D. A. Hosek

As an undergraduate I studied a number of languages with varying degrees of success. Spanish, Latin, Hebrew and Ancient Greek. It was this last that that completely defeated me. After just one semester, I dropped out of the Greek class. From talking with others both back in the olden days and more recently, the difficulty of ancient Greek is widely recognized.

So I approached the 480s with trepidation: there would be no avoiding attempting to re-learn Greek. 

What I recalled was that in my class, there were a pair of graduate students who were similarly being crushed by the Greek class and who talked about switching instead to a Biblical Greek class being offered through the Institute for Antiquity and said that it was allegedly much easier.

Given that memory, when I looked at the books on the shelf. I decided to pick a book on Biblical Greek, and whether I was just lucky in my choice of text or those long-ago grad students were correct, I found myself having a much easier time with Biblical Greek. 

I imagine it’s both, but this text does an amazing job of introducing the complexities of Biblical Greek. Each chapter ends with four sets of exercises, a set of sentences for translation from Greek which are presumably composed by Croy, a set of passages from the Septuagint, a set of passages from the New Testament (these latter two have supplementary vocabulary provided which is explicitly not expected to be learned) and finally a short set of English sentences to be translated to Greek. The later chapters have a few words that don’t manage to make it into either the main or supplementary vocabularies but Wiktionary provides an invaluable resource for being able to find words both in canonical and inflected forms much to my relief.

It took me nearly two years, but I worked through all 32 chapters and all the accompanying translation exercises and my phobia of ancient Greek has been alleviated. I’m almost ready to pull my old Attic Greek textbook off the shelf and give it another try.