I am teaching a beginning Greek student about parsing nouns and verbs. I have explained to him the basic concepts of tense, voice, mood, person, and number (Greek verbs) and of gender, number, and case (Greek nouns).

While reviewing these with him yesterday, I recovered an approach to helping students learns these concepts that I first came up with a number of years ago. Using many English sentences and explaining how each word works in the English sentence, I then showed him what Greek would use to convey those same functions for the nouns and verbs.

The following example illustrates this approach:

Tim, Joe gave Frank his book.

Tim – direct address = vocative;
Joe – subject = nominative;
Frank – indirect object = dative;
his – (shows possession) = genitive;
book – direct object = accusative

gave – aorist active indicative

Here are 25 sentences that I made up to use this approach. For nouns/pronouns, give the case. For verbs, give the tense, voice, and mood, unless directed otherwise. Skip the underlined words.

Dave sent flowers to his wife.

Flowers were sent to Dave’s wife.

Dave, have you sent her flowers?

Dave has sent his friends Christmas cards.

The old man had bathed himself until he fell and hurt himself yesterday.

Roy was watching TV.

Mike is listening to the news.

Roy is her husband.

Joe had been mistreated by his boss until recently.

His car is being damaged by hail.

Tim had hoped that he would get a good grade in the class until he failed his test.

Will she do her homework on time?

I had lived in sin until God opened my eyes.

Were you being watched?

The picture showed the accident.

The men of Rome were hating themselves.

Have their children been saved?

The policemen should be arriving home soon. (Present ____________   _______________).

The children may be taught by the new teacher.  (Aorist ____________   _______________).

Don hit himself with his racket.

You are hearing for yourselves how bad things really are now.

I will be satisfied when I get to heaven.

Joe has burned himself before.

What should I send mom for her birthday? (Aorist _____________  _____________).

Bill will wash himself.

This past year, I forced myself to read through the LXX and the GNT. Although this project was very demanding at times, it yielded some valuable fruit.

I had several goals in mind when I began this major project to learn to read biblical Greek better. I praise God that He enabled me to succeed in meeting each of these goals, although not necessarily to the same extent for each one.

Greater discipline in reading Greek

I wanted to get to the place where I would be reading Greek every day. In the first half of 2011, I missed reading Greek on at least 53 days; in the second half, only six. So, I did become much more consistent as the year went on.

In spite of not reading any Greek on about 60 days (about 1/6 of the year), I was still able to finish by reading much more diligently on the other days.

Increased understanding and knowledge of Greek

Reading through the Bible in Greek resulted in advances in my understanding and knowledge of Greek vocabulary, forms, syntax, and semantics. Of the four areas, I probably increased the most in my grasp of Greek syntax.

Especially when I came to read the GNT this past year, I had a better grasp than before of how to connect words and phrases together that are arranged in ways that differ greatly from English word order. I did not notice this advance as much at first when I was reading the GNT, but as time went on, it became quite clear to me that I am now able to put together Greek sentences with more skill and with less effort!

Additional insights into NT use of the OT

I had hoped to find many more insights into NT use of the OT through this project, but such finds were not nearly as common as I had hoped. One major reason was my missing many days early in the year, which forced me to read much more than I would have liked on many days of the rest of the year. Had I been more consistent throughout the year, I would have had much more time to absorb more of what I was reading and would surely have seen more connections between the LXX and the GNT than I did.

Another factor that may have affected how much I saw this time around was my previous reading through the LXX and the GNT over a period of many years. Because in much of that previous reading, I have examined what I read much more thoroughly than I did this time around, I have already made numerous discoveries before this past year, which may have meant that I had already previously found a lot of what there is to find in this respect.

Progress toward thinking more in Greek and less in English

This is the hardest area to assess progress in, but I think that I did progress some. I hope that similar immersion in biblical Greek in the years ahead will result in my noticing plainly that my thinking in Greek has truly progressed.

I praise God for granting motivation and grace to finish this project and for the benefits that He has allowed me to receive as a result of completing this reading through the Bible in Greek!

