The Upper Register

2014 ETS Annual Meeting in San Diego

The Evangelical Theological Society meets this week in San Diego for its Annual Meeting, November 19-21. This year's theme is "Ecclesiology." I'll be giving a paper on Wednesday at 4:30pm titled "Household Baptism in the New Testament: Assessing the Debate 50+ Years Later." For those who are interested, here is a summary of my paper.

The New Testament records three household baptisms – the household of Lydia (Acts 16:15), of the Philippian jailer (Acts 16:33), and of Stephanas (1 Cor 1:16). The number of household baptisms may be increased to six if we include three cases where a household context is implied – the baptisms of Crispus and Gaius (1 Cor 1:14; Acts 18:8) and of Cornelius (Acts 10:2; 11:13-18). In addition to the household baptisms, there are texts which speak of an adult believing (John 4:53; Acts 16:34; 18:8) or being saved (Acts 11:14; 16:31; Heb 11:7) along with their household. In 1949, Ethelbert Stauffer suggested that these texts employ what he called "the oikos formula." In 1958–1962, over the course of three monographs, Joachim Jeremias and Kurt Aland had a spirited exchange over this issue as part of a broader inquiry as to whether the early church baptized infants.

In this paper I review and assess the debate between Jeremias and Aland on the NT household baptisms, as well as the ways in which subsequent scholars have picked up their arguments in the continued polemics over infant baptism. I will argue that the debate has been sidetracked by unhelpful attempts on both sides to prove that infants were either included in or excluded from these household baptisms. It is my contention that a more helpful approach is to ask what "the oikos formula" itself implies with respect to the basis on which baptism was administered. My thesis is that the formula is rooted in the Old Testament as mediated by the Septuagint, and as such points to the Hebraic principle of household solidarity in regard to religion, that is, that the children are included in the religious community on the basis of the confession of faith of the head of the household. The New Testament's use of this formula suggests that baptism was administered in the apostolic age not only to adults on the basis of their profession of faith, but also to the children of believers on the basis of parental authority and household solidarity. 

I plan to mention Meredith G. Kline who takes the recurring use of the oikos phrase in connection with faith, conversion and baptism as terminological evidence in the New Testament of "a standard missions policy according to which the covenant community would regularly be enlarged through the accretion of household authority units" (By Oath Consigned, p. 97). The key is "the household authority principle," that is, the principle that the head of the household has authority in the sphere of religion over the household subordinates under his or her authority (I say "her" as well because of cases like Lydia who is the head of her household). 

But I'm most excited about the last part of the paper where I attempt to show that the oikos phrase ("he and his [whole] house") in the NT has a theological aura due to its origin in the Septuagint. To make this case, I appeal to the evidence that Luke’s Greek style was influenced by the Septuagint and that at times he even engaged in conscious imitation of Septuagint vocabulary, phrases, and constructions. The classic study on this subject was a pair of essays published in 1940 by the Swedish classical scholar, Albert Wifstrand, titled "Luke and Greek Classicism" and "Luke and the Septuagint."

Wifstrand argued that Luke's conscious imitations of Septuagint vocabulary and syntax gave "a certain solemn and hieratic tone to Luke’s diction, dignifying it and raising it above everyday life" and gave "his narrative an aura of sacred history." My thesis is that Luke's use of the oikos phrase is yet another one of these Septuagintisms and that this gives the phrase a theological significance, supporiting the concept of family solidarity in matters of religion.

My sense is that Baptists have more influence and that the covenantal/paedobaptist view is not well-represented at ETS. So I'm glad the organizers accepted my paper for inclusion. Should be fun!

[For those interested, English translations of Wifstrand's seminal essays may be found in Epochs and Styles: Selected Writings on the New Testament, Greek Language and Greek Culture in the Post-Classical Era (ed. Lars Rydbeck and Stanley E. Porter; translated from the Swedish Originals by Denis Searby; WUNT 179; Τübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 17-27, 28-45. See also Loveday C. A. Alexander, "Septuaginta, Fachprosa, Imitatio: Albert Wifstrand and the Language of Luke-Acts," in Acts in Its Ancient Literary Context: A Classicist Looks at the Acts of the Apostles (LNTS 298; London: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2005), 231-53.] 

