372 David J. Armitage greater contingency, can one conclude that the choice of subjunctive (including in third class conditions) necessarily implies less contingency, and higher probability? Can the third class condition legitimately be described as “probable future” (34)? Such a connection may have been present in Classical Greek, when the optative was more widely used and thus presented a commonplace alternative to the subjunctive, thereby narrowing the latter’s semantic field. However in Hellenistic Greek, the use of the optative had diminished enormously(35). Table 4 shows the proportion of finite verbs in the indicative, imperative, subjunctive and optative in two major works in Homeric Greek (36), and in the Greek of the Septuagint and New Testament. MOOD / ATTITUDE TEXT Indicative Imperative Subjunctive Optative DATA SOURCE Instances % Instances % Instances % Instances % Odyssey 10366 81.8 689 5.4 837 6.6 767 6.1 WordHoard(37) Iliad 12996 83.1 847 5.4 1078 6.9 712 4.6 LXX OT 51665 83.5 5473 8.8 4301 6.9 460 0.7 LXX Apocryphal 10057 81.5 1178 9.5 968 7.8 131(40) 1.1 writings(39) BibleWorks 6(38) NT 15628 81.4 1648 8.6 1863 9.7 68 0.4 Luke-Acts 4419 85.3 409 7.9 320 6.2 28 0.5 Pauline 2839 75.9 425 11.2 496 13.1 31 0.8 epistles (34) BROOKS – WINBERY, Syntax, 121. See also DANA – MANTEY, Manual Grammar, 290, who describe the third class condition as “more probable future”. (35) Cf.C.F.D. MOULE, An Idiom Book of New Testament Greek (Cambridge 1960) 150. (36) ROBERTSON, Grammar, 926, notes that in Attic Greek, the frequency of the subjunctive was lower than in Homeric Greek, and he draws attention to the very high frequency of optative use in some Attic texts (p. 936). (37) WordHoard is an application for the analysis of morphologically tagged texts (including various examples of Early Greek Epic) available at: wordhoard.northwestern.edu/userman/index.html (accessed 16/9/06). (38) BibleWorksTM Version 6.1.012r; © BibleWorks, LLC. (39) The following apocryphal materials were included in this search: 1 Esdras, 4 Esdras, Judith, Tobit, 1, 2, 3, 4 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, Epistle of Jeremiah, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, Prayer of Azariah, Prayer of Manasseh, Odes, Psalm 151, Psalms of Solomon. The additions to Esther were not included given constraints imposed by the organisation of the material in Bibleworks. (40) 4 Maccabees includes 46 optatives, accounting for 6.3% of the finite verbs in that book. 4 Maccabees thus markedly inflates the figure for optatives in LXX Apocryphal material.