Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

GREEK

An inflected language in which the marking of words with prefixes and suffixes encodes the syntactical structure of the sentence. Verbs are marked to express tense, mood, voice, person, and number, while adjectives, articles, pronouns, and nouns can be marked to reflect gender, number, and case. Greek has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. In addition to singular and plural, classical Greek has a dual. The eight Indo-european cases were reduced to five in Greek: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, and dative. Greek has three voice distinctions: active, passive, and middle.

History

The Greek language consists of several related dialects (Attic, Ionic, Doric, Aeolic) which emerged from Proto-Greek, a reconstructed Indo-european language. Migrating tribes of Achaeans, speaking Proto-Greek, arrived in the Greek peninsula ca. 2000 b.c.e., where they met and fused with the indigenous Aegeans. The earliest written form of Greek is called Linear B, preserved on clay tablets found on Crete and mainland Greece and dating from the Minoan and Mycenaean period (1450-1200). The collapse of Mycenaean civilization (ca. 1250) was followed by the arrival of groups of less culturally advanced Dorian Greeks, causing a cultural upheaval which introduced the Greek Dark Ages (ca. 1100-950), during which writing was forgotten. Toward the end of the 8th century, written Greek again appeared in the form of an alphabetic script borrowed from the 22-character Phoenician alphabet, with the addition of four distinctively Greek letters.

The dominant Greek dialect of the Hellenistic and Roman periods is called Koine (“common”) Greek, based primarily on 4th-century Attic Greek. Attic became the most important Greek dialect because of the political and military dominance of Athens during the 5th century. Koine was the official language of all the Hellenistic kingdoms founded by Alexander’s successors, and was used as the language of government, commerce, and education, as well as of the ruling elite and the higher strata of society because Greek language and culture were thought superior to other languages. There is no evidence that written Koine had local dialects, though there was much lexical and phonological variation. The uniform character of the written language contributed to the standardization of the spoken language.

Greek in the Near East

During the Mycenaean and Minoan periods, mainland Greece and Crete had extensive commercial contacts with the Near East. The Mycenaeans brought their language to Cyprus, for the Arcado-Cypriote dialect is known from inscriptions in the Cypriote syllabary. Though contact was interrupted by the dissolution of Mycenaean-Minoan civilization, commercial contacts were renewed and extended when Greek city-states began extensive colonization in the 8th century. Throughout the Hellenistic cities of Egypt and Syria-Palestine, the middle- and upper-class Greeks lived in relative isolation from the natives, minimizing the influence of indigenous languages. Greek continued to be spoken in the Hellenistic cities in the former Persian Empire, such as Seleucia on the Tigris and Susa.

Both Latin and Greek were used in the administration of eastern Roman provinces. In the Greek East the use of the Greek language was dominant, and it was the language of local Roman administration in the provinces. In the Greek-speaking provinces, even official Roman documents were routinely written in Greek, though public works inscriptions were usually in Latin. Latin was also the medium used for communication between the central government and Roman magistrates and between Roman magistrates and Roman colonies.

In Ptolemaic Egypt Greco-Macedonian immigrants settled in the two new centers of Hellenism, Alexandria in the north and Ptolemais in the south, as well as in the ancient port of Naucratis. However, most settled in primarily rural regions along the Nile. The preservation of nonliterary Greek papyri in Egypt from the 3rd century b.c.e. through the 3rd century c.e. provides an important avenue into the written Koine of this period. During the 3rd century b.c.e. the Torah and some other parts of the Hebrew Bible were translated into a Greek version called the Septuagint (LXX). The evidence from inscriptions indicates little dialectic difference in the Koine of Egypt, Asia Minor, Italy, and Syria-Palestine. Low-status Egyptian natives continued to speak Egyptian until the 3rd century c.e. In the 2nd century the Egyptian language, at this stage known as Coptic, began to be written using Greek characters and was heavily dependent on other aspects of Greek. As much as 20 percent of the Coptic lexicon consists of Greek loanwords, and some Greek verbs were adapted to Coptic morphology. Upper-class administrators and aristocrats as well as the lower social classes (especially in Upper Egypt) were generally monolingual.

