5 Books for Koine Greek Word Studies

1. Greek Word Studies For Everyone – https://amzn.to/4uBWopQ
2. The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis – https://amzn.to/4dtr9Y4
3. Biblical Words and Their Meaning – https://amzn.to/4ngkCmU
4. Greek-English Lexicon Based on Semantic Domains – https://amzn.to/3RaqodL
5. Lexical Semantics of the Greek New Testament – https://amzn.to/3OO2rZb

[00:00:00] Today I wanna share some resources for studying Biblical Greek. All of these books are ones that I personally found useful. I’ve got, I think, five different books that I’m gonna go through, and they really range from all levels. So not just from beginner to advanced, but even for someone who is interested in understanding the Bible better yet doesn’t have the time to invest in really learning Greek.

Some of the resources I’m gonna share with you today will be useful for you as well. These are things you can use profitably for years and years to understand the words that are used in the Bible, and you can do that just by means of these few books without actually studying Greek.

So the first book, which is very much in that category, if you don’t want to learn Greek, this is still really valuable. So this is called Greek Word Studies for Everyone, an easy guide [00:01:00] to serious study of the Bible, by Merkel and Plummer. It’s not gonna teach you Greek at all. It’s mostly gonna teach you how to use tools for Greek word studies, and it’s really well written.

So chapter three, which Greek New Testament Am I Reading? when I first got into this, I just thought, I don’t know what I thought in terms of the Greek version of the Bible.

All I had in my mind was, okay, I know there are all these English translations, ESV, NLT, NIV, King James. And I assume they all come from the same Greek New Testament manuscripts, but that step is fuzzy. What does the Bible actually look like in the Greek?

In terms of a physical thing you can hold and say, okay, this is the Greek New Testament. How many different options are there for the Greek New Testament, and how does that relate to English Bible translations.

Chapter four Greek word study resources. So I won’t say a ton about this really helpful [00:02:00] chapter because two of the books he recommends in there I’m gonna go into in more detail. So the next one we’ll discuss is this, the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis. That’ll be the, probably the second timestamp in this video.

But he goes through other word study resources as well, some of which are free. I think he does a good job throughout this book. Merkel and Plumber do a good job of presenting free as well as paid options.

There’s a lot of good free options on the internet that you can use without spending a dollar on this. If you have the money to spend, yes, you can get better resources. But he does a good job of sharing both sides there.

Chapter five, The Importance of a Concordance. People don’t really use concordances anymore, physical concordances. But again, it’s all moved online. So there’s Logos Bible software, there’s many websites where you can do [00:03:00] this for free without paying for Logos software, paying for a subscription. This chapter basically tells you how to do concordance word studies where you’re trying to search out every instance of a Greek word in the New Testament.

And looking at those words in context. And again, that’s something you can do even if you don’t want to spend the time to, to really learn Greek, you can do this already. You just use one of these tools, search for a given Greek word in the New Testament, and then just look through the list of verses where it appears and read the English translation of those verses, and you’ll start to get a flavor of, okay, this word, χάρισμα. So I did that in my previous video. I went in detail in a few instances of χάρισμα in the New Testament, but I could have very easily gone through that whole list and discussed every single example. And that’s something you can do even if you don’t know Greek. And it will start [00:04:00] to give you a flavor of what that word means and what context it’s used in.

Chapter six, they talk about biblical commentaries and Bible translations. So again just distinctions between different translations, different translation philosophies, and then he gives some resources for finding good commentaries.

I think the website was like best commentaries.com or something. I found that website to be useful because it gives you, it’s basically like a social media ranking system for commentaries, and it’ll break down these commentaries on how technical are they?

Since I’m going deep on Greek study right now, I wanted the most technical commentaries that’s gonna gimme the most insight on the Greek text. But you can also aim for an intermediate level, whatever is gonna fit your your needs at this time. You can look for those kind of commentaries on this website, and you can see the reviews that others have given.

[00:05:00] Now, this book introduced me to this huge series. So this is just Volume one of the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis. That’s a mouthful. The editor of this is Moises Silva, who’s also the author of another book I’m gonna discuss later.

