We return to the servant who owed his master a huge sum of money.
ἐξελθών δέ . . . having gone out
ὁ δοῦλος ἐκεῖνος εὗρεν . . . that servant found
ἕνα τῶν συνδούλων αὐτοῦ . . . one of his fellow servants
ὃς ὤφειλεν αὐτῷ . . . who owed to him
ἑκατόν δηνάρια, . . . a hundred denarii
καί κρατήσας αὐτόν . . . and having seized him
ἔπνιγεν λέγων . . . he choked (him) saying,
Ἀπόδος εἴ τι ὀφείλεις. . . . “Pay if any you owe.”
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But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe.’ (ESV)
Notes:
Ἐξελθών is the aorist active participle of ἐξέρχομαι, and εὗρεν is the aorist active indicative of εὑρίσκω. The latter has a rough breathing in both the present and the aorist.
Estimating the worth of money as mentioned in the New Testament is difficult. A hundred denarii – ἐκατόν δηνάρια – seems to have been more than a trivial amount, perhaps the equivalent of several hundred to several thousand dollars. It was still vastly smaller than 10,000 talents.
Κρατήσας is an aorist active participle of κρατέω – ‘I take hold of, I seize’. The main verb in this clause of the verse is the imperfect ἔπνιγεν, ‘he was choking’, from πνίγω. A few English translations use the nicely evocative ‘throttled’ for ἔπνιγεν, but note that this is the same verb used in Mark 5:13, when Jesus sends unclean spirits into a herd of pigs. The pigs rush down the bank into the sea and are drowned – ἐπνίγοντο, which is also an imperfect form, but a middle/passive.
Ἀπόδος is an aorist active imperative of the -μι verb ἀποδίδωμι.
The proclitic εἴ (‘if’) is usually seen spelled εἰ, without an accent. In tomorrow’s blog I will say a few words about this, and about proclitic and enclitic accentuation in general.
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A Workbook of New Testament Greek 