Riparian Grammar School: Parataxis and Why It's The Most Important Grammatical Idea You've Never Heard Of
Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 7:46AM | by Otter I should probably apologize for this post.
It’s about grammar.
If you love scripture and wonder about your experience of it, I think this is something you have to know about.
But if you’re like me and would rather have a rectal exam than talk about grammar, have a baseball (or cricket) bat handy to hit yourself on the head with every few minutes. It helps.
And as incentive, if you can muscle through (or skip to the end), we’ll finish by reading a bit of the Bible without punctuation, the way it was written.
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It’s probably too much to say that humans can’t think without language. The arrangement of images in the mind establishes relationships between things in our neural pathways, and I think it’s just snobbish not to call that “thought” (and a little pedantic to call it “language”).
But when it comes to analytical thought and the ability to think abstractly, language is essential. Thinking about God therefore requires some grasp of how language works, and worked a long time ago when snakes and donkeys talked (or didn’t) and people wrote about what they thought they were and who God was.
Certainly for Christians and Jews, their vision of God incarnates itself in language, an ancient text that tells the stories. Scripture is, mostly, a book of poems, and a story-book. It establishes the images that give the human imagination something to believe (or disbelieve) in, it arranges those images in patterns, and in the few abstract propositions it offers (mainly in the gospels and epistles) it draws them explicitly out of that wildly vivid imagery.
Time for a grammar lesson.
Begin with your fifth grade grammar lesson and the idea of the clause. It’s the smallest strictly grammatical unit, and it’s just a subject and a predicate (which contains a verb): Grammar identifies as precisely as possible how clauses are constructed and relate to one another.
“Jesus” is the subject, the one doing action. “Wept” is the predicate, consisting here of a verb and nothing but a verb.
Notice two things.
First, there is a third element in the sentence that is relatively modern, dating back to a little after the invention of the printing press. It’s so subtly become a part of how we read that we assume it’s actually part of the sentence, but it isn’t.
It’s the period. The period lets you know, “This sentence has now ended.”
But there was no punctuation in Koine Greek (that is, in the original text of John 11:35) that would signify that to the reader. He had to, as it were, make up the grammar as he went based on context and the construction of the words themselves.
Second, notice that since the clause can stand all by itself as a signifier of meaning, we say it is an “independent clause.” If we were to add a “subordinating word,” such as “because,” we would change the clause from an independent to a dependent (or subordinate) clause:
In this case, the period is hurled into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, perhaps replaced by another late-comer, the comma: since the period implies a complete sentence, it is inappropriate after a dependent clause, which is not a complete sentence.
Using a comma would generally allow a writer to signify the relationship of a dependent clause (“Because Jesus wept”) to an independent clause (“Thomas scowled”):
A fine invention, the comma.
But most ancient languages didn’t have it.
The word “syntax” means “to place [clauses] together,” to arrange them in units that declare their equal importance. But as I have indicated, it depends heavily on the invention and standardization of punctuation to sort out for us what the relationships are between clauses.
A Greek manuscript. Notice that there are no chapters, verses, paragraphs, or even line breaks. With a very little training you will notice that the text is in ALL CAPITALS and has no punctuation or quotation marks. You had to sort out meaning based on other cues.
In the Hebrew and (slightly more generally speaking) in Greek and even in English before about the Renaissance, people wrote (and composed poems and stories) in parataxis, a word that comes from the Greek for “to place [clauses] side by side.”
The heroes of our story are the coordinating conjunctions: and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet.
When the King James Version was published in 1611, it still retained a habit of rolling out parataxis, an affection for coordinating conjunctions.
