Reading the Parsing Codes

Nehemiah 8 is one of the great scenes of scripture being taught. The returned exiles gather in the square before the Water Gate and ask Ezra to bring out the Law. He reads it from daybreak until noon, and the Levites instruct the people as they stand in their places, explaining it and giving insight. The result is not only information but joy: the people celebrate 'because they understood the words that had been made known to them' (8:12). Reading was necessary. It was not sufficient. Someone had to help the people see what the words were saying.

The Hebrew word the BSB renders 'explaining it', מְפֹרָשׁ (mephōrāsh), is not easy to pin down. It is related to a verb for making something distinct or clear, and it may mean reading clearly, reading section by section, or reading with an explanation. The rabbinic tradition recorded in the Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 3a) read it as referring to translation, the rendering of the Hebrew into Aramaic for listeners who no longer understood Hebrew well; many modern scholars find that plausible, while others think the verse describes interpretation in Hebrew and that we cannot be sure translation was involved. The BSB's 'explaining it' covers both. What is not in dispute is the next phrase, giving insight, literally putting sense into it. The Levites were not adding to the Law. They were making its meaning available.

Parsing is one small part of that work. To parse a word is to identify its form: for a Greek verb, its tense, voice, mood, person and number; for a noun, its case, number and gender. That may sound dry beside a scene of weeping and feasting. It is in fact the first step of giving the sense, because in Greek much of the meaning of a sentence is carried in the endings of its words. Who does the action, who receives it, whether something is said as a fact, a wish or a command: all of this is marked on the word itself. The free tools have already done the identifying. This lesson teaches you to read what they have written.

A tagged Greek New Testament is one in which every word has been labelled with its dictionary form and its grammatical form. Doing that for some 138,000 words is the work of years, and it has been done several times by different teams. The labels they produce are written in short codes, because a full description such as 'verb, aorist tense, active voice, indicative mood, third person, singular' would not fit under a word on a screen.

The most widely used code system in free tools is the one developed by Maurice A. Robinson, a New Testament scholar at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina, best known as co-editor with William G. Pierpont of an edition of the Byzantine text of the New Testament. Robinson's morphological analysis codes were released for free use and have been taken up by a great many programs and websites. STEP Bible's Greek tagging, prepared by Tyndale House, uses an expanded form of Robinson's codes. You do not need to know who tagged a text in order to read its codes; you need to know which system of codes it uses, and the Robinson system is the one you will meet most often.

Both tools will spell the codes out for you. On STEP Bible, tap a word and its grammar appears in the side panel in plain words, one line each for function, tense, voice, mood and the rest, often with a short example in everyday English. On Blue Letter Bible, the interlinear has a Parsing column; tap the code and a panel spells it out in full. So why learn the codes at all? Because a student who can read V-AAI-3S at a glance can scan a whole verse in seconds, notice a pattern across a paragraph, and see immediately when two tools disagree. The spelled-out version is for checking. The code is for reading.

Every code begins with the part of speech, then a hyphen, then the details. The common parts of speech are V for verb, N for noun, A for adjective and T for the article, the Greek word for 'the'. Pronouns have their own letters: P for a personal pronoun such as 'I', 'you' or 'he', F for a reflexive pronoun such as 'yourself', D for a demonstrative such as 'this' or 'that', R for a relative such as 'who' or 'which'. Words that never change their form are written out in short words: CONJ for a conjunction, PREP for a preposition, ADV for an adverb, PRT for a particle, with PRT-N for a negative such as 'not'.

A verb code has the pattern V-[tense][voice][mood]-[person][number]. Take V-AAI-3S. The V says verb. The three letters after the hyphen give tense, voice and mood. Tense letters: P present, I imperfect, F future, A aorist, R perfect, L pluperfect. If a 2 stands in front of the tense letter, as in 2A, it marks a second aorist, a form built in a different way from the regular aorist but with the same function. Voice letters: A active, M middle, P passive. Mood letters: I indicative, S subjunctive, O optative, M imperative. After the second hyphen, the person is 1, 2 or 3 and the number is S for singular or P for plural. So V-AAI-3S reads: verb, aorist, active, indicative, third person, singular. In English, roughly: he, she or it did something.

