Making the Case for Cases: Five Endings, Eight Labels, and a World of Exegesis
Making the Case for Cases: Five Endings, Eight Labels, and a World of Exegesis J. Neil Daniels One of the first things a student of New Testament Greek discovers is that nouns refuse to sit still. Just when you think you have learned a word, its ending changes, and suddenly you're wondering what happened to the vocabulary you memorized yesterday. But there is a method to the madness. Greek is an inflected language, meaning that the forms of words communicate grammatical relationships that English ordinarily expresses through word order and prepositions. This brings us to the concept of case, which identifies the grammatical function of a noun, pronoun, adjective, or other declined word within a sentence. The nominative ordinarily identifies the subject; the genitive expresses various relationships, including possession, description, and source; the dative commonly indicates interest, location, or means; the accusative ordinarily identifies the direct object; and the vocative is use...