"Translation is Required" - Book Review, Part 6

The SBL Commentary on the Septuagint

This is my last post in my review of this book. My previous post mentioned three papers on specific books of the Septuagint – Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. That is a perfect segue to this post, because the authors of those papers are also the authors assigned to write commentaries on that book. The series will be called The Society of Biblical Literature Commentary on the Septuagint (SBLCS).

Benjamin Wright mentions this major scholarly project:  “With NETS now completed, the scholarly focus will now shift to the commentary series (SBLC), in which the full implications of DTS and the interlinear paradigm can be worked out in individual translation units” (p. 39).

At the 2013 SBL Annual Meeting in Baltimore, I had the privilege of meeting Jannes Smith, who is a Professor of Old Testament at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Ontario, and who did his Ph.D. under Albert Pietersma at the nearby University of Toronto. Dr. Smith has been assigned to do the SBLCS commentary on a portion of the Psalms, and he presented a sample of his work at SBL in 2013. If Dr. Smith’s sample is representative, the SBLCS looks like it is going to be a fantastic series in terms of interacting with the Greek and the underlying Hebrew in painstaking detail, showing the correspondences and divergences between the Greek and the Hebrew and trying to provide possible explanations for them, getting into the mind of the translations as it were. In spite of my doubts about the Interlinear Paradigm, I am sure that this series will be an incredibly rich resource for students of the Septuagint. I can’t wait to see the first volume!

"Translation is Required" - Book Review, Part 5

Okay, enough of the Interlinear Paradigm. That is a very important issue, but the papers presented at the conference were by no means restricted to it. At this point, I would like to briefly mention just three papers devoted to specific books of the Septuagint that I found interesting. It is all very well to speak of the Septuagint in abstractions, but when one starts studying specific books, one begins to see that each book has a character of its own.

Exodus: “‘Glory’ in Greek Exodus: Lexical Choice in Translation and Its Reflection in Secondary Translations,” by Larry Perkins

Perkins points out that the translator of Greek Exodus engages in “semantic leveling,” that is, he uses the Greek word δόξα and cognate terms (e.g., ἔνδοξος, δοξάζω, ἐνδοξάζομαι, παραδοξάζω, etc.) to render a variety of unrelated Hebrew words. This suggests that the translator wanted to emphasize the concept of Yahweh’s δόξα in the book of Exodus. Perkins also points out that in his English translation of Greek Exodus in NETS he took pains to consistently render these words using the English word “glory” in some way or other in order to reflect the Septuagint translator’s methodical use of the same δόξα terms. 

Leviticus: “Some Reflections on Writing a Commentary on the Septuagint of Leviticus,” by Dirk Büchner

I enjoyed this essay because Büchner discusses the important word ἐξιλάσκομαι used in Greek Leviticus, which plays an important role in the debate over the meaning of the related term ἱλαστήριον in the New Testament (esp. Rom 3:25). Büchner argues that the concept of appeasing God or propitiating God’s wrath is present in the meaning of the verb as used in Greek Leviticus.

Deuteronomy: “Translating a Translation: Some Final Reflections on the Production of the New English Translation of Greek Deuteronomy,” by Melvin K. H. Peters

This paper was a riot to read! Peters takes a strong (too strong?) stand against the hegemony of the Leningrad Codex (which he refers to as “L” or the St. Petersburg Codex) and argues that the Septuagint must be allowed to stand on its own as a valid witness to the text of the Old Testament. He wants to “challenge once again the long-standing and continuing practice, in both scholarly and confessional circles, of elevating the St. Petersburg Codex to a normative status unwarranted by the evidence of its text and, in my view, by sound judgment” (pp. 119-20). To illustrate, he examines Deut 30:15-16 in both the Hebrew and the Greek and concludes that “there is no credible way to argue for the primacy of the text of L in this instance,” because the Masoretic Text as represented by the Leningrad Codex (L) is “clearly incomplete,” since it leaves out the “if” clause at the beginning of v 16 (p. 122). Peters extrapolates from this one example and argues that the Septuagint is often a better witness to the original Hebrew than the Leningrad Codex, which is a medieval manuscript dated to the beginning of the 11th century.

