoil
of burning Troy. Just from the galleys ye?"
He spoke; but straightway, when no safe reply
returned, he knew himself entrapped, and fallen
into a foeman's snare; struck dumb was he
and stopped both word and motion; as one steps,
when blindly treading a thick path of thorns,
upon a snake, and sick with fear would flee
that lifted wrath and swollen gorge of green:
so trembling did Androgeos backward fall.

These English lines are from the translation of Vergil's Aeneid by Theodore C. Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1910), and I've borrowed them from the Perseus Digital Library, which is edited by Gregory R. Crane, of Tufts University. This library also supplies a Latin version replete with hyperlinks defining each word and offering grammatical analyses.

As for Williams, he translates "sensit medios delapsus in hostis" (line 377) of the Latin original as "he knew himself entrapped, and fallen / into a foeman's snare" (lines 378-379). If we want a more literal translation of "sensit . . . delapsus," we obtain "he sensed . . . fallen," i.e., "he sensed (himself) . . . fallen." The word "sensit" is the third singular perfect indicative active of the verb "sentio" (i.e., "to discern by sense, feel, hear, see, perceive, be sensible of"), and the word "delapsus" is the singular perfect passive masculine nominative participle of the verb "delabor" (i.e., "to fall, sink, slip down, glide down, descend").

I was led to all of this by way of a couple of sources. The first that I came across was a note in Roland Gregory Austin's annotated edition of Virgil's Aeneid. In Aeneidos Liber Secundus (Oxford University Press, 1980), Austin notes of line 377 in book 2 ("sensit medios delapsus in hostis," page 13):

377 sensit . . . delapsus : a pure Grecism, ᾔσθετ᾿ ἐμπεσών, for which there is no precise Classical Latin parallel; Löfstedt (Synt. ii. p. 428) notes Apul. Met. iv. 34 'invidiae nefariae letali plaga percussi sero sentitis'. For an allied turn cf. Stat. Th. 7. 791 f. 'non aliter caeco nocturni turbine Cori / scit peritura ratis'; so Milton, PL ix. 792 'And knew not eating death'. (page 159)

The other source was the New First Latin Reader, by John Henderson and R.A. Little (Toronto: The Copp, Clark, Company, Limited, 1906), which also notes of line 377 in book 2 ("sensit medios delapsus in hostis," page 168):

377. sensit delapsus : a Graecism for sensit se delapsum esse : cp. ᾔσθετ᾿ ἐμπεσών. So also Milton, Paradise Lost, 9, 792 :--

Greedily she gorged without restraint
And knew not eating death.

i.e., that she was eating.

So also Catullus iv, 2 :--

Phaselus ille quam videtis hospites
Ait fuisse navium celerrimus.

This note is found on page 215 of Henderson and Little. As for ᾔσθετ᾿ ἐμπεσών, this is the Greek expression that Virgil takes as his model for "sensit delapsus," and the Perseus website also proves useful in analyzing this Greek model:

αἰσθάνομαι - to perceive, apprehend by the senses, to see, hear, feel (ᾔσθετ᾽ is the third singular aorist indicative middle form of the verb)

ἐμπίτνω - fall upon (ἐμπεσών is the singular aorist active masculine nominative participle form of the verb)

And that's probably enough for any reader who's followed me this far into terrain beyond my ken. Let us now follow the example of Aeneas instead and escape this terrain by setting sail for other shores.

And off we go to the farewell of "Bon voyage!"

Oppian of Corycus, Halieutica 2.99-106

Frogfish

Antennarius pictus

Copyright of Jeffrey Rosenfeld

(Image from Tree of Life)

My regular, esteemed reader and occasional commenter Michael Gilleland, who takes a professional interest in quotes from antiquity and their grammatical analysis, including informative material that I have previously dredged up, has assisted me in making sense of yesterday's Greek quote from Oppian of Corycus, both grammatically and contextually. I initially requested his help on the grammar by means of alerting him to my blog post:

You might find this blog entry interesting:

οὐδ᾽ ἐνόησαν ἑὸν σπεύδοντες ὄλεθρον

Oppian, Halieutica ii 106

I'd be interested in a grammatical analysis of the clause. I presume that ἑὸν . . . ὄλεθρον is an accusative object of σπεύδοντες. Is that correct? That would explain why it translates as "They knew not hastening their death" rather than "They knew not their hastening death," right?

