★★★★★ 5
Great resource for keeping up biblical language skills
Format: Hardcover, Format: Hardcover
I am excited to have purchased this book. I graduated from seminary over a decade ago, and I have definitely lost a lot of my proficiency with Greek and Hebrew. I have been looking for something to help get back into the flow of things, and this just might be it.
The book contains both the Hebrew and Greek scriptures, which makes it several inches thick. On the plus side, the whole Bible is there in one book. However, it's not as portable as I'd like it to be. But that is the only downside I've discovered so far.
The pages and hard over are of really good quality--they just feel good in your hands. The Hebrew and Greek fonts used are very readable, better than my critical editions. Some other reviewers have commented negatively on the yellow paper, but it hasn't been an issue with me. (Your results may vary.)
The text itself has footnotes with quick definitions for all infrequent words (occurring <100x for Hebrew, <30x for Greek), so you don't have to look up that one word in the passage that, as it turns out, is a hapax legomenon or something. Each Testament also has a short lexicon with quick definitions for every word not defined in the footnotes. So in theory you should be able to look up any word quickly and easily just with this book. As an added bonus, infrequently occurring names in the Hebrew Bible are indicated in a light grey font, so again, you can quickly see that it's a name instead of getting frustrated trying to translate it as a regular noun.
One word about usage: This is not an "academic" book per se. That is, you're not going to be able to do detailed word studies or compare manuscript variants with this book. Even the definitions are just quick glosses, meant to get you down the road, not to provide technical etymological information. The purpose of this book is to help you read and familiarize yourself with the original-language text, or, like me, to keep your language skills sharp. And I believe that it will do this well.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2020