"Translation is Required" - Book Review, Part 4

“Translating the Untranslatable: Septuagint Renderings of Hebrew Idioms,” by Jan Joosten

This is the third paper that relates to the Interlinear Paradigm, although it is not mentioned by name in the paper. As I mentioned at the outset, Jan Joosten was not part of the NETS translation team but rather comes from a different project, the translation of the Septuagint into modern French. In collaboration with Eberhard Bons and Stephan Kessler, he translated Greek Hosea for La Bible d’Alexandrie. Joosten is therefore not tied to the Interlinear Paradigm the way the NETS team was. Nevertheless, he comes to a similar position regarding the character of the Septuagint as a translation, although perhaps holding back from the more extreme position of Pietersma, who, as quoted above, seems to regard the Septuagint not really as a translation but as a representation of the Hebrew in Greek (a position that Joosten would not endorse).

Joosten’s paper is focused on one narrow issue, namely, the way the Septuagint translators handled Hebrew idioms like “to lift so-and-so’s face” (meaning, to show respect to so-and-so). Here is the key quote from Joosten’s conclusion:

“To all appearances, the ultimate goal of the translators was to give to their readers as much as possible of what they found in the source text. Although the translational process sometimes demands that one should abandon either the wording of the source text or its global meaning, the Seventy were not at ease with this alternative. More often than not, they refused this basic dilemma and tried to compose in Greek an expression that paid tribute to both the wording and the sense” (p. 69).

This may seem to be very close to the Interlinear Paradigm. Indeed, later in the volume, Benjamin Wright said, “I know that in other places Jan has argued that the interlinear paradigm does not succeed as an explanatory hypothesis. But ... I would suggest that we are not all that far apart” (p. 237).

However, I think Jan Joosten is still articulating something somewhat different from what the Interlinear Paradigm seems to be saying. For Joosten, the Septuagint is, at the end of the day, still a translation, that is, an attempt to render the meaning of the source text in words that are still intelligible (however awkward) in the target text. Yes, they did so quite literally at times, or to use the modern distinction between formal and dynamic equivalence, they were clearly on the formal end of that spectrum. Joosten puts it this way: “The translators made every effort to transmit not only the content but also the form of the source text to their Greek readers” (p. 70).

I think that is a better formulation than that of the Interlinear Paradigm, which would have the movement going in the opposite direction, e.g., that they were making every effort to bring their readers to the source text itself, the same way that a modern Greek-English interlinear Bible is intended to bring the English reader to the Greek. Recall Wright’s statement that they “did not intend to produce translations meant to be independent of those [Hebrew] sources” and sought “to bring the reader to the original” (p. 27). Later in the volume, Wright makes the strong assertion that the Septuagint is not “an independent, literary text that a Greek reader would be able to decode readily without recourse to the source text” (p. 236).

I have to admit that I’m skeptical of the Interlinear Paradigm, at least as formulated by Pietersma and Wright in this volume. My concern with the interlinear paradigm is that I do not think the Septuagint translators were trying to bring the Greek speaker to the Hebrew text but to bring the Hebrew text to the Greek speaker. The Septuagint was intended to be read independently of knowledge of the Hebrew. Of course, they were trying to bring over as much of the Hebrew as possible, not only in terms of the sense, but in terms of the formal features of Hebrew. Yet they were trying to do this for a Greek-speaking audience that had no recourse to the source text (the Hebrew). This theory does a better job than the interlinear paradigm of explaining why the Septuagint translators sometimes rendered literally and sometimes not, and when they did translate literally, why their renderings still typically make sense in Greek. 

"Translation is Required" - Book Review, Part 3

“Moving Beyond Translating a Translation: Reflections on A New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS),” by Benjamin G. Wright III

The second editor of the NETS project weighs in next. Benjamin Wright sets the Interlinear Paradigm within the broader context of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS), which is a theoretical framework for analyzing the text-linguistic character and sociocultural function or position of translations in general. (DTS was developed by Gideon Toury in Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond). I’m still not completely clear on why the editors of NETS are interested in DTS or what its connection is with the Interlinear Paradigm. Wright says vaguely, “DTS came to form an important theoretical nexus for understanding and, in some cases, reconfiguring ideas that had been central to NETS from the beginning” (p. 27). So I will just take note of it (because it is obviously important to Pietersma and Wright) and move on, hoping for more enlightenment in the future.

