Bible Translation and Linguistics: Formal vs. Functional? | Todd Scacewater
What are “formal” and “functional” Bible translation? Which is better, and in which context?
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Your Guide to the 1,000 Questions in the Greek New Testament
There are around 1,000 questions in the Greek New Testament. That’s about 15% of the sentences in the NT. Are you equipped to handle their syntax, semantics, and pragmatic effects on discourse?
The Verbal System of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Qumran Hebrew Texts, by Ken M. Penner
Ken Penner tackles an important but neglected area of study: the morphological value of Hebrew verbs in the Dead Sea Scrolls. That is, are the Hebrew verb tenses in the DSS aspect-, mode-, or time-prominent….
The Bloomsbury Companion to Syntax, edited by Silvia Luraghi and Claudia Parodi
This volume came out at the same time as, and as a good complementary volume to the Bloomsbury Companion to Lexicography. Although there is not much overlap in the content, they are two important fields in linguistics (or in lexicography’s case, a field associated with linguistics) that those of us in biblical studies must take heed of….
The Letter to the Romans: A Linguistic and Literary Commentary, by Stanley Porter
I have worked through enough of this volume to offer a positive recommendation. Porter has complained that most commentaries are composed of comments on other commentaries. This is an observation that I echo as well. He has succeeded, in my opinion, in avoiding that pitfall. As would be expected, Porter is very familiar with the literature….
The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited by Deborah Tannen, Heidi Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin
Several handbooks on discourse analysis have been published recently. To gain a little perspective, Brown and Yule’s Cambridge Textbook on discourse analysis was published in 1983. In this short 30 years, the field of discourse analysis is not…
Exegetical Fallacies: Word Studies, Part 2
Our last post in this series on word study fallacies gave five fallacies you want to avoid. This post will give you five more, with a third post completing the series on word studies. Make sure to avoid these mistakes in your preaching, teaching, research, and individual study….
Endangered Languages: An Introduction, by Sarah Thomason
“According to most experts’ estimates, at least half of the world’s seven thousand languages will vanish before the end of this century” (2). What an amazing statistic! Those of us interested in biblical languages have felt the sting of this statistic recently, as we heard news about the last of native Aramaic speakers dying out. What is it that leads to language “death,” and how can languages be revitalized? Or should they be? The purpose of this book is “to introduce the general topic of language endangerment…and to describe some methods designed to prevent endangerment from leading to the disappearance of a threatened language” (2)….
Advances in the Study of Greek: New Insights for Reading the New Testament, by Constantine R. Campbell
I bought this book because I was interested in learning more about tense and aspect theory. It ended up being much more than just that. Advances in the Study of Greek: New Insights for Reading the New Testament by Constantine R. Campbell is a monumental book written to help pastors and other Greek New Testament exegetes apply advances in Koine (biblical) Greek scholarship to proper exegesis for the benefit of the church (albeit not exclusively so)….
Linguistics and the New Testament: Critical Junctures, eds. Stanley Porter and D. A. Carson
T&T Clark is reissuing several studies from the JSNTSS series in their Library of New Testament Studies series. Many of these are valuable sets of essay, including the present volume, which contains papers that apply modern linguistic methods to the analysis of the New Testament. As in most sets of essays, some are more useful than others, but the volume gives a good sampling of what modern linguistics has to offer biblical scholars….
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