Language Resource Recommendations

[Mike Richards]

I'd like to learn to read Greek (for the New Testament, Septuagint, other stuff...) and Hebrew (for MT...). Any specific recommendations on how to do that or where to start? Books, online resources, classes to take, etc?

[maklelan]

I'd like to learn to read Greek (for the New Testament, Septuagint, other stuff...) and Hebrew (for MT...). Any specific recommendations on how to do that or where to start? Books, online resources, classes to take, etc?

For Hebrew there are dozens of textbooks out there, but a new one by Cook and Holmstedt is available for free online here. At BYU we used Lambdin. At Oxford we used Weingreen. Other good ones are Pratico and Seow. A website that provides parallel English and Hebrew for the whole Hebrew Bible is here.

For Greek there are two routes. The less academic and more seminary-ish route starts and ends with biblical Greek, and for that Mounce is probably the best. The more academic approach would be to start with Classical Greek and then move on to Koine. For that route the best place to start is Hansen and Quinn. The entire LSJ lexicon is available for free online here. A good free program for PCs that has quite a number of Greek texts that are morphologically tagged and linked to the intermediate LSJ lexicon (including the New Testament and Septuagint) is Okus.

[Mike Richards]

Thanks! These look great.