A crucial Note on grammatical accuracy
Matthew 6:9b-13b
9b O Father -- ours! O One in the spiritual realms [of YHWH], Your Name/identity/reputation be seen as pure.
10 Your Rulership come and Your will come to be, as in Heaven, also on earth.
11 Give us this daylight for our next day's bread, 12 and forgive us our debts/wrongs/failures, even the same way as we forgive our debtors. 13 Then You would not carry us into testing. Instead, pull us away from the bad(-thing/one)/our bad.
v. 13b - [For the Rulership and the power and the influence (of YHWH) are Yours into the ages (of YHWH). It is so.]
(TENT - Mt 6:13b) Italics of vs 13b above highlight an early coda not original to the prayer)
9b O Father -- ours! O One in the spiritual realms [of YHWH], Your Name/identity/reputation be seen as pure.
10 Your Rulership come and Your will come to be, as in Heaven, also on earth.
11 Give us this daylight for our next day's bread, 12 and forgive us our debts/wrongs/failures, even the same way as we forgive our debtors. 13 Then You would not carry us into testing. Instead, pull us away from the bad(-thing/one)/our bad.
v. 13b - [For the Rulership and the power and the influence (of YHWH) are Yours into the ages (of YHWH). It is so.]
(TENT - Mt 6:13b) Italics of vs 13b above highlight an early coda not original to the prayer)
In the Lord's example prayer in Mat 6:13a, please note the following difference made by the N2LR TENT translation. The Greek verb here, "to lead/bring/carry," is not a command as in the KJV! It is an aorist subjunctive (see TENT Grammar Glossary) which, I soon found out using the N2LR method's English translation, "conditionalizes" the previous simple conjunction from "and" to "then," and in English adds a conditional auxiliary verb "would/could" to the verb following it. This seemed to fit every occurrence I could find of the aorist subjunctive used with the conjunction NT2532.
While looking without success for the official name of this grammatical construction, I came upon a blog post by William Mounce which I was sure must have the name for it. He frankly discussed the Greek subjunctive but could not see any standard (grammatical rule based) solution in English translation. After his post, a comment below it by David Croteau gave even more information, plus a quote he attributes to "Wallace" by which I am assuming he means Daniel Wallace. I quote his comment below to illustrate the profound difference accurate grammar can make. (paragraph formatting and highlights added for clarity; Wallace quote moved to the end):
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Permalink Submitted by David Croteau (not verified) on Mon, 10/31/2011 - 12:11.
Ever since your post on the purpose clause in John 3:16 I've been processing through this issue. While the OED is a great resource for understanding the English language, my question is: "what do people hear today when they read 'might' or 'may'?" I've asked dozens of people, some were Greek students and some not, and virtually everyone (I can think of one exception) hears the idea of contingency or probability. Contemporary translations need to recognize this better.
Too many are communicating contingency in purpose clauses. I've heard pastors base their entire sermons off of the hina subjunctive clause in Ephesians 2:10 saying that sanctification is probable, but not a reality, because of the subjunctive verb. I recently took aside a pastor who has a doctorate because he taught that in 2 Tim 2:10 the "elect" MIGHT "obtain salvation" ... all because of the hina subjunctive clause.
Many times I simply convert it to a simple infinitive when there is no external subject. However, other times I end up deciding, case by case, if the concept of doubt is present or not. If it is, then "might" works; if not, then "will" seems to communicate definiteness best. I hate that some will read it strictly as future. If you don't mind getting mildly idiomatic, then the NIV's rendering of Eph 2:10 communicates purpose without the issue of doubt or definiteness: "which God prepared in advance for us to do."
Wallace states: "We must not suppose that this use of the subjunctive necessarily implies any doubt about the fulfillment of the verbal action on the part of the speaker. This may or may not be so; each case must be judged on its own merits."
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Because recognized Bible scholars seem to have no name for this hina [NT2443 - ἵνα] subjunctive construction, I will refer to it as the "p/a-sub" (perfect or aorist subjunctive). In 2 Tim 2:10, their translation, "elect" MIGHT "obtain salvation," is translated in the TENT as, "...so that [NT2443 - ἵνα] the chosen ones, (they-) themselves also would/could have rescue ..."
