Biblical Greek (Beginners): 07. Imperfect, verb to be (εἰμί)

Imperfect

Imperfect expresses past imperfective action. In general, it portrays an action, which took some time in the past without defining boundaries of its beginning or ending. We will encounter imperfect mostly in storytelling texts (narratives) like gospels and acts. 

The word ἐλυον would be thus translated as „I was loosing“, not „I loosed“, in order to stress imperfectness in the translation.

Augment

All past tenses indicative are prefixed with letter ἐ which makes you to easily determinate that the verb is in past. However, two special situations might occur affecting the resulting form of the letter ἐ:

• in combination with a vowel (there is lengthening):

  • α, ε → η

  • ο → ω

  • αι, ει → ῃ

  • οι, ει → ῳ

• in verb with prefix:

  • there is lengthening of a vowel after prefix: ὑπαγω → ὑπ + ε + αγον = ὑπηγον (I was leading out)

  • the last letter in prefix will drop off: ἐπιφέρω → ἐπι + ε + φερον = ἐπεφερον (I was bringing)

Deponent verbs

This kind of verbs has active meaning as it is in the present tense. The information about verb's deponency is available in a dictionary.

Examples

Verb to be

Greek word εἰμί or infinitive εἶναι (to be) is not quite regular in its forms. Therefore it is needed to be learned alone. However, we can draw some rules and connections to regular verbal endings from its forms.

We will encounter this verb in NT text quite often. The number of its occurrence is 2462.