And As Many As Walk By This Rule: Is ΟΣΟΣ Really Only A Pronoun?

Ὃσος, η, ον is one of those slippery little words that is sometimes difficult to get a grip on.

It is a word that occurs 110 times in the New Testament and is succinctly glossed by Strong as meaning “as (much, great, long etc.) as”.

I would like to suggest that the problem with this little word when starting out with NT Greek is a problem of labels, what philosophers call a “category error”. If you put something in one category and then start talking about it as if it belonged in that category and that category only, you will start to make empirical mistakes.

LABELS MATTER

Many dictionaries, grammars and online resources label ὅσος, η, ον a relative pronoun or, at the very least, a pronoun.

When you are starting out with Greek, you are taught that a pronoun is a word that stands instead of a noun. You are taught this because this is what they are (basically). e.g. George is going to Malta. He will phone us when he get there. In the second sentence, the word “he” stands in for George. It is a pronoun, the masculine, singular, third person pronoun. Nobody says “George is going to Malta. George will phone us when he gets there”. Pronouns substitute for nouns.

Let’s take a look at this passage from Revelations.

καὶ ἡ πόλις τετράγωνος κεῖται καὶ τὸ μῆκος αὐτῆς ὅσον τὸ πλάτος (Rv 21:16)

And the city lies foursquare, the length of it as much as the width

Does ὅσον stand in for a noun here? I don’t see it. To me ὅσον is qualifying the noun τὀ μῆκος (the length). What is the length? Is it blue? Is it green? No, it is “as much as” the length.

To me, this is a case where the word ὅσος, η, ον is not acting as a pronoun. It is acting as an adjective, albeit a rather odd one that correlates one measurement with another. It needs a further phrase to complete the meaning. That is, while you can say “The length is long” and make perfect sense, you cannot say “The length is as much as” and still make perfect sense. You need a complementary phrase to complete the meaning but the phrase “as much as” is still qualifying the noun “the length”. That is what an adjective does.

Similarly, let’s take a look at Romans 7:1.

Ἔ ᾽ἀγνοεῖτε, ᾽ἀδελφοί, γινώσκουσιν γὰρ νόμον λαλῶ, ὅτι ὁ νόμος κυριεύει τοῦ ᾽ἀνθρώπου ἐφ’ ὅσον χρόνον ζῇ¨;

Or do you not know, brothers and sisters, for I am speaking to those who know the law, that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives.

Here again, this seems to be a case where ὃσος, η, ον is acting like an adjective. It is sitting right next to the word it qualifies, old father time, and both are in the accusative as objects of the preposition ἐπι. In this case, the complementary phrase that completes the meaning is the verb “he lives”, ζῇ. How much time? “As much as ζῇ.”

Footnotes Matter

I have cited the above two verses as examples merely to showcase that sometimes grammatical labels can mislead.

There is no doubt that in the majority of cases ὃσος, η, ον behaves like a pronoun.

For example, part of the title of this post is taken from Galatians 6:16. Here ὅσοι, with all the panache of an indefinite pronoun, is standing in for a whole congregation of people, saving Paul the trouble of naming each and every one of them, even if he knew who they were.

But the two examples I have given above show, I think, that ὅσος, η,ον is not always a pronoun.

There is a footnote in Greek Grammar Beyond The Basics by Daniel B. Wallace (p. 319) that starts off “Grammarians are not agreed as to what distinguishes a pronoun from an adjective. Indeed many terms are given double labels…”

I would suggest that ὅσος, η, ον is one of these words and, that as a beginner in New Testament Greek studies, you just need to be aware that labels may occasionally slip.

A Greek noun is most of the time a noun, a verb a verb etc. etc. but sometimes, if and when you come across a word that is behaving oddly, check the label. You may need to throw it away and print a new one.