John 19:32 — ExegesisTAB

The verse opens with the aorist verb elthon {ἦλθον | ēl-thon} ‘they came’, fronting the decisive movement of the soldiers and then linking it to the prior narrative by the inferential conjunction oun {οὖν | oun} ‘therefore’. The subject phrase hoi stratiotai {οἱ στρατιῶται | hoi stra-ti-ṓ-tai} ‘the soldiers’ follows the verb in typical narrative order, emphasizing the action over the agents. The genitive construction tou men protou {τοῦ μὲν πρώτου | tou men prō-tou} ‘of the first’ employs the particle men {μὲν | men} to establish the first in a pair, anticipating the corresponding tou allou {τοῦ ἄλλου | tou ál-lou} ‘of the other’, so that the two crucified men are treated in deliberate sequence. The aorist verb kateaxan {κατέαξαν | ka-té-a-xan} ‘they broke’ takes as its object ta skele {τὰ σκέλη | ta ské-lē} ‘the legs’, depicting a single, completed, and violent act performed on each victim. The final genitive phrase tou systaurothentos autō {τοῦ συσταυρωθέντος αὐτῷ | tou sys-tau-rō-thén-tos au-tō} ‘of the one who had been crucified with Him’ uses the participle systaurothentos {συσταυρωθέντος | sys-tau-rō-thén-tos} adjectivally to identify the “other” by his shared crucifixion alongside Jesus, while the dative pronoun autō {αὐτῷ | au-tō} ‘with Him’ signals Jesus as the central figure to whom this companionship in death is related. In translation, the Greek genitive chains are rendered as English possessive and relative clauses (“the legs of the first man,” “the other who had been crucified with Him”) in order to preserve the sequential contrast between the two men while maintaining natural subject–verb–object word order.