Notes On Koine Greek: Part 56

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1. The Aorist Middle Indicative: Having familiarized ourselves with the

Present, Future and Imperfect forms of the Middle Voice, we can now move on to
the Aorist. Once we have completed the Aorist, we will fill in our Indicative
Mood chart with what we’ve covered and then move on to the Perfect and
Pluperfect paradigms before venturing into the Passive Voice.
2. Building the Aorist: At this point, we have already seen how the Aorist Active
Indicative is built. Having a knowledge of this, we can now use these tools to
understand the morphological breakdown of the Aorist Middle, which, is as
follows:
Past-Time Morpheme + Lexical Morpheme + Aoristic Aspect Morpheme + Person-Number Suffix Morpheme*

3. *Note that the “Person-Number Suffix Morpheme” is referred to by Dave Black

here as the “Secondary Middle Suffix” morpheme. In fact, he refers to both the
Middle and the Passive Voice Person-Number Suffix Morphemes this way. It is
more helpful for me to stick with the “Person-Number” title while just knowing
that the Middle & Passive Voices are all considered “secondary”.
4. Table: Here is the table for the Aorist Middle:

Aorist Middle Indicative

Singular
I loosed myself
1 ev|lu|sa,|mhn I loosed for myself
I myself loosed
You loosed yourself
2 ev|lu,|s|w You loosed for yourself
You yourself loosed
He loosed himself
3 ev|lu|,sa|to He loosed for himself
He himself loosed
Plural
We loosed ourselves
ev|lu|sa,|meqa We loosed for ourselves
We ourselves loosed
You (all) loosed yourselves
e|lv u,|sa|sqe You (all) loosed for yourselves
You (all) yourselves loosed
They loosed themselves
ev|lu,|sa|nto They loosed for themselves
They themselves loosed

5. Tips: First of all, it is helpful for me, when looking at this table and the
morphological building process above, to remember that in the Aorist Middle
Indicative, there are 4 morphemes. (Note that the past-time morpheme is often
referred to as the augment.) The second thing I notice is that in the English
translation, these past-tense words end with “ed” (e.g. I loosed…). Thirdly, I
notice that all 4 morphemes are consistent throughout all the words except for the
2nd Person Singular, where the Aoristic Aspect Morpheme loses the “a”.
6. Remember…The Aorist, while being past-time or past tense, does not aim to
say something specific about the time of the action or event; it is more of a
circumspect view of the event in past-time. One way to think about this is to
imagine having stood in front of a large window that looks out over a set of train
tracks. Now, imagine the entire large window, except one tiny peephole big
enough for the eye to see through, being covered up. At some point, you looked
through it and saw a train passing by. But as you looked, you do not see the front
or the back of the train and you were not even sure you were looking at the
middle. All you saw was a passing train. That’s how the Aorist works: It focuses
on a past event, just not a detailed part of it.