Mr. Gilleland responded with confirmation and context:

Your grammatical analysis is 100% correct. I downloaded A.W. Mair's edition and translation of Oppian in the Loeb Classical Library series (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1928) from the Internet Archive web site, and here is a translation of the entire sentence in context (Halieutica 2.99-106, Greek on p. 290, English on p. 291, but I didn't transcribe the Greek):

"As when a man, devising a snare for lightsome birds, sprinkles some grains of wheat before the gates of guile while others he puts inside, and props up the trap; the keen desire of food draws the eager birds and they pass within and no more is return or escape prepared for them, but they win an evil end to their banquet; even so the weak Fishing-frog deceives and attracts the fishes and they perceive not that they are hastening their own destruction."

Moreover, the generous Mr. Gilleland offered even more:

Also, on my last visit to the library, I copied the title page and pp. 825-826 of Guy L. Cooper, III (after K.W. Krüger), Attic Greek Prose Syntax (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), which has many examples of this construction. Despite the book title, many of the examples come from poetry. I've been trying to figure out how to make a .pdf file out of these pages to send to you. I don't have a scanner. This week maybe I'll go to Kinko's and see if they can make a .pdf file. This is probably not a book you have in your university library, but if you do, let me know, and I won't bother sending you the pages.

I look forward to this if he's able to make time for it. Meanwhile, I found some material that interests both him and me, a 'copyable' online Greek version of Oppian of Corycus, Halieutica, from which I was able to copy and paste 2.99-106:

ὡς δ᾽ ὅτε τις κούφοισι πάγην ὄρνισι τιτύσκων,
πυροὺς τοὺς μὲν ἔρηνε δόλου προπάροιθε πυλάων,
ἄλλους δ᾽ ἔνδον ἔθηκεν, ὑπεστήριξε δὲ τέχνην·
τοὺς δὲ λιλαιομένους ἕλκει πόθος ὀξὺς ἐδωδῆς,
εἴσω δὲ προγένοντο, καὶ οὐκέτι νόστος ἑτοῖμος
ἐκδῦναι, δαιτὸς δὲ κακὴν εὕραντο τελευτήν·
ὣς κείνους ἀμενηνὸς ἐπέσπασεν ἠπεροπεύσας
βάτραχος, οὐδ᾽ ἐνόησαν ἑὸν σπεύδοντες ὄλεθρον.

Just to clarify, for those who might not know Greek, this is the poetic original to the prose translation found by Mr. Gilleland. I've gone on to find a more 'poetic' translation on page 307 of Frogfishes of the World: Systematics, Zoogeography, and Behavioral Ecology (Stanford University Press, 1987), by Theodore W. Pietsch and David B. Grobecker, who provide more of the context. They refer to Oppian of Corycus by his other title, "Oppian of Anazarbus," and quote the 1722 translation by William Diaper and John Jones, Halieuticks, of the Nature of Fishes and Fishing of the Ancients, but abruptly stop without providing the two lines at the end, and no wonder since Diaper and Jones also fail to provide a proper rendering of them. The lines are differently numbered, too, for what was 2.99-106 in the Greek are lines 2.168-175:

The Fowler thus the feather'd race deceives,
And strows beneath his Snare the rifled Sheaves.
The busy Flocks peck up the scatter'd Seed,
Nor midst their Joy the fatal Engine heed;
Till with loud Clap the tilted Cover falls,
And the close Pit the flutt'ring Prey enthralls.
Sea-Toads with Foxes may for Cunning vie,
These too (as Rusticks tell) will feign to die. (page 66)

Those last two lines here in Diaper and Jones offer a rather free translation that betrays the original meaning in the Greek. The frogfish in the Greek text deceives the other fish upon which it preys, but not by itself feigning death; rather, it dangles its lure (see photo above) and thereby entices other fishes that expect to feed, knowing not that they are hastening their own deaths. Mair's prose translation provided by Mr. Gilleland offers an English version more consonant with Satan's role in luring Eve to the forbidden fruit, which she expects to eat, but which instead 'eats' her.