It’s around 800 pages. And this is a four volume series. There’s five volumes, the fifth volume is just the index. So it’s just the fifth volume is just helping you to find all occurrences of words in these volumes. You can just look up the Greek word alphabetically in these. But if you’re looking for, say, a specific Bible verse that you want to understand better, you can look at the index, which is volume five.

And find okay, for that verse, which volumes and which head words is [00:06:00] that verse discussed under. And it’ll point you to the exact pages in volumes one through four where it’s discussed. I like to just take this, and there’s a word I’m curious about, i’ll just open it up and I’ll read the entire article.

It is pretty dense, but this is something you can read even if you don’t want to learn Greek thoroughly. I’ve been looking for this series for a long time, I didn’t even know it existed. So here’s what it provides that I wanted.

This will take you through and do a survey of how that word is used in three different sets of literature. So one is just the broader Greek literature, which I think is mostly focused on the Koine period. So you know, around the time of the New Testament, although he also I think, mentions Homer and Classical period, which would’ve been 500, 800 years before the New [00:07:00] Testament.

But I think it’s mostly focused on the use of the word in the New Testament period because words change over time. And even though a word meant something to Plato, for example, doesn’t mean that it still has the same sense in New Testament times, sometimes it doesn’t.

So it’s good to know the uses of the word that are in the same time period for the most accuracy. Just imagine Shakespeare. There are a lot of words used in Shakespeare or the original King James Bible that we don’t use in the same ways today.

So first section, broader Greek literature. Second section for each word is Jewish literature. So this is gonna tell you a lot about the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. It’s gonna tell you which Hebrew words were translated into that Greek word. that gives you, again, another sense of what that Greek word means.

We also have Philo and Josephus. Those are two Jewish writers who [00:08:00] were contemporaries of Paul, of the New Testament writers, and it’s gonna tell you how they use the word under consideration.

The third section for each word is how the New Testament uses that word.

So it’ll usually break it down by authors, talk about Paul, it’ll talk about Peter, it’ll talk about John, it’ll talk about Luke, and you’ll see how, maybe some writers use that word a lot and others very rarely used it. And that’s all valuable information.

The length of articles in this series covers a really wide range. In terms of like head words, like main words that start, that the articles are organized under, there are around, it’s between 800 and 900 different words. Several words that have the same root, they’ll be organized under just one head word and it’ll just show you all of those in one article, which is helpful.

The [00:09:00] reason I wanted a book like this is that I know the way I learned English was just by reading a lot of different books, right? And that’s the same way I want to learn Greek. The challenge is that’s really hard to do, especially when there’s no ancient Greek kids books.

There’s very few at that level. It’s hard to learn everything purely by immersion, but this is a step ladder or like training wheels that sort of gets you towards that point because it will do that survey of the literature for you and tell you and condense that information into a bite-sized piece that you can just sit down and read. Some of the articles are one page, other words that are more, used more often in the New Testament, or that these authors think to be more theologically significant. Those articles can be, 10 or 12 pages, maybe even longer. But even if you don’t know any Greek, you’re still be gonna be able to get a [00:10:00] lot of value out of this five volume series. I think it was $125 for the physical books when I got them on Amazon.

You might find used copies cheaper. You can also get digital copies or digital edition of this on Logos Bible software. I do use the digital edition when I just want to quickly see what this series said about a given word, just like the first paragraph or something. But mostly I use the physical books. I’ll just sit down and read the words that I’m interested in and it’s really pretty readable, surprisingly readable.

Given sort of the nature of it, the intimidating title, you wouldn’t think it’s a book, you could just sit down and read, but it is.

So I would say in terms of the usefulness of this, someone who’s not learning Greek all the way to, even someone who’s pretty advanced in their understanding of Greek, can still benefit from this series.

Now this is a much [00:11:00] denser book, Biblical Words and Their Meaning, an Introduction to Lexical Semantics.

So based on the title, you would think this could be a popular level book. Based on the subtitle, you might not be so sure, An Introduction to Lexical Semantics. And it’s really a mix. I would say for the most part this is a complex book to read. I went very slowly through it and I made a lot of notes.

