Common Words in Uncommon Phrases

Matt. 24:29-30 predicts that “immediately after the tribulation of those days … all the tribes of the earth shall mourn” when “they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with power and great glory.” The prophecy is understood in two different ways. Thoroughgoing preterists (like John Gill) understand the coming of Christ predicted in this verse to have taken place in the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in AD 70, drawing on verses like Isa 19:1 to show that a military invasion can be the instrument of a divine intervention. Futurists (notably dispensationalists) and partial preterists like John Calvin understand the verses to speak of a coming of the Lord that is still in the future.

A crucial difference between the two is the understanding of “all the tribes of the earth.” Futurists insist that all the tribes of the earth, even all the tribes of the known world, did not observe the Roman invasion in AD 70. Gill notes that γη “earth” can also mean “land” or “region,” and that the expression is satisfied by the impact of the Roman conquest on the inhabitants of Judaea.

γη can indeed mean “land” or “region,” as BDAG meaning 3 documents clearly. If the Lord is making up the phrase “all the tribes of the earth,” he might well mean us to understand him in this way. But if the expression is an idiom, it might have a meaning of its own that transcends the sum of the individual words.

Tracking down idioms like this used to be an onerous burden. φυλη occurs 477 times in the Greek Bible, and γη appears 3422 times. Scanning concordance listings for individual words, or even xeroxing one article, laying it alongside the other, and scanning for matching references, is time-consuming. In BW, we could search for co-occurrences of the two lemmata, reducing the list to 78. But even that might try our patience. Let’s just search for the phrase, by highlighting it in BGT of Matt 24:30, right clicking, and selecting “Search for Phrase.” (We use BGT instead of BNT because we want to check for LXX references. NT instances might well be drawing on the Lord’s words, while LXX references are candidates for an idiom that he might be using.)

We find three OT instances of the phrase: Gen 12:3, Gen 28:14, and Psa 71:17. The two references in Genesis express God’s promise that in Abram’s seed “all the families of the earth” would be blessed, and Psa 71 appears to be developing this same idea. The use of the phrase in such a prominent covenantal context makes it unlikely that the Lord intends us to understand it as a neologism. He is, after all, the seed in whom these families will be blessed, and the identity of the phrase seems compelling evidence that in Matt 24:30 he is describing the moment when he comes to confront those families. To restrict the expression to “all the inhabitants of Judaea” might satisfy the semantics of the individual word γη, but overlooks the meaning of the complete phrase that would be apparent to Greek-speaking Jews familiar with the LXX from their synagogue readings.

By searching for the phrase in BGT, we restrict ourselves to instances in the nominative case. We can check for other cases by modifying the search to

‘πασ* *1 φυλ* της γης

The asterisks on the end of πασ and φυλ will match any case ending, and the “*1” takes care of any form of the article. It might match any other word, too, but BW is so fast that it’s easier to start with a rough search and refine it if it returns too many hits than to work through a more detailed search construction at the outset. This search does indeed broaden our results, to include Amos 3:2 and Zech 14:17. Both verses reinforce our understanding of the phrase as an idiom denoting the population of the entire earth, and weaken even further the claim that we can limit Matt 24:30 to local events in Judaea in AD 70.