Diaper and Jones are thus wrong in their prose rendering, but as noted in yesterday's blog entry, my investigation of John Milton's meaning in Paradise Lost 9.792 ("And knew not eating death") is taking me many places . . . some of them rather odd.

Greek Nominative Participle After Verbs of Knowledge or Perception

Poachers

John Atkinson Grimshaw

I received the image of this Grimshaw painting above from Michael Gilleland, who was concerned that he might also be poaching:

I hope I'm not poaching on your private preserve.

If you click on the link, you'll find Sir Gilleland too fine and noble to stoop to poaching, for he has hunted in the wilds of Antiquity and returned with nine trophies, quotes from Greek writers demonstrating the nominative participle in Greek after verbs of knowledge or perception, a grammatical construction that I first blogged about last August 4th in my entry "Milton's 'Awkward' Grecism: "know" with nominative participle?" I was, of course, discussing the by now quite familiar passage on Eve's fall in Paradise Lost 9.791-794:

Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
And knew not eating Death: Satiate at length,
And hight'nd as with Wine, jocond and boon,
Thus to her self she pleasingly began.

The awkward clause "knew not eating Death" has been thought by some Milton scholars to be modeled on the Greek nominative participle after verbs of knowledge or perception, an issue that I've been belaboring of late . . . and shall continue to do so for some time to come.

Including today.

And I -- lowly and common 'Hodges' that I am -- am not above poaching on Sir Gilleland's preserve, for I have bagged one of his trophies. More precisely, I took it when he wasn't looking. But enough of carefully considered confession and vain hopes for absolution. Here is what I've stolen from Sir Gilleland:

Euripides, Hecuba 397 (tr. David Kovacs):

οὐ γὰρ οἶδα δεσπότας κεκτημένος.

I am not aware that I have a master.

As explained by Michael, in the English translation, "you'll find a clause starting with the word 'that' and containing a finite verb -- in the corresponding Greek there is a participle in the nominative case." If Milton were translating, he might awkwardly render it as follows:

I know not having master.

Unlike Odysseus in this drama by Euripides, however, I am a nobody who knows his Greek master, and that master is Michael Gilleland.

"God-breathed" = "living words"?

Blue Letter Bible Logo

(Image from Blue Letter Bible)

In my Bible study class Sunday morning, I noticed the adjective "theopneustos" (θεόπνευστος) in 2 Timothy 3:16, which the Blue Letter Bible site informs us literally means "God-breathed," from "theos" (θεός, God) and an apparant derivative of "pneō" (πνέω, breathe), resulting in the following NIV translation:

All Scripture is God‑breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.

The original Greek is:

πᾶσα γραφὴ θεόπνευστος καὶ ὠφέλιμος πρὸς διδασκαλίαν πρὸς ἔλεγχον, πρὸς ἐπανόρθωσιν πρὸς παιδείαν τὴν ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ.

Presumably, the writer was thinking of the Old Testament, since there was yet no New Testament, and this emphasis upon scripture as "God-breathed" called to mind -- to my mind, anyway -- Genesis 2:7:

The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. (NIV)

Hebrew original:

וַיִּיצֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָֽאָדָם עָפָר מִן־הָאֲדָמָה וַיִּפַּח בְּאַפָּיו נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים וַֽיְהִי הָֽאָדָם לְנֶפֶשׁ חַיָּֽה׃

Greek translation (Septuagint):

καὶ ἔπλασεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον χοῦν ἀπὸ τῆς γῆς καὶ ἐνεφύσησεν εἰς τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ πνοὴν ζωῆς καὶ ἐγένετο ὁ ἄνθρωπος εἰς ψυχὴν ζῶσαν.