Most of his purpose in this book is to take the field of lexical semantics and apply it to not really to apply it to the Bible, to teach that field of lexical semantics to students of the biblical languages. I would say that’s his purpose and it’s really probably an intermediate level of Greek or above would be beneficial.

Before you read this book, there are a few Hebrew examples as well. I don’t know Hebrew at all and the [00:12:00] Hebrew examples didn’t slow me down. There’s a lot more Greek examples than there are Hebrew examples. So you want to be at an intermediate level. Probably before diving into this one, he has another one that’s a little less technical which I can’t remember the name right now, but I’ll put it on the screen when I edit the video.

so what is lexical semantics? This is like a sub subdiscipline discipline of linguistics and linguistics is aiming to be a scientific study of languages.

I think we can debate whether the word scientific is appropriate there or not. It’s pretty hard to quantify language in the same way that we would quantify, physical, chemical, or biological processes. But it aims to be… linguistics aims to be very precise in their language and in understanding how words work and how languages [00:13:00] function.

Semantics is a subdiscipline within linguistics that’s related to meaning. So they’re focused on studying the meaning of words or sentences or discourses, in a given language. And then if we focus even further on lexical semantics, that means we’re talking about the meanings of words specifically.

So not grammatical constructions or entire discourses, but just the meaning of individual words. So Moises Silva in this book does a really good job of unpacking that in a very precise way to explain how we understand the meaning of words. He gives a lot of examples from all different languages: English, French, Spanish, German, biblical Greek, biblical Hebrew. And so he does a good job of bringing in all those examples and using those examples to [00:14:00] illustrate the theoretical points he’s making.

Mostly this is a textbook on semantics. It doesn’t go a ton into detail on the sort of biblical words part with a few exceptions. So I would say mostly you think of this as a textbook on linguistics. That’s gonna teach you linguistics terminology, and it’s illustrated with a few biblical examples.

That’s the main thrust of this book. There are a few chapters that are exceptions to that, where he talks in more detail about topics that are very specific to the biblical languages. So like in the introduction, he goes through a good bit of the history of how the Greek New Testament has been understood, and there were quite a few twists and turns in this story where, you know, different groups of people thought…

at one time, the New Testament Greek was its own language, not used by anyone else. Like [00:15:00] it was some, from the ether, from the Holy Spirit language that was uniquely different from any other Greek written anywhere else. There are others who thought that New Testament Greek should be understood purely in terms of classical Greek, that it’s the same as classical Greek.

If you read a little bit of Plato and read a little bit of the New Testament, especially somebody like John or Mark you’ll quickly see, no, this is a very different dialect of the language than Plato wrote in. But some people persisted in that belief for a very long time.

Another camp that used to be popular was scholars who said that Biblical Greek was basically, it wasn’t real Greek, it was an outgrowth of Hebrew, more or less. Most of the authors of the New Testament are Semitic, so they’re mostly Jews, and Greek is not their first language.

They know it because it’s the lingua franca of the day, but it’s not their [00:16:00] first language. And when they use Greek. The way to understand their Greek is just to relate their Greek back to an Aramaic word or a Hebrew word, and then understand the text in that way. That’s, and that’s deeply flawed.

So I think every approach that I just named off to you, all three of those approaches are deeply flawed. But basically all those views were blown apart by the discovery of papyri in Egypt in the late 1800s and early 1900s. So suddenly we had all these archeological discoveries of everyday documents from the same time period as the New Testament. And what those papyri showed is that over and over again, they were u, they were using words like what’s in the New Testament, but just in like very ordinary, everyday contexts.

And what scholars realized after those discoveries was [00:17:00] that the New Testament is written not in the literary form of the day, which would’ve harkened back to classical Greek, but it’s written in the common language, like people would talk to each other on the street.

You got a Jewish guy and a Greek guy and a Roman guy, and the only way they can talk to each other is if they use Greek. The way that they would talk to one another just on the street if they met each other or at the market. That’s the same kind of language that is used in the New Testament.

