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Episode Synopsis "Luke 1:28"
Hello friends! Starting today, we’re going to try something new! Since learning a language involves so much more than reading, I’ll be sending you an audio form of the message along with the email. If you don’t like it, let me know, and I’ll stop! Our verse today contains an absolutely fascinating Hebrew idiom that ended up becoming part of Catholic liturgy for centuries (up to the present day) after it was translated into Latin. Interesting, right? Today, we’ll also hear from Martin Luther about how to translate this interesting expression; he noticed something about it that a lot of people don’t notice. Here we go: καὶ εἰσελθὼν πρὸς αὐτὴν εἶπεν· χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη, ὁ κύριος μετὰ σοῦ.Translation: And coming to her he said “Greetings, favored one, the Lord is with you.”The grammar of this passage really isn’t that bad. Let’s take it piece by piece. First, we have the participle εἰσελθὼν. It’s an aorist active participle, and it’s also masculine, singular, and nominative. Let’s break that down: the “aorist active” part means that we’re referring to something someone did in the past without much regard to when it happened. The “masculine, singular, nominative” part means that it has to agree with whatever else in the sentence is masculine, singular, and nominative. Good news: we have it easy this time - it’s a clear reference to the angel. The angel is coming to Mary. If we were to take the whole phrase καὶ εἰσελθὼν πρὸς αὐτὴν εἶπεν we would translate it as “and coming to her, he said.” We’ve heard about εἶπεν before, by the way - it’s just the “he/she/it” past tense form from λεγω (“I say”) so in this case we translate it as “he said.” Next, we have the greeting χαῖρε, which just means “Greetings!” It is in the vocative case, which is the case of direct address. In general, Greek words don’t really like to end in ε. So you can pretty much assume that if you encounter a word ending in ε, the vocative case is at least one possibility for how to translate it. After that, we have the interesting word κεχαριτωμένη. Within Catholicism, this word has always been rendered as “full of grace” because that’s how the Latin translator Jerome thought it should be rendered. It then became part of the famous “Ave Maria” prayer. It is, however, based on an interesting late Hebrew idiom that seems to have been used in greetings. We find it in two places in the Hebrew part of Daniel: אִישׁ־חֲ֠מֻדוֹת, which might best be translated as “man greatly loved.” In both those situations, it’s where the angel greets Daniel or speaks directly to him during his visions. The Hebrew חֲ֠מֻדוֹת is basically the same semantic range as κεχαριτωμένη. It’s not hard to see the connection. Interestingly enough, Martin Luther was the first one to point out the connection between the angel greeting Daniel (that’s where he uses that phrase, twice no less!) and the angel greeting Mary. In his introduction to his translation of the New Testament, he pointed out how it makes both literary and linguistic sense to connect the two. Finally, we have the phrase ὁ κύριος μετὰ σοῦ. This is easy: it just means “The Lord is with you.” That’s it for today! Have a good one. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greeknewtestament.substack.com
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