(12) καὶ οὐκ ἐγίνωσκεν αὐτὴν ἕως
οὗ ἔτεκεν υἱόν.
He did not know her until she birthed a son.
Like λαμβάνω, the predicate ἐγίνωσκεν
αὐτήν must be a bounded event because it is an imperfective achievement. If γινώσκω
happens at all, the endpoint was reached because γινώσκω causes an instant
change to a non-incremental object. Moreover, because every proper subpart of
γινώσκω is identical to the event itself, there is a culmination entailment. In
Matt 1:25, the culmination entailment is denied during the topic time, which is
the period prior to the culmination of the event ἔτεκεν υἱόν. However, Matthew
selects the until-phrase to structure the event sequence so that, once the
event ἔτεκεν υἱόν finished culminating, the reader would understand that ἐγίνωσκεν
αὐτὴν culminated too: the Until Time Span sets “the boundary at the farthest
point at which the sentence can still be true.” (Iatridou and Zeijlstra,
“Complex Beauty,” 139) In other words, denial of the culmination entailment
only lasts during the topic time. Once the topic time is over (i.e. once Mary
finishes giving birth), a polarity reversal occurs, and the culmination
entailment of the imperfective achievement ἐγίνωσκεν αὐτήν goes through. The
result is an obligatory scalar inference meaning ‘after but not before’: the
final boundary of ἔτεκεν υἱόν was the initial boundary of ἐγίνωσκεν αὐτήν. (Travis
Wright, “Prepositions
and Perpetual Virginity: Until as a Scalar Item in Matt 1:25,” Biblical
and Ancient Greek Linguistics 13 [2025]: 29-30)