The Hebrew term here for "breathed" (יִּפַּח) is from "naphach" (נפח, breathe). The Greek term here for "breathed" (ἐνεφύσησεν) is from "emphusaō," meaning "to breathe into or upon," derived from from "en" (in) and "phusaó" (to blow). The Septuagint Greek of Genesis 2:7 thus differs in terminology from the Greek of 2 Timothy 3:16, and the Hebrew of Genesis 2:7 is, of course, an entirely different language. I find no striking linguistic similarity Greek, but I can't nevertheless help feeling that some sort of allusion is being made.

When Genesis 2:7 describes the Lord God as breathing into Adam's nostrils, the consequence is that Adam becomes a "living being" (לְנֶפֶשׁ חַיָּֽה; ψυχὴν ζῶσαν). One would therefore expect that such a conception of scripture as "God-breathed" would imply that scripture become "living words," but my cursory search finds only Acts 7:38, with a reference to Moses receiving the commandments of God:

He was in the assembly in the desert, with the angel who spoke to him on Mount Sinai, and with our fathers; and he received living words to pass on to us.

Greek original:

οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ γενόμενος ἐν τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ μετὰ τοῦ ἀγγέλου τοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτῷ ἐν τῷ ὄρει Σινᾶ καὶ τῶν πατέρων ἡμῶν ὃς ἐδέξατο λόγια ζῶντα δοῦναι ἡμῖν.

The Greek here for "living words" is "logia zōnta" (λόγια ζῶντα), from "logion" (λόγιον, brief utterance, words) and "zaō" (ζάω, live). Since the Septuagint for Genesis 2:7 has "zōsan" (ζῶσαν), which is also from "zaō" (ζάω, live), then we find a closer lexical term, but the case for a connection among 2 Timothy 3:16, Genesis 2:7, and Acts 7:38 is relatively weak, especially since 2 Timothy and Acts were written by different authors.

This little superficial exercise hasn't gotten us very far, except to note that no clear allusion to Genesis 2:7 is being made in 2 Timothy 3:16, but I promised the Bible study leader that I'd look into this point.

Only scholarly commentaries would get me further now, but I don't have any relevant ones at hand, unless there are some online . . .

Milton's 'Awkward' Grecism: "know" with nominative participle?

"Back to the thicket slunk . . ."

John Milton, Paradise Lost 9.784

Illustration by Gustave Doré

(Image from gravures.ru)

I'm returning to my old interest in Paradise Lost for today's blog entry, but this time for what some scholars, Richard Strier for instance, have considered a bad line of poetry. Several other scholars on the Milton List, for that matter, have noted the awkwardness in the description of Eve's gustatory activity in Paradise Lost 9.792:

And knew not eating death . . .

Perhaps some context would help us understand the awkwardness. As depicted in the Doré illustration above, the serpent possessed by Satan has just seduced Eve to the first human-committed sin and is slinking off into the forest primeval, leaving Eve to finish her first fallen meal:

Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
And knew not eating Death: Satiate at length,
And hight'nd as with Wine, jocond and boon,
Thus to her self she pleasingly began. (PL 9.791-4)

(Thomas H. Luxon, ed. The Milton Reading Room, August, 2010.)

Eve goes on to praise the tree for its excellent fruit. The expression "And knew not eating Death," nearly everyone agrees, is very awkward English but has been explained as a Miltonic Grecism. According to Kenneth Haynes, for example, in English Literature and Ancient Languages (Oxford University Press, 2003):

Greek may use a participle after verbs of knowledge or perception, and the line, modeled after Greek, means "and knew not that she ate Death." But the unusual syntax is not limited to its Greek model; rather it concentrates several meanings in the line: Eve did not know (that is, she was ignorant for the last time) while she was eating death; she did not know what she did (she ate death); she did not know the eating, devouring power of death. (page 79)

Other scholars offer the same explanation about the Greek model. But knowing this fails to reduce the awkwardness, so why does Milton borrow Greek syntax? Partly, to achieve ambiguity -- Eve is eating death even as death is eating her. Maybe that's enough, though surely the same point could have been made without turning to such an awkward Grecism . . . so there might be more.