(In Part II, I plan to give a number of examples of helpful things that I discovered this past year.)

In a section entitled, The Triunity of the Godhead, Fruchtenbaum, a believing Jewish scholar, brings out some helpful points concerning the OT teaching about the Angel of Jehovah:

The Expression Malach YHVH

The second divine personality is the Angel of Jehovah – but who is He? The Angel of Jehovah is not to be taken as a title, but, following Hebrew grammar, it always functions as a proper name. This individual is always considered distinct from all other angels and is unique. It never appears in the plural. Nowhere in Scripture are the phrases “the angels of Jehovah” or “the angels of the God,” but rather there are three, and only three, different expressions which are used:

1. the Angel of Jehovah – Malach YHVH, always singular.
2. the Angel of the God – Malach Ha-Elohim, always singular with the definite article.
3. the angels of God – Malachei Elohim, plural, and is never used with the definite article.

The third of these expressions is used in general terms of ordinary angels. The first two expressions are both used to describe a very special and distinct individual – the Angel of Jehovah. We can see this in Judges 6:20-21, where the same Person is described first, in verse 20, as “the Angel of the God” and then, in verse 21, as “the Angel of Jehovah.” This is also brought out in Judges chapter 13; in verse 3, there is a reference to “the Angel of Jehovah” and later, in verse 9, this same individual is called “the Angel of the God.”

Consistently, throughout the Hebrew text, there is a distinction made between ordinary angels and this unique Person referred to as both “the Angel of YHVH” and “the Angel of the God.” The Angel of Jehovah is clearly revealed as being different in stature, nature, person and essence from ordinary angels.

—Arnold G. Fruchtenbaum, Messianic Christology: A Study of Old Testament Prophecy Concerning the First Coming of the Messiah, 109-110; bold is in italics in the original

Yesterday, I finished my first semester of tutoring first semester Hebrew. After my final tutoring session, I produced this handout that helps with learning the verbs by grouping the verbs by the paradigm that they follow: Classification of First Semester Hebrew Verbs by Paradigm.

Over the years, in addition to English, I have extensively studied Biblical Greek more than any other language. In addition, I have taken two years of Biblical Hebrew and done additional independent study in that language.

I have also worked on learning Hindi in various ways at more than one point in my life. Other languages that I have learned to a lesser extent are the following: Modern German (preparatory class and work for passing a German translation proficiency test); French (1 year in High School and 1 year in College), and Spanish (only 1 semester in Junior High).

Based on my experience, I say unhesitatingly that diligently memorizing vocabulary words in each language has been an essential aspect of my attaining whatever levels of proficiency I have attained. In my opinion, failure to learn the vocabulary properly is a root cause of many people’s poor levels of learning other languages.

A key in my learning vocabulary words in other languages has been what I would call a comparative analysis and memorization of the vocabulary. What I mean by this expression is a diligent and thorough examination of all the words that goes beyond just making flash cards and learning the meanings of individual words in an unconnected manner.

For example, in studying Greek, I did much more than just thoroughly learn the meanings of all the words that I had to learn. I also learned words in categories by gender, part of speech, and common characteristics (such as what kind of accent marks a word has).

Similarly, by sorting words into various groups beyond what was provided in the Hebrew syllabus that I learned Hebrew from, I was able to learn the Hebrew vocabulary quite well. I also employed similar steps to learn a large amount of German vocabulary for the test that I had to take.

Just today, I used some of these same techniques to help a beginning Hebrew student prepare for his first semester final. By my guiding him through pairing words with each other based on similarity of meaning and or spelling, he was able to make considerable advances in his learning of vocabulary words that he had not thus far mastered during the semester.

I am hopeful that these techniques will help him to earn a satisfactory grade on the final. As time allows, I hope to share more about these techniques in future posts.

From my study of biblical Hebrew in the past and my recent times of intensively tutoring a student in beginning Hebrew, I have found some very helpful patterns with the preformatives on Hebrew verbs. My Verb Forms Preformatives Chart brings out these patterns visually in a way that I think is very helpful!

I would appreciate feedback about any problems or errors in this chart.