After the death of Alexander in 323 b.c.e., Coele-Syria, Syria, Phoenicia, and Palestine were controlled by Ptolemaic Egypt until conquered by the Seleucids in 201; Koine Greek was the administrative language of both the Ptolemies and Seleucids. From the 3rd century on, most of the inscriptions found in Syria-Palestine are in Greek. The Zenon Papyri (259-257) reflect the relationship between the Jew Tobias and Egyptian authorities. One of the oldest dated Greek inscriptions is from Jaffa in honor of Ptolemy IV, and is dated to 217. Though there were enclaves of Hellenistic culture in the Hellenistic cities in Galilee such as Sepphoris and the more northerly cities of the Decapolis, including Antiochia Hippos, Abila, Gadara, Pella, and Beth-shean, no clear picture has yet emerged regarding the exact nature of the relationship between Jewish and Hellenistic cultural worlds in Upper and Lower Galilee during the 1st century c.e.

Many Greek settlers had settled in the Phoenician coastal cities during the 3rd century b.c.e. The traditional bilingualism of these cities was replaced with a Hellenistic Koine monolingualism, though Palestine generally during the Hellenistic and Roman period was bilingual; most people spoke both Aramaic and Greek. Hellenistic Koine was spoken and written by all social classes. The use of Greek in Palestine during the Roman period has been intensely investigated because of the problem of the language or languages spoken by Jesus and the more general problem of the extent to which Palestinian Judaism was Hellenized. Jesus certainly spoke Aramaic, probably Hebrew, and possibly Greek. Hebrew was a spoken language in Palestine until the Mishnaic period, though how widely it was used remains unclear. Both Hebrew and Greek were considered prestige languages in different social contexts. During the 2nd and 1st centuries b.c.e., Hebrew was used as a literary language, by the authors of Daniel, Ben Sira, and many of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Even among the Qumran literature, however, a number of Greek manuscripts were found dating from the mid-2nd century b.c.e. to as late as the mid-1st century c.e., including fragments of four LXX scrolls; and a scroll of the Minor Prophets in Greek was discovered at Naḥal µever. Two of the 15 Bar Kokhba letters (written 132-35 c.e.) from Naḥal µever are written in Greek, and the Babata archive from Naḥal µever consists of 36 or 37 documents written from ca. 93-132 c.e. in Nabatean, Aramaic, and Greek. The 221 Greek inscriptions from Beth-shearim in Galilee (3rd and 4th centuries c.e.) far outnumber those in Hebrew and Aramaic. The fact that there are ca. 1500 Greek loanwords in talmudic literature underlines the widespread use of Greek by Jews during the 1st centuries c.e.

Bibliography. D. E. Aune, “Greek,” OEANE 2:434-40; J. A. Fitzmyer, “The Languages of Palestine in the First Century a.d.,” in A Wandering Aramean (1979, repr. Grand Rapids, 1997), 29-56; W. Horbury and D. Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt (Cambridge, 1992); G. H. R. Horsley, “The Fiction of ‘Jewish Greek,’ ” in New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity (Marrickville, New South Wales, 1989), 5:5-40; G. Mussies, “Greek in Palestine and the Diaspora,” in The Jewish People in the First Century 2, ed. S. Safrai and M. Stern. CRINT 1 (Philadelphia, 1976), 1040-64; L. R. Palmer, The Greek Language (1980, repr. Norman, 1996); J. N. Sevenster, Do You Know Greek? NovTSup 17 (Leiden, 1968); B. Spolsky, “Triglossia and Literacy in Jewish Palestine of the First Century,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 42 (1983): 95-109.

David E. Aune

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

GREEK

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)