Lesson 8 | Digging Deeper into Verbal Phrases, Part 2
Relative Phrases
The final type of verbal phrase is a relative phrase. This is a phrase with a relative pronoun, such as “who,” “which,” “whom,” “that,” and “whose.”
Be careful around the word “that,” however, as it could be functioning as a relative pronoun, or introducing a conjunction phrase, or introducing a substantival phrase. You can tell if “that” is functioning as a relative pronoun if it is pointing back to an antecedent.
For example, look at the following passage of Scripture, Joshua 24:16-18, where each relative phrase is marked in bold.
Then the people answered, ‘Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods, 17 for it is the Lord our God who brought us and our fathers up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight and preserved us in all the way that we went, and among all the peoples through whom we passed. 18 And the Lord drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land. Therefore we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God.’
One way to test if you have a relative pronoun, and which referent it has, is by replacing the relative pronoun with the word you think is its referent. Try that in the second occurrence of “who” above in verse 17. “[The Lord] did those great signs.”
But remember, we don’t label a relative phrase because we already know what it is doing. Relative phrases are, by nature, grammatical explanations telling us more about a specific noun or pronoun (its referent).
Sometimes a relative phrase comes between a subject and verb. Subject and verbs should stay on the same line; therefore, you need to extract the intruding relative phrase, placing it on the line above or below its anchor phrase. You don’t need to further indent the verb or the direct object, unless there is a second verb or direct object parallel to it.
That all sounds confusing, so let me give you an example from Joshua 6:23a.
I extracted the relative phrase. Then I took the verb “went in” and indented it within the phrase because I wanted to make the verb “brought out,” which is the second action of “the young men,” parallel to it. The rest of the phrase is self-explanatory.
A Relative Block
Now that we’ve gone through the usage of basic relative phrases, both in Step 2.3 and here, it’s time to introduce you to something called a relative block. You see, the way that you’ve learned to divide and indent relative phrases works perfectly 95% of the time! For the remaining 5%, though, we need to do something a little differently.
Back in Step 2.4, when you were first learning about genitive phrases, I showed you a phrase of John 1:30. Here it is again to remind you.
The first genitive phrase, “of whom I said,” is actually more complex than it looks. All is well when the relative pronoun is the subject or direct object of the verb in its phrase, like “who had been” in Joshua 6:23 above, or like “who belonged” at the end of the same verse. The same goes for “who ranks” here in John 1:30.
But even though we called “of whom I said” a genitive phrase, it contains a relative pronoun, “whom”! And “whom” is not the subject or object of the verb “said.” Rather, it is the object of the genitive marker “of.” And the phrase “of whom” is really subordinate to “I said,” not to “this is he,” because it is describing about which person John was speaking.
So John 1:30 would be more accurately phrased as follows.
All of the phrases, from “of whom” until the end of the verse, is what I referred to earlier as a relative block. And the phrase “I said” is the head phrase of the relative block.
Notice that the phrase within the relative block which contains the relative pronoun (“of whom”) has two arrows. The first is a blue arrow connecting this genitive phrase to its antecedent in the anchor phrase in normal fashion. The second is a curved green arrow from the relative pronoun to its antecedent. This is the connection point between the relative block and its anchor phrase, “This is he”. On the other hand, the head phrase of the relative block has no arrow, because the connection between the relative block and its anchor phrase has already been made.
Let’s look at one further example to make this new concept of a relative block even clearer: Psalm 1:1-2, the subject of the devotional in Step 1.8. Here’s an image of the phrase.
Notice the Negative relationship between “who walks not” and “but [whose] delight is.” “Who walks not” is a subordinate phrase to “but [whose] delight is.” However, it also contains the connection point between the relative block and its anchor phrase, “Blessed is the man,” as represented by the curved green arrow going from “who” to its antecedent. The phrase, “but [whose] delight is,” on the other hand, has no arrow, because it is the head phrase of the relative block (which in Psalm 1:1-2 is everything that follows the main phrase) and because the connection between the relative block and its anchor phrase has already been made.
Now that we’ve thoroughly covered each type of verbal phrase, let’s make sure our focus is on the Lord Jesus by doing a devotional phrase together in the next step, before our review and quiz.