A few book, Luke and Hebrews, whoever wrote Hebrews, they do write in a bit more literary style. That’s a little bit more classical, but most of the New Testament is very colloquial. So yeah, that’s a really interesting history. This book’s worth reading just for that introduction, and in order to understand that introduction, you would not even need to know Greek.

The second chapter is also very specific to biblical [00:18:00] words, where he talks about the Septuagint, the textual history of the Septuagint. Its transmission through time. The fact that today we still don’t have a really good critical edition of the Septuagint. Really the only one you have is the Gottingen one.

I don’t know how to say that. It’s a German word, based on the german city. And so this, the Septuagint is, it’s written in German. The commentary is written in German for this critical edition. And it’s very expensive.

So the Septuagint is still not very well understood, and if we understood it better, it would help us understand the New Testament better. So he goes into a lot of that in chapter two of this book.

Chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5 are just really about the linguistic stuff, examples and theory for linguistics, which is helpful to avoid a lot of mistakes and to think more clearly about language and what it means.

Chapter six and the [00:19:00] appendix goes through a lot more Greek examples from the New Testament, and he shows how to apply all the theoretical machinery that he’s built up throughout the book. In those last few chapters and the appendix, he shows how to apply that machinery to actual examples of New Testament words.

So the appendix is actually written by someone else and is titled Distinguishing the Meaning of Greek Verbs in the Semantic Domain for Worship. I think it was one of Moises Silva’s students, if I remember right, who wrote that appendix. And she just goes through and applies his methodology to Greek words for worship as they’re used in the New Testament. And so you can see with a lot of precision how those words are used. And you can also see where there’s not precision.

One major mistake in understanding language is ascribing precision, where it’s not warranted. So saying with, in great [00:20:00] detail what this specific word means, and drawing a lot of meaning out of that kind of explanation, maybe even drawing a lot of claims about God, theology out of that word when it’s unwarranted.

And actually, if you look at all the uses that word in the New Testament and in broader Greek literature, you might find, oh, we, we actually don’t have a clear idea what that word means. Because we just don’t have enough data points to establish the meaning real clearly. So that’s the kind of error that this book helps you to avoid, and yeah, very recommended if you’re an intermediate student. Okay, I’ve just got two more. These could be useful for students of all levels. Even if you’re in your first semester of Greek, I would say, and just starting to build up your vocabulary.

This is not for the person who’s no, I don’t wanna learn Greek, this book is not for them, but [00:21:00] if you’re in your first semester of Greek and you want to get better at understanding vocabulary, spending a little bit of time with Louw and Nida’s Lexicon, Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains. I think spending that time would be worth it to you.

This lexicon is unlike any other, it’s not like BDAG in alphabetical order. So starts in alpha, goes all the way to Omega. It’s actually organized by topic. They call semantic domains. So there are 93 different topics in this book, and many of those have several subtopics. Let’s just choose an example. Let’s say attitudes and emotions. So I just finished reading this section earlier today, domain of attitudes and emotions right here. And then it’s organized into subdomains.

So has a big list of subdomains. For example, desire, want, wish [00:22:00] is number one. Number two, desire strongly. Number three, love, affection, compassion. Number four, hope, look forward to, all the way to the last ones here are like sorrow and regret, and then discouragement.

Even within each subdomain, there is a meaning to the order of the words within that subdomain. let’s say desire, want, wish, which is a subdomain of attitudes and emotions. The first word is θέλω, which is I want, I desire, I wish. That’s a word that’s used many times in the New Testament and it has a very broad meaning.

It’s gonna give you a, an example in Greek from the New Testament and then a brief translation of the example.

If we go all the way to the end of that subdomain we get νοσέω, which is an unhealthy or morbid desire for something could be translated to desire in an unhealthy manner or to have a morbid desire.

The [00:23:00] example is “ἀλλὰ νοσῶν περὶ ζητήσεις καὶ λογομαχίας” from 1st Timothy 6:4, which means, but he has an unhealthy desire for controversies and arguments. But you can see going from θέλω to νοσέω, from the beginning to end of the subdomain, we’re going from the very broad and general sense of, “I want” to a very narrow and specific sense of “I want.”

