Morphology of Biblical Greek, The

Excellent work! It explains everything concerning the biblical Greek grammar in detail. Anyway is not for the beginner who could get lost, especially in the introductory chapters regarding phonology. Always I thought that the phonetics should be kept at minimum. Once progress is made, the phonology can be inserted in small bits.

However, the book is for the intermediate learner. The beginner should stick to Mounce's BBG's grammar explanations. But for a in depth study of biblical Greek, The Morphology of Biblical Greek is essential.

The only downside of the book is its binding... A pity for a such a great work!

Be forewarned...as two other reviewers have said, this is a cheap paperback with glue-injected binding...mine @ the first reading has pages dopping out like falling leaves...What ever you do DON'T glue the pages as the glued page now pulls loose the next page...I've written Zondervan about their cheaply produced books...but apparently they don't care as they never responed...A real SHAME for a great work...And on works that have been around for a while like Kubo's Reader's Lexicon get an older version where the binding is sewn, not glue-injected...

I decided to take classes in Biblical languages at the Lutheran university I attend. Our class used Voelz's Greek Grammar as a text book. I had already worked through Mounce's Grammar, and so I decided to use this book to help learn the forms that we would go through much better. I not only learned the forms better, but by the end of the class, the teacher said that I was tempting him to study Morphology in this much depth!

When your teacher gives you a list of principle parts to learn, and you find a verb that has some odd principle parts, then look it up in the index and find the morphological class the verb is in. Then check the footnotes and cross references. It is also good to have a copy of Robert W. Funk's "A Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellinistic Greek," Smyth's "Greek Grammar," and the Blass-Debrunner-Funk "A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature." These are excellent supplemental works as they are cited quite extensively by Mounce. LaSor's "Handbook of New Testament Greek" is also cited alot, although I have not yet gotten a copy of it.

The only thing bad about this book is that it is a paperback. One of the corners of my copy are already dog eared, the outer film is starting to come off the front cover and the binding has a large bend in it. Hopefully we can encourage Zondervan to make a hardcover edition of this excellent work of high scholarship.

If you want to use Greek to learn, teach or study the New Testament, this book is essential for the long term.

I found the information on consonantal iota (p43f), digamma (p45f), accentuation (p47f) particularly useful. The paradigms and referencing system is also something you'd definitely pick this volume up for. Every word is accented throughout.

A few minor errors (then again it could always be me that's wrong):

p50- "preperispomenon" should be "properispomenon"

p201- n3d(1) should include KREAS (meat).

p335- ERHMOS is a-3a, but also n-2b, see footnote 3 on p232.

I bought the soft-cover from Amazon, but immediately covered it with contact. It is too valuable to allow to fray.

In short, this is a very handy volume, but usefulness is lessened by reliance on the short contents page and a word index without page numbers to find one's way around.

There is no doubt that this is an excellant resource and if you master it you will really know Greek. My experience was that I got bogged down in it. At some point I found reading and understanding the why more difficult than just memorizing it. It's intended as a reference tool and that is how it's best used early in your Greek - use occasionally but mostly just read the Greek and figure it out. After some practice you can read the Greek without having to think about what form it is or why, you just know it.