A little while back I became involved in a discussion about whether it was okay to use/teach people to use the 2nd person negative aorist imperatives. E.g. is it okay to teach learners to say μὴ φάγε or similar.

This is the kind of thing that should be in a textbook, and frankly most textbooks are not good/clear on the topic. I say “should be”, because what you should be taught is that instead of using μὴ + 2nd person aorist imperative, you should use μὴ + 2nd person aorist subjunctive. Why? Because that is the overwhelming pattern of usage until you reach a still very minority of usage in late antiquity (3/4th century onwards).

But let’s look at some textbooks. Mounce, easy to bash:

3. μή plus the aorist imperative. Because it is a perfective imperative, the speaker is prohibiting an undefined action.

μὴ γνώτω ἡ ἀριστερά σου τί ποιεῖ ἡ δεξιά σου (Matt 6:3)
Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.[1]

Christophe Rico, Polis:

Uses negated aorist imperative in the opening of ch 5, p61. Doesn’t explain at any point that this isn’t attested usage.

I won’t keep going, but notice something very important about Mounce’s example. It’s 3^rd person. And he doesn’t discuss this, so you could easily walk away from his textbook thinking that μή + 2^nd person was fine and normal.

So, and particularly if you are trying to norm your usage to Koine/NT, you should look the data. If you run this search in Logos, “lemma.g:μή BEFORE 1 WORD morph.g:VA?M2” you should get 3 hits for the NT, all θη middle(-passives) imperatives. That suggests something to me about usage of the θη-middle more than I leap to a conclusion about μή + imperative.

For the LXX you get 24 results in 11 verses, but this requires investigation; firstly, some are separated by a comma, e.g. εἰ δὲ μή, ἀπαγγείλατέ in Gen 24:49, so that’s a false positive. Num 14:9 is the same μὴ φοβηθῆτε we see in the NT. The forms in -στῆτε are ambiguous and arguable subjunctive. But I will grant that there seem to be 7 genuine examples.

There are quite a few more 3^rd person negative aorist imperatives if you broaden out the search in that way.

But the main point I’m trying to make here is this: yes, there are a few examples in this corpus, but not many, and the general rule is not a matter of “I’m an Atticist and so I’m speaking ‘correct Greek’”; it’s “the data doesn’t support this being a typical usage”.[2]

And so then the question might come back, “okay, sure, but can we just teach them this and fix it later? Because it’s simpler and they haven’t learnt the subjunctive.”

From my perspective the answer to this question is no. If you’re in the “communicative approaches to ancient languages” sphere, and you are also trying to teach people who ultimately want to learn to read Greek texts with something like an intuitive feel for what’s standard and non-standard, then teaching them something at the outset that’s non-standard is a bad idea. Do I suspect 2^nd language learners of ancient Greek often came out with things like μὴ φάγε? Yes, they probably did. Did their patient teachers or sympathetic interlocutors then wince a little and say, “οὐκ οὕτως λέγεται, ἀλλὰ μὴ φάγῃς ? Probably.

We need attention to detail, a concern for corpus-normed usage, and a pedagogical head screwed on the right way, to get these things right. The only reason people think teaching the subjunctive instead is hard is because (i) courses delay the subjunctive to late in their sequence, (ii) the subjunctive is treated as spooky and hard by teachers and so students fear it before encountering it, (iii) we don’t sidestep the whole issue and teach μὴ φάγῃς as a usage first instead of a grammatical category.

[1] William D. Mounce, Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar, ed. Verlyn D. Verbrugge and Christopher A. Beetham, Fourth Edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019), 385.

[2] (I did run a TLG search through their whole corpus for μή + 2^nd person aorist imperative, but the parsing there is more problematic, and it’s harder to sort through the results).