Rodney A. Whitacre, Using and Using and Enjoying Biblical Greek: Reading the New Testament with Fluency and Devotion (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015).
In this book I offer resources and suggestions for developing fluency in reading Greek, as well as for digging into passages in more detail beyond simply reading. Originally I thought of entitling the book, Sipping and Guzzling Greek, but the publisher advised against it, probably wisely. I have in mind two types of readers who have learned basic Greek, those who have forgotten much of what they learned, and those who have kept at it and continued to read Greek.
For those who have not kept up their Greek and want help in getting back into it this book provides resources for review of both morphology and syntax, as well as suggestions for studying and learning vocabulary. Several approaches to becoming comfortable in the language and beginning to develop a level of fluency are discussed.
Those who have kept up their Greek may find this review material helpful as well. More particularly, they may be interested in how to supplement exegesis with other ways of benefitting from reading and studying passages in Greek. I suggest several approaches to reflecting and meditating on a passage, some closely related to exegesis and others more wide-ranging, though also ultimately controlled by the text as understood exegetically.
When exegeting a passage many people find it beneficial to do a map of the flow of the text. There are many approaches to this technique. The one offered in this book rearranges the text to clarify its flow, while enabling one to see the original word order as well. Extensive help is provided for learning this technique, as well as two other simpler ways of arranging a text to facilitate reading, called chunking and scanning. Chunking simply divides a text by clauses or phrases while leaving it in its original order. Scanning also leaves a text in its original order and adds marks to signal its divisions and clusters on a more detailed level than chunking.
A series of 15 videos walk through the morphology review presented in Using and Enjoying Biblical Greek, and introduce these three tools for sorting out sentences and larger passages.
This book is available on the Baker website, Christian Book Distributors, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.
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© Rodney A. Whitacre. All rights reserved.