Morphology of Biblical Greek, The

William Mounce’s approach to Biblical Greek emphasizes how the history of the language gave us the sounds (phonology) and units of meaning (morphology) in koine Greek. He believes that it’s easier to memorize the underlying rules than to memorize the patterns of individual words “as exceptions.”As someone who has studied the history of Indo-European languages, I appreciate this position. Unless you have a reasonable background in linguistics, however, you will probably disagree. Other Greek textbooks I have seen, both for Biblical Greek and for Attic Greek, ask you to memorize a large number of paradigms, with types, subtypes, and exceptions. For example, the traditional approach asks you to learn “irregular” paradigms for liquid verbs, contract verbs, noun stems, and so on. Memorizing those paradigms is boring and not effective pedagogy.Instead, Mounce asks you to learn 300 pages of rules and examples – with lots of footnoted exceptions! – governing historical derivation. That would be great if those rules took up fewer pages than the traditional paradigms, but they don’t. Mounce’s result is also not effective pedagogy. Ancient Greek is, simply put, a difficult language.That said, this book does serve two people well. First, if you’re interested in linguistics, especially Indo-European linguistics, this might be so interesting that you’ll read it straight through. Second, it’s a useful reference for advanced language learning. If you see a strange noun or verb form, a lexicon will tell you its exact grammatical form. (Mounce’s own Lexicon is great for this.) If you’re the kind of person who wants to know *why* that strange form looks the way it does, then this is the book for you. You will see other words that behave in similarly strange ways, and this may reinforce your understanding of the language. However, I think the audience for this kind of language learning is modest at best.In short, I don’t think that the typical seminarian who just wants to read Biblical Greek at a modest level will need this book. Lexicons and commentaries will give you the cheats that you need to make sense of a passage. Scholars and others who want to understand Biblical Greek more deeply, including historical linguists whose expertise lies in other languages, will find it helpful. (Comments by other reviewers seem consistent with my views here.) For the linguists it provides a detailed reference grammar of Biblical Greek.

Well Done!!!

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.

I really enjoy this book. Very helpful in the formation of Greek words and the behavior of the language. In depth coverage of how and why Greek words form the way they do, probably more information than the beginner will need unless you are like me and you're just all about every aspect of the Greek, even the details. Only problem is that it is not available in a hardcover! What a travesty! It is a book that will get used often once one has become acquainted with how to use it, so I can see how the other reviewers talk about their copy falling apart, even though mine has not. I would highly recommend it to anyone using Greek long term or is just more curious on the formation of Greek words.**UPDATE I have found a hardcover version after searching for years, they apparently made it in hardcover for the first printing, then after that all of them were made in the cheap paperback form available now. Absolute shame considering it is a Greek reference book! Having said that, the hardcover is excellent and I would not own this in a paperback if I planned on using it a lot (like I do!), however, the hardcover was THE hardest book I have ever tried to find! People seem to raise the price on them so high they are out of reach (sometimes up to $400 or more!!!). Again, I rated the paperback version 5 stars because of CONTENT, not QUALITY! The hardcover I now own I give 5 stars for both quality and content!

I have just read this book cover to cover and colored it with copious highlighting on almost every page. It has been tremendously beneficial to me, and I recommend it to anyone who has a serious desire to improve their understanding of the language. Especially if you are the type that is not satisfied with the “just do it this way” approach most popular beginning grammars use and want to know why.I did deduct a star because it has been in print for some time and needs an erratum sheet to correct the many minor and careless typographical errors (examples: contractions §2.7, the missing rule §24.4c which is referred to in various footnotes such as footnote 1 p.155 but not appearing in the text, extra epsilon in footnote 1 p.159). Learning Greek is difficult enough without having to sort through them.

Great work which compliments the basics of biblical Greek and the Analytical Lexicon to the Greek New Testament. I would Highly recommend this to the more serious student of Biblical studies as this book will help tremendously.

If you need a sequential and comprehensive look at how New Testament words are formed from their roots, than I recommend that this book is on your bookshelf.

Very useful for those wrestling with Greek of NT.

Great and perfect item

Excellent book