Genitive

The individual words in a phrase or sentence serve different functions. Genitive is usually defined as the case of a word indicating "possession." In the expression, "Martha's coat," e.g., 'coat' is the subject and 'Mather' is the genitive. In English, the genitive is usually indicated by the apostrophe (the train's light; 'light' is the object and 'train's' the genitive) or by the preposition 'of' (the Great Wall of China; 'the Great Wall' the object and 'China' the genitive). But there are other ways of indicating the genitive (e.g., "his promise," "the mouning for an only son," "a land flowing with milk and honey") esp., in other languages.

"Possession," however, is too narrow a definition because, depending on the context, "Martha's coat" may mean, not that it "belongs" to Mathar, but that it was "made" by Martha, or even "given" by Matha, or "lent by Matha," etc. As a result, grammarians have categorized genitives into many 'species,' each indicating more specifically what function the writer intents it to play or what a reader may interpret it to mean. The list of species is long; here we explain just two of the most frequently occurring in Scriptures:

Subjective genitive - here the genitive plays an underlying role as a subject. In the expression, "God's love for us," e.g., 'God' is the genitive but it reflects the act of God loving us; God here is assumed to be the subject who is doing something.

Objective genitive - here the genitive plays an underlying role as an object, something acted upon. "A book of prayers" is not a book written by prayers but a book concerning or containing prayers.

Beyond these two broad categories we can speak, e.g., of attributive genitive ("a king of kindness" is essentially "a kind king"), genitive of location ("Antioch of Syria"), genitive of quality ("a man of excellence"), genitive of substance ("a bed of iron"), and so on. For more details on these you will need to refer to the standand grammars.