With regard to the specific issue of the Interlinear Paradigm, Wright agrees with Pietersma but puts things a little differently. He argues that “the interlinear paradigm is an expression of the notion that the Greek translators of the so-called Septuagint intended their product to have a relationship of dependence on their source text. That is, they did not intend to produce translations meant to be independent of those sources” (p. 27, citing Cameron Boyd-Taylor’s Ph.D. dissertation, Reading Between the Lines: The Interlinear Paradigm for Septuagint Studies). Another way of putting it is that the translators sought “to bring the reader to the original.” That is the Interlinear Paradigm boiled down to a simple phrase.

"Translation is Required" - Book Review, Part 2

“Beyond Literalism: Interlinearity Revisited,” by Albert Pietersma

This paper answers the question, “What is the Interlinear Paradigm, the methodology behind the New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS)?” According to its architect, Albert Pietersma, the use of the term “interlinear” is not to be taken literally, as if it were being claimed that an interlinear text with the Greek words aligned with the Hebrew words actually existed. Rather, it is a metaphor and a heuristic tool. It is a way of conceptualizing the relationship between the source text (Hebrew) and the target text (Greek).

One way of conceptualizing the relationship between the underlying Hebrew and the Greek of the Septuagint is to refer to the Septuagint an “essentially literal translation,” which is the descriptor given by James Barr. But the advocates of the Interlinear Paradigm think this designation, while not totally wrong, needs to be refined and made more precise. Pietersma therefore coined the term “interlinear” as a metaphor for describing the nature of the Septuagint’s literalism. Saying that the Septuagint is more like an interlinear certainly takes “literal” to a whole new level!

Pietersma sees three characteristics of the Septuagint as a translation of the Hebrew that justify this designation (pp. 18-19):

1. Isomorphic transfer – when a morpheme in the target text so closely mimics an item in the source text that it fails to fit the target context, e.g., when a preposition in Hebrew is rendered as an article in Greek.
2. Lexical transfer – when a lexeme in the target text so closely mimics a lexeme in the source text that it fails to fit the target context, e.g., when a particular Greek word is chosen to render a Hebrew word based on an etymological interpretation of the Hebrew.
3. Segmentation – when the target text follows so carefully follows the word order of the source text that the meaning of target text is not as transparent as it could be.

The result of these literal features is that the Septuagint is often characterized by unintelligibility. In Pietersma’s judgment, this pervasive characteristic (unintelligibility) is one of the main things that makes the Septuagint more like an interlinear than merely a literal translation.

It is almost as if Pietersma thinks the Septuagint really isn’t a translation at all. Indeed, Pietersma comes pretty close to saying just that: “One might further speak of ‘representation’ in distinction from ‘translation,’ of a deferring of meaning or a withdrawing by the translator of his own understanding” (p. 9).

"Translation is Required" - Book Review, Part 1

Robert J. V. Hiebert, ed., “Translation is Required”: The Septuagint in Retrospect and Prospect (Septuagint and Cognate Studies 56; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010)

This volume is a collection of papers that were presented at a 2008 conference on modern translations of the Septuagint sponsored by the Septuagint Institute of Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, now called the John William Wevers Institute for Septuagint Studies in memory of that giant of modern Septuagint studies.

The main focus of the conference was to celebrate the publication of A New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS), edited by Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright III. Although NETS was the main focus, scholars involved in two other major projects to translate the Septuagint into modern languages also presented papers: Jan Joosten presented a paper on the French translation of the Septuagint (La Bible d’Alexandrie), and Wolfgang Kraus presented a paper on the German translation of the Septugaint (Septuaginta Deutsch).

There are thirteen conference papers and four introductory statements by the panelists. I’ve decided to be selective, rather than boring you with summaries and reviews of all thirteen papers! First, I am going to address the issue of the Interlinear Paradigm, which is the focus of three important papers in the volume. Then I will give very brief summaries of three additional papers on specific books of the Septuagint that I found stimulating. Finally, I will take note of an important development that is mentioned in this volume, the forthcoming, über-cool SBL Commentary on the Septuagint.