It had gotten that from the ways that medieval texts were handled, without punctuation and depending on coordinating conjunctions and (we can’t stress this enough) the reader’s inflection to sort out the meaning. Consider this section from The Book of Armaments, from which I have removed the punctuation and emphasized the coordinating conjunctions (only those which “place main clauses side by side”, and a few words that are functioning as coordinating conjunctions like “neither”) so you can see how a medieval text looked, and how parataxis works:
and saint attila raised the hand grenade up on high saying O Lord bless this thy hand grenade that with it thou mayest blow Thine enemies to tiny bits in Thy mercy and the Lord did grin and the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats and large chu […] and the Lord spake saying first shalt thou take out the Holy Pin then shalt thou count to three no more no less three shall be the number thou shalt count and the number of the counting shall be three four shalt thou not count neither count thou two excepting that thou then proceed to three five is right out once the number three being the third number be reached then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe who being naughty in My sight shall snuff it Amen.
Notice that as Brother Maynard reads it, he supplies punctuation through his vocal inflection. You could almost believe there were commas, periods, and quotation marks in the text, but there aren’t:
Now go back and read Mark 1:4-34 without modern punctuation.
The rolling Greek parataxis of Mark is something to encounter, and if you dabble in Greek, you really owe it to yourself to go through and read it without punctuation or the modern, editorial chapters, verses, and even paragraph breaks that editors use to tell you how to think about the text.
Notice, just as one of scores of examples, how the parataxis holds together the experiences of baptism and being driven into the wilderness. (This is heavily muted by both a paragraph and verse break in your English translation, and often even a section break.) But what am I saying: you’ll notice things I haven’t even noticed as you read this. (I’ll have some comments when you’re done…)
John appeared baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins and all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan confessing their sins and John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey and he preached saying after me comes he who is mightier than I the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie I have baptized you with water but he will baptize you with [or in] a holy spirit and in those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan and when he came up out of the water immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove and with you I am well pleased a voice came from heaven you are my beloved son and the spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness and he was in the wilderness forty days being tempted by Satan and he was with the wild animals and the angels were ministering to him and after John was arrested Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God and saying the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand repent and believe in the gospel and passing alongside the Sea of Galilee he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen and Jesus said to them follow me and I will make you become fishers of men and immediately they left their nets and followed him and going on a little farther he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother who were in their boat mending the nets and immediately he called them and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him and they went into Capernaum and immediately on the Sabbath he entered the synagogue and was teaching and they were astonished at his teaching for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes and immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit and he cried out what have you to do with us Jesus of Nazareth have you come to destroy us I know who you are the holy one of god but Jesus rebuked him saying be silent and come out of him and the unclean spirit convulsing him and crying out with a loud voice came out of him and they were all amazed so that they questioned among themselves saying, what is this new teaching with authority he commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him and at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galile and immediately he left the synagogue and entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John and Simon’s mother-in-law lay ill with a fever and immediately they told him about her and he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up and the fever left her and she began to serve them and that evening at sundown they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons and the whole city was gathered together at the door and he healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons and he would not permit the demons to speak because they knew him…
And so the text goes on, right to the end, one main clause at a time.
Two things probably leaped out at you immediately.
One is that it’s a little difficult to organize the information. We depend on paragraphs, line-breaks, punctuation (including quotation marks) to tell us what the relationships are between elements in the language. That is, we think syntactically, not paratactically like Mark does, and well-meaning translators and editors will provide that for you.
It’s a modern way of dealing with a text, though, that makes parataxis a little difficult to read at first. But it’s like wearing glasses: after a little while your brain adjusts to it and you see things a little differently.
Second, the text organizes itself in surprising ways. I’ll bet you noticed relationships between images that hadn’t occurred to you before.
That is, you’ve begun to think a little more like the biblical writers. And whether you’re a believer or not, it’s just kind of nice to feel you understand them a little better.
Now go back and do the whole Bible that way.
Reader Comments (5)
You always manage to make me think about stuff in a new way. Thank you.
Wow, that was weird. Apparently if you take out the punctuation, I start speed reading.
Victoria, can you see how parataxis favors the mythic mind over the factual description?
The thing I noticed first is that it all sounds so breathless, like it's being told at breakneck speed. "And immediately this happened, and immediately that happened..." It reminded me of my 8 year old when she's excitedly telling me a story.
Reading in this manner makes me think about how God is outside of time and our arbitrary distinctions of when a thing begins and ends.Everything simply flows and is.