[B-Greek] Question about the third person pronoun in this sentence

Mike Noel mike at vnoel.com
Mon Dec 29 08:40:41 EST 2008


As mentioned in an earlier posting, I am trying to work through Machen
and am having problems with some of the exercises.  Here is one that I
am having difficulty with.

hAUTH BLEPEI TO PROSWPON TOU KURIOU AUTHS

This is what I have so far:

hAUTH is the pronoun "this"  used in feminine, nominative, singular.
Machen explains that when the pronouns hOUTOS and EKEINOS are used
without a noun they imply a subject based on the gender and numbe.  So
I translate hAUTH to "this woman".   Then we have:

BLEPEI TO PROSWPON TOU KURIOU

Which I think is simply "sees the face of the lord".

The final AUTHS is what is confusing me.  It is the third person
pronoun feminine, singular, genitive.  Since pronouns match the
antecedent in gender and number I'm thinking that this pronoun has to
go with hAUTH.  That makes a funny sentence:

This woman's face sees the face of the lord.

This also means that the antecedent and the pronoun are at opposite
ends of the sentence.  I'm learning that word order in Greek sentences
isn't as constrained as word order in English but this seems to be
quite a stretch.

Am I missing something?

Thanks.


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