Two moods have no person, because they are not tied to a subject in the same way. An infinitive, the 'to' form of a verb, uses N in the mood slot and stops there: V-AAN is an aorist active infinitive. A participle, a verb that works like an adjective or adverb, uses P in the mood slot and then, instead of person and number, gives case, number and gender like a noun: V-PAP-ASM is a present active participle, accusative, singular, masculine.

Nouns, adjectives and the article give case, number and gender. Case letters: N nominative, G genitive, D dative, A accusative, V vocative. Number: S or P. Gender: M masculine, F feminine, N neuter. So N-NSM is a noun, nominative, singular, masculine. Notice that the same letter means different things in different slots: N is noun at the front, nominative in the case slot, neuter in the gender slot, and infinitive in a verb's mood slot. That is why the position of a letter matters as much as the letter itself, and why it is worth writing the pattern at the front of your notebook until you no longer need it.

You will meet some extra voice letters, and they are where the Robinson system shows its age most. Some Greek verbs appear only in middle or passive forms but are translated actively. Older grammars called them deponent, and Robinson's codes mark them with D (middle deponent), O (passive deponent) or N (middle or passive deponent). Where a form could be either middle or passive, the code may use E. Many Greek scholars now argue that the category of deponency is mistaken and that such verbs are simply middle in meaning; module 5 of this track sets out that debate. For now, read a D, O, N or E in the voice slot as a signal that the form is middle or passive in shape and that the translation will usually be active. Some forms of εἰμί (eimi, I am), which has no voice in the ordinary sense, carry an X in the voice slot on Blue Letter Bible, meaning that no voice is assigned.

John 11:35 is the shortest verse in most English Bibles and an ideal first exercise. The SBLGNT reads ἐδάκρυσεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς (edakrysen ho Iēsous, Jesus wept). The verb ἐδάκρυσεν is coded V-AAI-3S: aorist, active, indicative, third person, singular, from δακρύω (dakryō, to shed tears). The article ὁ is T-NSM, nominative singular masculine, matching Ἰησοῦς, which is N-NSM. The nominative tells you Jesus is the subject: he is the one who wept. Two cautions belong here, and both point forward. The aorist is the ordinary tense for telling what happened, and it does not by itself mean the action was brief or once for all; module 4 explains what the aorist does and does not signal. And this verb occurs only here in the New Testament, while the weeping of Mary and the mourners two verses earlier uses a different verb. Commentators notice the change; whether it means anything more than variety is a judgment, and not one a code can make.

Now 2 Timothy 2:15, the verse from lesson 1, coded word by word in the Robinson system. σπούδασον (spoudason, make every effort) is V-AAM-2S: aorist active imperative, second person singular, a command to one person. σεαυτὸν (seauton, yourself) is F-2ASM: reflexive pronoun, second person, accusative singular masculine. δόκιμον (dokimon, approved) is A-ASM. παραστῆσαι (parastēsai, to present) is V-AAN, an aorist active infinitive completing the command. τῷ θεῷ (tō theō, to God) is T-DSM and N-DSM, both dative, which is the case Greek uses for the person something is done to or for. ἐργάτην (ergatēn, workman) is N-ASM and ἀνεπαίσχυντον (anepaischynton, unashamed) is A-ASM. ὀρθοτομοῦντα (orthotomounta, handling accurately) is V-PAP-ASM, a present active participle in the accusative singular masculine. Finally τὸν λόγον (ton logon, the word) is T-ASM and N-ASM, and τῆς ἀληθείας (tēs alētheias, of the truth) is T-GSF and N-GSF, genitive singular feminine.

Now read the codes as a set, and watch the sentence appear. There is one command, second person singular: Timothy must act. An infinitive depends on it: to present. Then a run of accusatives: yourself, approved, workman, unashamed, handling. Because they share a case, a number and a gender, a Greek reader hears them as belonging together, describing the one Timothy is to present. The participle ὀρθοτομοῦντα is accusative masculine singular too, which is how you know it describes the workman and not the word of truth. And the word of truth is accusative because it is the thing being handled, while truth itself is genitive, attached to word. You have just read the grammar of a Greek sentence without knowing a single paradigm. That is what the codes are for.