It also organizes the list of, the big scale domains in a sensible way as well. So first it has really concrete topics. Some examples, geographical objects and features, natural substances, plants, animals, foods and condiments, artifacts.

So those are very concrete things. But then as you go further down the list, you get to memory and recall, know, think. Those are some domains and those are more abstract. [00:24:00] They’re less concrete. There’s gonna be very different feeling to those sets of words.

And then at the very end, they have things like case, discourse markers, discourse referentials. So these would be things like prepositions and conjunctions, more like even more abstract language elements that kind of tell you the connection between different words in a sentence.

And they don’t necessarily point to any physical or spiritual object. They’re purely linguistic units. So really my point is that the value of Louw & Nida above other lexicons is that it’s not arranged alphabetically, it’s arranged in a fractal manner so that there’s meaning at every level of that fractal.

On the biggest scale, there’s a list of domains. You can put every single word in the New Testament. It can be put into one of these topics. And then if you [00:25:00] look within a certain domain, it’s divided into sub-domains. And then within each subdomain, the words are arranged in a way that gives meaning from general to specific.

Most lexicons would just be so boring to sit down and read. This is one that I can just sit down and say, I’m interested in understanding what the Bible says about attitudes and emotions, understanding those Greek words, how they relate to one another. So I can just sit down and read that. You understand the words by comparing them to other words, to see their similarities and to see their contrasts. And this format of semantic domains facilitates that in a way that, an alphabetical list of words can never do.

The main issue here is that this book is very heavy. So if you’re gonna just try and sit and read it, it’s, the main difficulty is not boredom. The main difficulty is how [00:26:00] heavy this book is. So it’s hard to just hold it up and and read it like this. So I usually have to, I sit in my beanbag chair and read a while, and then I come to my standing desk and I lay the book down flat on the desk.

In Moises Silva’s book, he claims you would learn more about the Greek structure of the Greek vocabulary by reading the introduction to this book for one hour. You would learn more doing that for one hour than spending five years reading commentaries, even technical commentaries on the Greek New Testament, I think is what he means. So this is gonna teach you how the vocabulary functions if you read the introduction.

The fifth and last book that I’m gonna recommend is this one, lexical Semantics of the Greek New Testament, which is also by Louw & Nida. And it’s basically an expanded introduction to this book that goes into much [00:27:00] greater detail on how they put this lexicon together, how they structured the domains, what it means for a given word to have synonyms and what it means for a given word to have multiple meanings for that one word. So I just started reading this last night, but I think that’s gonna be really useful because the introduction to this was really useful. Like Moises Silva, said in his book.

Volume two of Louw & Nida is the index. It’s much thinner than volume one. So here’s volume one and volume two. This is also worth a little bit of browsing because this is where you get the alphabetical list of words and under each word, it’s gonna show you how many different definitions they have for it.

So that’s like μετά, which is a preposition that has a lot of different uses. They have a ton of different definitions, [00:28:00] whereas μεσότοικον, which means dividing wall, they only have one definition for that. So some have many definitions. Some have just one. And it’s interesting just to browse this because they’re much more systematic in their methodology than BDAG.

A lot of times in BDAG what you’ll see with different words is like different words have different ways that the entry is organized. It’s valuable if you’re just looking at one word and to understand what the meaning of that one word is and the way it’s used, BDAG is useful, but let’s say you want to compare two words and say, what’s the differences between these two Greek words?

’cause they seem similar, but I don’t really know the distinction between them. BDAG is usually not gonna be very helpful. Because the entries for those two words are probably not organized in the same way as each other, and so it’s gonna be really hard to compare them. Whereas Louw and Nida, [00:29:00] their priority was doing this in a systematic way that would allow you to easily compare different words and see the nuances.

It’s useful for, I would say, for everyone from first semester Greek student who just wants to start getting a better flavor of the vocabulary all the way to somebody who’s pretty advanced. You can read the New Testament a big chunk of it fluently and yet maybe you still need some help understanding the distinctions between different words Louw & Nida is gonna be helpful.

That’s all I have for today. Five different books that you can use to improve your understanding of New Testament Greek. Thanks for watching.