καὶ κατέβη ἡ βροχὴ καὶ ἦλθον οἱ ποταμοὶ καὶ ἔπνευσαν οἱ ἄνεμοι, καὶ προσέπεσαν τῇ οἰκίᾳ ἐκείνῃ, καὶ οὐκ ἔπεσεν· τεθεμελίωτο γὰρ ἐπὶ τὴν πέτραν.καὶ κατέβη ἡ βροχὴ καὶ ἦλθον οἱ ποταμοὶ καὶ ἔπνευσαν οἱ ἄνεμοι, καὶ προσέκοψαν τῇ οἰκίᾳ ἐκείνῃ, καὶ ἔπεσεν· καὶ ἦν ἡ πτῶσις αὐτῆς μεγάλη.
In the ESV, these verses are:
And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.
It wasn't until looking at the Vulgate that I realized that both of these verses exhibit polysyndeton (the repeated καὶ, translated as "and"). In my copy of the Vulgate, the first part of each of these verses is formatted as:
et descendit pluviaet venerunt fluminaet flaverunt ventiet inruerunt in domum illam
which makes the polysyndeton obvious. Here, it highlights the multitude of forces assaulting the houses. In the Greek and the Latin, the verbs (the first three, at least) precede their respective nouns, and this structure may also heighten the sense of action.
Additionally, the formatting of the Latin suggests (to me, anyway) that "flaverunt" (ἔπνευσαν, blew) and "inruerunt" (προσέπεσαν/προσέκοψαν, beat) have different subjects (the explicit "venti," ἄνεμοι, "winds" and an inflected "they," respectively), resulting in a slightly different translation: "And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and they [all three forces!] beat on that house." Like the polysyndeton and the inverted structure, this reading also highlights the intensity of the elements' assault on the houses.
[For what it's worth, I also wrote about this passage a few years ago.]