Do not make more of a code than it says. V-AAM-2S tells you that σπούδασον is a command in the aorist. It does not tell you that Paul wanted the effort made once, quickly, or decisively; the aorist imperative is the ordinary way to give a command in Greek, and module 5 of this track explains what the choice between aorist and present imperatives can and cannot show. The code is a description of form. Meaning still has to be argued.

A parsing code is not a fact about the Greek in the way that the spelling of a word is. It is a judgment made by the people who tagged the text, and judgments differ. That is the reason for the habit this lesson asks you to form: when a code matters to your reading of a verse, check it in a second tool. Three kinds of difference will turn up, and only one of them is a real problem.

The first kind is a difference of convention, not of fact. Different code systems write the same analysis differently. The open MorphGNT tagging of the SBLGNT, used by a number of free programs, writes the first word of 2 Timothy 2:15 with D for imperative and with the person first, so that the 2 at the front of its code means second person; in the Robinson system a 2 in front of the tense means a second aorist. The analysis is identical. Only the alphabet is different. Likewise, Blue Letter Bible codes ἦν (ēn, was) in John 1:1 as V-IXI-3S, with X for no voice assigned, while the MorphGNT tagging, and Robinson's own current data files, call it an imperfect active indicative. All agree it is imperfect, indicative, third person singular. When you meet an unfamiliar code, find the key for that system before you conclude the tools disagree.

The second kind is a genuine ambiguity in the Greek. Some forms are spelled identically for two or more parsings, and the tagger must choose one. In the present tense the middle and passive voices share their forms, and for many verbs the second person plural is spelled the same in the indicative and the imperative. So in John 5:39 the form Ἐραυνᾶτε (eraunate, you search) can be a statement, 'you search the scriptures', or a command, 'search the scriptures'. The KJV took it as a command: 'Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me' (KJV). The BSB takes it as a statement: 'You pore over the Scriptures because you presume that by them you possess eternal life.' The command reading has a long history and fits Jesus pointing his hearers to the scriptures that testify about him. The statement reading fits the rebuke that surrounds the verse, in which his word does not abide in them (5:38) and they 'refuse to come to Me to have life' (5:40). Most modern translations take it as a statement; the command remains grammatically possible. Whatever code your tool shows is one side of that choice, not the end of the question.

Romans 12:2 has a form that is ambiguous in two directions at once. μεταμορφοῦσθε (metamorphousthe, be transformed) could be middle or passive in voice, and indicative or imperative in mood. Context makes the imperative clear, since Paul is urging his readers, and the BSB translates it as a passive command: 'be transformed by the renewing of your mind.' Many interpreters take the passive seriously, since the change is something done in the believer; others weigh the middle more heavily. A tool will give you one code. The form allows four, and an honest student knows that.

The third kind is an error. Tagging nearly 138,000 words by hand produces mistakes, and every tagged text has some. They are rare, and most have been corrected over years of use, but they exist. If one tool gives a parsing that makes no sense in the sentence and another tool gives a different one, you may have found a mistake. STEP Bible's side panel also offers a link to check alternative parsings of a word, which is a quick way to see whether a form is ambiguous. More often you have found an ambiguity, so look for that first. Either way, write the two codes side by side in your notebook and note which reading you think the context supports, and why. That small habit will save you from building a sermon on a single letter in a single tool.

Return to the passage you chose in lesson 1. Copy the Robinson verb pattern, V-[tense][voice][mood]-[person][number], and the noun pattern, case, number, gender, onto the inside cover of your notebook, with the meaning of each letter. Keep it there until you no longer need to look.

Then, for the first verse of your passage, add the code of every word to the right-hand side of the page where you copied the Greek in lesson 1. For the rest of the passage, find every verb and write its code and its spelled-out parsing. Check each verb in both Blue Letter Bible and STEP Bible. Where they agree, put a tick. Where they differ, write both codes and decide which of the three kinds of difference you have found: a convention, a genuine ambiguity, or a probable error.

Finally, read through your list of verbs and mark every imperative with a box and every participle with a circle. Write one sentence underneath answering this question: who in this passage is commanded to do what, and who is doing the actions the participles describe? Many passages come into focus at that moment, because you can see for the first time where the commands sit and what they rest on. Keep the page; in lesson 4 you will set your verbs beside four translations.