The first two conference papers were by the editors of NETS, Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright III. The purpose of these two papers is to provide an overview of the methodology that guided the production of NETS, namely, the so-called “Interlinear Paradigm,” which was developed during the period 1996–2005 by Albert Pietersma and his colleagues. What the heck is that, you ask? Stay tuned ...

Happy International Septuagint Day

Today is International Septuagint Day, established by the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies (IOSCS) to promote Septuagint studies throughout the world. It is so designated because, on February 8, 553, the Emperor Justinian made it illegal for the Jews in the Byzantine Empire to read the Bible in Hebrew and required them to read the scriptures in Greek or Latin or another language that could be understood by the people. His hope was that this might encourage the Jews to convert to Christianity. “Necessity dictates that when the Hebrews listen to their sacred texts they should not confine themselves to the meaning of the letter, but should also devote their attention to those sacred prophecies which are hidden from them, and which announce the mighty Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”  To that end, he required that those Jewish synagogues choosing the Greek version “shall use the text of the seventy interpreters, which is the most accurate translation, and the one most highly approved.”

Why should you study the Septuagint? Here are four reasons:

First, it is our oldest witness to the text of the Old Testament. The Leningrad Codex, which is reproduced in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, is a medieval manuscript dated to the beginning of the 11th century. By contrast, the Septuagint Pentateuch (the LXX proper) was produced ca. 250 BC on the basis of Hebrew manuscripts that had to have been at least 1,250 years older than the Leningrad Codex. There are many cases where the Septuagint preserves a more accurate reading than the Leningrad Codex. For example, the Masoretic Text at Gen 4:8 seems to have dropped a phrase, “Let's go out to the field,” which makes more sense of the verse. But that phrase is found in the Septuagint along with other ancient versions (see NIV and ESV footnotes). The reputation of the Masoretes as careful scribes checking every jot and tittle is deserved, but they were not infallible. And in some instances, theological concerns crept in and influenced their work.

(I want to be careful here. There are also many cases where the Septuagint translators flat-out misunderstood the Hebrew, so the Septuagint is not infallible either. I am not arguing that the Septuagint is always to be preferred over the Masoretic Text. I think we need to engage in textual criticism of the Old Testament using an eclectic method that looks at each variant on a case-by-case basis, taking into account all of the evidence, including the Samaritan Pentateuch, the biblical texts at Qumran, the ancient versions such as the Vulgate, the Septuagint, and others. However, due to the traditional primacy of the Masoretic Text, we have more work to do in taking the Septuagint into account as a weighty ancient witness to the text of the Old Testament.)

Second, the vast majority of the New Testament quotations, allusions, and paraphrases of the Old Testament are either directly based on the Septuagint or a Greek Bible tradition related to it. The Septuagint (broadly speaking) was the Bible that Jesus and the apostles read, studied, used, and quoted. Have you ever had the experience of reading the New Testament in your English Bible, coming across a quotation from the Old Testament, and then flipping back to the Old Testament to read the quotation in context, only to be puzzled by the differences, sometimes really big differences? This happens time and time again. Why? Because our English Bibles rely primarily on the Hebrew Leningrad Codex, whereas the New Testament authors were using the Greek Bible, and these two traditions are separated in time by a millennium, not to mention the fact that the Hebrew Bible was copied and preserved during that millennium by non-messianic Jewish scribes. The New Testament writers were not quoting from the Leningrad Codex. In fact, they were not even quoting from a Hebrew manuscript. They were quoting from the Greek Bible traditions that we call the Septuagint. 

Third, much of the specialized theological vocabulary of the New Testament is colored by the biblical usage in the Septuagint. Just think of key words like ἄγγελος (angel), διαθήκη (covenant), δικαιόω (declare to be righteous), δόξα (glory), and many more, all of which have taken on unique shades of biblical meaning. The Septuagint was like the King James Version of the Greek-speaking Jewish synagogue, so it is not at all surprising that its vocabulary, syntax, and even theology have influenced the writers of the New Testament. Accordingly, it would seem to me that the development of a unified biblical theology of the Old and New Testaments would require a strong (though not exclusive) reliance on the Septuagint as one of the ways of making the connections from Old to New.

