This week we featured Charles Lee Irons’ work, A Syntax Guide for Readers of the Greek New Testament, as our Book of the Week. And it is truly a resource to keep right next to your Greek New Testament. It could shave many precious minutes off your sermon preparation and keep you from flipping through your intermediate syntax categories every few minutes….
There are many obstacles that stand between you and Greek proficiency. The first is mastering morphology, and there are plenty of helps from published books to Bible software like BibleWorks. The second is vocabulary, and there are plenty of ways to improve your bank of Greek vocabulary….
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….
For two decades, Wallace’s Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics has been the favorite textbook for intermediate Greek courses in seminaries and Christian colleges and universities. As much as we all owe a debt to Wallace’s grammar with its comprehensiveness, exegetical discussions, and useful charts, it is now two decades old and….
In Constantine Campbell’s latest book, Advances in the Study of Greek: New Insights for Reading the New Testament, he summarizes in two chapters the use of discourse analysis by New Testament scholars over the past few decades. A summary of these chapters and some evaluative comments might be helpful for those interested in discourse analysis….
Forbes follows up Murray Harris’ Colossians and Philemon volume in this same series with the same approach, format, and clarity of expression as the inaugurating volume. The purpose of this series is to offer analysis of the grammatical, syntactical, and lexical features of every word, clause, and sentence in the NT book it analyzes. Those who would benefit most from these volumes would be intermediate Greek students or those who have been away from their Greek for a while and want to regain their language skills….
I’m not sure why a series such as this one wasn’t published sooner. The Baylor Handbooks on the Greek New Testament are a beautiful addition to the library of any student, pastor, or scholar. The purpose of these volumes is to give a grammatical and syntactical analysis of the Greek text of each book of the Bible. This is the “prequel” to commentary proper (ix). However, as we will see, deSilva’s volume does more than label Greek words or phrases with their corresponding syntactical category.
I took Aramaic last year and really enjoyed it. In addition to the biblical texts, we translated some older Aramaic inscriptions and I got to see a bit of the diachronic development of the language. But I was quite a bit removed from Jewish-Babylonian Aramaic, the language of the Babylonian Talmud.
Grammar Jewish-BabylonianSiegal’s grammar, Introduction to the Grammar of Jewish-Babylonian Aramaic, seeks to introduce the student to this period of Late Aramaic. He divides Aramaic (following Fitzmyer) into the following periods in his introduction….
Harris’ introduction is brief, noting some brief arguments for Paul as the author of both Colossians and Philemon. Paul probably wrote the letters during his first Roman imprisonment (4, 207-209) in order to exhort them away from their relapse into paganism and to combat false teaching (5). Harris provides a bibliography for further reading on the occasion for the letters and the “Colossian heresy.” The purpose of the series is to deal extensively with grammatical and syntactical issues, while briefly explaining the implications of such issues for theological interpretation. Harris interacts heavily with secondary literature, showing that he has done the difficult job of wading through various grammatical analyses of the texts by others. He does a superb job of explaining the various grammatical and syntactical possibilities for each phrase….
Rodney Decker has produced a new Koine Greek grammar that focuses on translation from the very beginning and includes extra-biblical Greek to allow exposure to wider forms of Koine. This work is entirely suitable for use in Greek 1 & 2, although the professor may find the following review helpful for determining whether it fits his or her tastes before ordering a review copy….