And in Eph 2:10, the second red quote, for "which God prepared in advance for us to do," the TENT Translation has "...which the Mighty-One prepared before so that we would/could walk in them." To my way of thinking, many verses containing an aorist or perfect subjunctive, correctly translated, illustrate a healthy relationship between predestination and free will.
The N2LR method allowed me to locate the problem in those two tenses, the aorist subjunctive and the perfect subjunctive. When a "p/a-sub" follows somewhere after a conditional "trigger" word such as NT2532 (as a "then") or after an "if" or "not" (or any of their compounds), or, and most commonly, after NT2443 - ἵνα (English: "so that"), then the trigger is probably the conditional aspect of any of those words.
This strongly suggests how the Greek formulates the English meanings: "would/could", which otherwise seem to be missing in the Greek. Because the non-aorist subjunctive ("may/might") is insufficient to carry the meanings "would/could", the Greek has this specific "p/a-sub" grammatical formula to cover those meanings. I may be mistaken, but it seems that this formula was unrecognized until the N2LR method brought it into the light of day. If I am mistaken, please tell me so that I can credit the right source.
So what does this aorist subjunctive do in the Lord's Prayer? It restores the center point of the prayer. Instead of the borderline blasphemous, "And lead us not into temptation..." it actually says, with accurate translation of grammar and the Greek, "Then You would not carry us into testing." From a list telling Father YHWH what we want Him to do and not do, the prayer is turned into an admission that if we do not forgive, He will rightly carry us into testing!
As YHWH's children we both ask forgiveness and grant forgiveness. That is, we do if we want to avoid what we might be tempted to consider a bad thing -- a test from YHWH. When we pray the Lord's Prayer we assent that God can do what He needs to do, in order to keep us away from "the bad."
It is possible to read the Greek here as asking our Father to rescue us from either "the bad one" or "the bad thing," or both, since both have the same grammatical support in the Greek. So in this prayer we are giving our assent for Him to pull us away from the bad one and/or the bad thing, even if it means inconvenience or pain for us. At the same time, His prayer implies that whenever we choose our way over His way, we are granting that He has the absolute right to "carry us into testing".
As we have just seen, Greek grammar sometimes includes more than one possible (grammatically supported) meaning. This enabled John to imply that these two words - "the bad" - might mean to "pull us away from the bad thing," and/or "the bad one." But that is not all. This same sentence can also be translated a third way --"pull us away from our bad."
That article "the" before "bad" can be translated correctly in this third way by replacing the article here with a contextually appropriate possessive pronoun -- in this case, "our". To illustrate, I will give another example of this third way NT Greek uses such a possessive article.
In Rom 7:2 you can see three instances of the possessive article. You won't see the article in the English translation there; you will only see three times in the English translation the substituted appropriate possessive pronoun "her". You won't see the word for "her" in the Greek; you will only see the article used three times. NT Greek quite often uses this "possessive article" as a substitute for any pronoun which is easily understood by context.
Given all of the above information, it seems that some verses can be translated In English quite differently from traditional translations by using accurate contextual grammar. In the case of Mat 6:12-13a in the Lord's Prayer, you can see that is so by using the N2LR translation method. The TENT Lexicon shows that the words underlined below are different from traditional translations, and should not be ignored: "Forgive us our debts/wrongs/failures even the same way as we forgive our debtors, then you would not carry us into testing. Instead, pull us away from the bad thing / the bad one / our bad." In Mat 6:12-13a we are not to plead that God 'lead us not into temptation', but for Him to 'instead pull us away from the bad thing / bad one / our bad' that includes our unforgiveness. Do we then cooperate with, and submit to, His “pull” ?
Koine Greek speakers might have been able, even expected, to keep multiple possible meanings in mind at the same time. I suppose it must remain a mystery whether in this case they accepted all contextually appropriate meanings as valid or if they narrowed the meaning down to just one.
Yet I marvel at how well each possible meaning in this prayer fits the context of the list of things our Lord Yeshua said we all should plead to be pulled away from, that is, pulled away from when we forgive. If I had to choose one meaning from the three possibilities discussed above, I would choose the possessive article -- "our bad" -- just by virtue of it's being so explicitly linked to the context and its seeming to lead right into repentance.