Haynes, we should note, suggests that the strangeness of the syntax "emphasizes the momentous, mysterious nature of Eve's action: by eating the apple she is bringing death into the world" (page 79).

I would take this one step further. English syntax is here broken to allow the entrance of something foreign, "eating death" as the all-devouring death that follows from sin in Milton's scripturally inspired thinking. This death enters now through the break. The colon in the line -- the very caesura that divides "And knew not eating Death" from "Satiate at length" -- punctuates this break.

My colleagues at the Milton List, e.g., Michael Gillum, are generally agreed that the line holds more or less to iambic pentameter, but I would like to note that the awkward syntax and the use of caesura work against a smooth metrical reading. The line is awkward, and we are forced to pause, a hesitation reinforced by the single deviation from iambic in this line -- the stress on "Death," followed by stress on the initial syllable of "Satiate."

After that break, after that pause, Eve becomes evil, Satanic, "satiate at length," as though serpentine in sound and shape -- if one might draw out the length to which Milton goes to emphasize Eve's radical alteration. Think on the description of Satan "stretcht out huge in length" (PL 1.209), or even more clearly in Satan's own description of being "sated at length" (PL 9.598; emphasis again mine) in his deceptive claim to have himself eaten the forbidden fruit, an unmistakable verbal parallel that conforms Eve to Satan's image.

More on this break at length . . . after a pause.

St. Paul: "Love . . . is not . . . resentful"

Saint Paul Writing His Epistles

Artist: Valentin de Boulogne or Nicolas Tournier

Sixteenth Century

(Image from Wikipedia)

Yesterday, I cited I Corinthians 13: 4-7 in the New International Version (NIV) to suggest a source for Jane Austen's understanding of love's power to overcome resentment in Pride and Prejudice. In looking further, I discovered that the Revised Standard Version (RSV) offers the following translation for verse 5:

[Love] is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful.

Austen, of course, would have been using the Authorized Version (AV, aka King James Version (KJV)) or some variant of that, for the RSV was authorized later. Here's the old AV for verse 5:

[Love] doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil.

For the record, the AV uses an old term for "love," namely, "charity." Moreover, "thinketh no evil" does not immediately connote "is not . . . resentful." The larger passage, however, would lend itself to an understanding that true love is not resentful:

13:4 Charity suffereth long, [and] is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, 5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; 6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; 7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

The Greek behind the AV version, the so-called Textus Receptus, has the following for verse 5:

13:5 οὐκ ἀσχημονεῖ οὐ ζητεῖ τὰ ἑαυτῆς οὐ παροξύνεται οὐ λογίζεται τὸ κακόν

The phrase "οὐ λογίζεται τὸ κακόν" is what the RSV has translated as "is not resentful." The term "λογίζομαι" (logizomai, pronounced lo-gē'-zo-mī) means "to reckon, count, compute, calculate, count over" and can have the sense of "to take into account, to make an account of," or, metaphorically, "to pass to one's account, to impute." Since "κακός" (kakos, pronounced kä-ko's) means "evil," then "λογίζεται τὸ κακόν" (logizetai to kakos) could have the meaning of "to pass evil to (some)one's account," which would certainly overlap with the sense of "being resentful." The negative particle "οὐ" (ou, pronounced ü) negates the expression. Thus, true love is not resentful.

Of course, I can't assume that Jane Austen was reflecting on the meaning of the Greek original, but a next step would be to check old commentaries on 1 Corinthians 13:5 (and its context) to see if they offer any remarks on resentment.

Reconstructing Words of Jesus in Aramaic?

William Wallace Denslow

Mother Goose (1901)

Not how I learned it!

