12 David I. Yoon are four moods in Hellenistic Greek: indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative, but it may be helpful to view these in a binary opposition between indicative and non-indicative moods, where the indicative mood conveys the writer/speaker’s “assertion about what is put forward as the condition of reality” and the non-indicative moods convey the writer/ speaker’s “projection” of reality41. Porter writes: Thus, the Indicative is used to grammaticalize assertive or declarative sta- tements, while the non-Indicative moods grammaticalize a variety of related attitudes, having in common that they make no assertion about reality but grammaticalize the volition of the speaker, and are therefore deontic42. The indicative is the most common mood throughout the New Testament corpus and is unmarked, and thus it grounds the other moods. Westfall notes that on the scale of markedness from least to greatest, the imperative would come after the indicative, then the subjunctive, with the optative being the most heavily marked mood43. 3) Voice. Voice is defined as “a form-based semantic category used to describe the role that the grammatical subject of a clause plays in relation to an action”44. Another definition is: “Voice is that property of the verb that indicates how the subject is related to the action (or state) expressed by the verb”45. The Greek verbal system contains three voices: active, middle, and passive. The active and passive roughly correspond to the voices in the English system and are relatively simple to grasp, but the middle is often problematic, especially for speakers who do not have the middle voice in their own language. This is not the place for a full-fledged linguistic study on the significance of the middle voice, but a few remarks are in order. Wallace states that the middle voice is the subject of the verb both “doing and receiving (at least the results of) the action”46. Dana and Mantey define the middle as: “that use of the verb which describes the subject as participating in the results of the action” (italics original)47. Porter, Idioms, 51–52. 41 Porter, Verbal Aspect, 322. 42 43 Cynthia Long Westfall, “A Method for the Analysis of Prominence in Hellenistic Greek,” in Stanley E. Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell (eds.) The Linguist as Pedagogue: Trends in the Teaching and Linguistic Analysis of the Greek New Testament. NTM 11 (Sheffield: 2009) 80. 44 Porter, Idioms, 62. 45 Wallace, Greek Grammar, 408. 46 Wallace, Greek Grammar, 408. 47 H.E. Dana and J.R. Mantey. A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament (Reprint; Upper Saddle River, NJ: 1957) 157.