Fourth, the Septuagint was the Bible of the church for the first four centuries. In the West, it was eventually supplanted by the Latin Vulgate in the early middle ages. In the East it continues to be the Bible of the Greek-speaking churches in the Orthodox tradition. When the church fathers quoted the Old Testament, they almost always used the Septuagint. 

There are many other reasons to study the Septuagint, but those are the four big ones that motivate me.

If you would like to get started, I would recommend the following tools:

A New English Translation of the Septuagint

A New English Translation of the Septuagint (online)

Jobes and Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint

The Rahlfs edition of the Septuagint

Finally, if you are interested in the exciting study of the ways in which the Septuagint has influenced the New Testament in terms of vocabulary, syntax, and quotations, see my unfinished paper in which I am trying to collect as many examples as possible. There are so many studies out there on the Greco-Roman and Jewish materials as background for the NT, but the most obvious background, which has had the greatest impact of all, and the one that has been sitting right under our noses this whole time, has not received the attention it deserves. 

Influence of LXX on Greek NT

For some time now I have been compiling what I hope will some day become an exhaustive list showing the influence of the Septuagint on the Greek New Testament. (Click link for PDF, 17 pages; it is a new document that I have uploaded to my static site.) I have collected these under four categories of influence: (a) spelling, (b) vocabulary, (c) syntax, and (d) Scripture quotations.

The third category is also referred to as "Septuagintisms." At one time, they were called "Hebraisms" or "Semitisms," on the assumption that many portions of the NT were actually translations of a text originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic. However, the general consensus of NT scholarship is that, aside from some of the sayings of Jesus, none of the actual texts or books of the NT was composed in a Semitic language. There is therefore a great reluctance to speak of "Semitisms" in the NT any more; any traces of Semitic influence on the syntax of the Greek NT are now best viewed as "Septuagintisms." In other words, the Semitic syntax has been mediated by the Septuagint which often translates the Hebrew quite literally and thus preserves the Hebraic flavor of the original. 

The second area -- vocabulary -- is perhaps even more important than syntax, and is of special interest not only to philologists but also to biblical theologians. Not a few of the theologically important words of the Greek New Testament are best understood in light of their Old Testament context and allusiveness as mediated by the Septuagint. Many of these theologically important terms in the New Testament  have nuances that differ slightly from their secular usage in extra-biblical Greek, whether classical Greek, literary Koine, or the papyri. Adolf Deissmann rightly refuted the notion prevalent in his day that the New Testament is written in a special "New Testament Greek" that differed substantially from standard Koine Greek. Nevertheless, Deissmann's emphasis on the papyri as the primary context for NT lexicography led to a reduced awareness of the strong influence of the Septuagint. As the late C. F. D. Moule said:

The pendulum has swung rather too far in the direction of equating Biblical with ‘secular’ Greek; and we must not allow these fascinating discoveries [the papyri] to blind us to the fact that Biblical Greek still does retain certain peculiarities, due in part to Semitic influence … and in part to the moulding influence of the Christian experience, which did in some measure create an idiom and a vocabulary of its own.

Septuagint scholar Sidney Jellicoe made a similar comment:

On the whole, [Deissmann] laid a sound foundation, but with the enthusiasm of the pioneer he looked to the papyri as the source of light, and took too little account of the richer content with which the LXX translators invested their Greek terms, a stage which must be interposed between the papyri and the New Testament for a right understanding of the vocabulary of the latter ... It is primarily to the Greek Old Testament that we should look, rather than directly to the papyri, for the theological significance of the terminology of the New.

[For references, see my paper, p. 1.]

Some theological implications of the above include the following:

• The οίκος formula and the debate over infant baptism
• Meaning of "righteousness" in the NT (is the Hebraic background of δικαιοσυνη more relational or forensic? I would argue forensic)
• Translation of ἀρσενοκοιται in 1 Cor 6:9 (NASB's "homosexuals" is totally misleading)
• Interpretation of "blessed are the poor" (is πτωχος an economic or a spiritual term?)
• Debate whether διαθηκη means covenant or testament
• Kline's interpretation of Luke 22:29, which uses the LXX verb "to make a covenant" (διατιθημι)
• Interpretation of "the βασιλεια (kingdom or reign) of God"
• And much, much more