(Image from Wikipedia)

I take part not only in discussions on the Milton List but also on the Synoptic List, a listserve that focuses upon the literary connections among the gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Lately, scholars on that list have been discussing whether Aramaic sayings of Jesus can be reconstructed from the Greek. Mr. Jack Kilmon thinks so, and he has some plausible arguments based on possible mistranslations from Aramaic into Greek that result in some of the "hard sayings of Jesus." For instance, Mr. Kilmon suggests that we look at Luke 14:26:

If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. (RSV)

εἴ τις ἔρχεται πρός με καὶ οὐ μισεῖ τὸν πατέρα ἑαυτοῦ καὶ τὴν μητέρα καὶ τὴν γυναῖκα καὶ τὰ τέκνα καὶ τοὺς ἀδελφοὺς καὶ τὰς ἀδελφάς ἔτι τε καὶ τὴν ψυχὴν ἑαυτοῦ οὐ δύναται εἶναί μου μαθητής (mGNT)

As Mr. Kilmon points out, the Greek word for "hate" is "misei" (μισεῖ), but he suggests that the Aramaic work was "sana," and that Jesus was using an idiom: "This is a mistranslated idiom where the Aramaic word for 'hate' (sana) means to 'set aside'." Professor Mark Matson of Milligan College liked Mr. Kilmon's suggestions on recovering the Aramaic words of Jesus:

Here I can only join with an Amen. I think the gospels were clearly written in Greek. But the traces of Aramaic material do show in a number of places. Whether these are "sources" as we might imagine (e.g., written), or very strongly remembered oral remembrance I am not sure. It would be interesting to explore that.

Mr. Kilmon replied by means of analogy:

Mnemonic devices such as alliteration, paronomasia, assonance, rhyme and meter appear in back translations of "Jesus stuff" to his native Aramaic. These devices are very effective for accurate transmission. If I were to say:

"Roses are red, violets are blue;
You better be good or the devil will get you"

. . . you would remember it and pass it on fairly pristine. At some point, my profound saying would be written down but it would still preserve the syntax of orality.

Mr. Kilmon's suggestion on the Aramaic term "sana" has a certain plausibility and may very well be correct, but I wonder if the power of mnemonic devices ensure accurate transmission and if we can be certain of recovering the actual Aramaic. On the Synoptic List, I mostly just lurk and listen in on these learned discussions, but this time, I stood up on my hind legs and expressed my doubts publicly:

Jack Kilmon wrote:

"Roses are red, violets are blue;
You better be good or the devil will get you."

This is, of course, not only poetic but also wise . . . yet I think that an oral culture would very quickly 'improve' on it:

"Roses are red, violets are blue;
Better be good or the devil with you!"

The original would be forgotten, and any attempt to get back to the actual words of the historical Kilmon would be frustrated . . . though nobody would realize this.

Professor Bruce Brooks, of the University of Massachusetts, chimed in with a powerful amen:

I think Jeffery's point is very well taken. Rhyme may be a mnemonic aid, though whole traditions including the Homeric seem to have gotten along nicely without it, but when present, it does not protect the maxim in question from literary abrasion and change. The most famous poem of the Chinese poet Li Bwo, a little thing of four short lines, can be shown by early copies to have been worn down and trivialized from what is more likely to have been its original form to the form in which millions can recite it at the present moment. In much the way that Jeffery's improvisation suggests. Quotations, rhymed as well as unrhymed, from the early Chinese classics in the later Chinese classics, are sometimes inexact, not to mention quotations in less exalted contexts. Mediterranean examples might be multiplied as well.

For one reason and another, some types of material may survive repetition and transmission better than others, but there can be no guarantee, whether by genre or by form, of invariance under repetition and transmission. Life is simple, but not *that* simple.

And so it stands . . . next to me, still on my hind legs. I'd better get back down (such a stance being unseemly because seamy), but while I'm standing here, I'll offer a bit of mnemonic advice: remember to spell "mnemonic" with its silent "m" by recalling that "m" comes directly before "n" in the alphabet.

Oh, by the bye, William Wallace Denslow's illustrated version above of that rosy Mother Goose rhyme is obviously not the illustrious original because mnemonics favor the one that I grew up with: "Roses are red, / Violets are blue, / Sugar is sweet, / And so are you." Though there's something to be said for an anonymous competitor:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue;
Wish I were dead,
For you're not true.

I've even heard of a version having the "I" replaced by "you" . . . but such violence is foreign to true-blue, red-blooded, rosy-hued Mother Goose lyrics (as we all know from infancy).