Remembering the three guidelines for distinguishing between subjects and predicate nominatives is difficult. But if you can get the guidelines down, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and errors when reading Greek….
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….
There is a shortage of user-friendly resources for learning biblical Aramaic. Recently, Miles van Pelt published a grammar with a reader that goes through every Aramaic verse in the OT. There are some helpful grammatical and morphological notes throughout, but not…
Learning Greek can be a fun and rewarding exercise. While the work of memorizing vocabulary and paradigms can be tedious, the payoff is worthwhile and worth the effort it takes. But what about after you spent those many months memorizing vocabulary, case endings, and principal parts? How do you keep from losing the hours you spent learning Greek? This is where Rodney Whitacre’s Using and Enjoying Biblical Greek: Reading the New Testament with Fluency and Devotion (UEBG) comes in handy. Consisting of seven chapters and 5 appendices, UEBG is the just the resource needed for both the beginner and the rusty student of Biblical Greek….
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 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….
The first video in a series walking through the Greek text of Colossians to focus on translation, basic grammar and syntax, vocabulary, and morphology.
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….
This week’s Featured Resource is Ken Berding’s Sing and Learn New Testament Greek: The Easiest Way to Learn New Testament Grammar (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008). (CD Hardcopy) (Audio Download) Among those who have rigorously attempted to teach or study Koine Greek, many will agree that memorizing paradigms and how to parse are equally the most important and the most difficult part of learning the language. Since paradigms are the foundation for parsing and parsing is part of the foundation for translation,…