I wrote this in January 2008. It was my first Greek assignment. Click on the image to enlarge.
“Jesus wept.”
10 observations:
1. The verb in the sentence is in past tense form (εδακρυσεν). Now I could add that it’s in the aorist tense the active voice and the indicative mood. Oh, and of course it’s in the the third person singular.
2. The subject of the sentence is a proper noun (ιησους). Yes, I could now do the same parsing for the noun.
3. The word εδακρυσεν, translated wept in John 11:35, only occurs this one time in Scripture (King James Concordance). The word εκλαυσεν, translated wept in Luke 19:41 and also ascribed to Jesus, should literally be translated sobbed or wailed (Strong’s Hebrew and Greek Dictionary).
4. The shortness of this verse could be a literary technique to emphasize the manhood of Jesus. This is inline with a central theme of the forth Gospel set out in John 1:14: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
5. This was clearly an emotional reaction and not a mechanical process. The author records in John 11:33: “he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled”, and in John 11:38: “Jesus therefore again groaning in himself.”
6. This is the shortest verse/sentence in the Bible.
7. The text does not record the motivation why he wept (sin, loss, empathy), rather circumstances around when he wept. Everyone from Thomas Aquinas to Mathew Henry and in between have an authoritative comment to make about the why.
8. The context of the passage is Lazarus’s death and subsequent raising.
9. Jesus could have come quicker and healed Lazarus, but this was that the disciples might believe (see verse 15).
10. This is a different wept (δακρύω) to the weeping (κλαίω) in verse 31, which literally means to sob.
I’m firmly convinced that a book, a volume of books even, could be writing about these two beautiful words and still that volume wouldn’t be able to capture the entirety of the moment.
