Review: The Handy Guide to Difficult and Irregular Greek Verbs

Jon C. Laansma and Randall X. Gauthier. The Handy Guide to Difficult and Irregular Greek Verbs: AIDS for Readers of the Greek New Testament.  Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, September 26th 2017. 80 pp.

5 out of 5

Purchase: Amazon

In my opinion one of the best thing I got from my education in seminary was picking up the original languages of the Scriptures; other places such as the church might be better to prepare for other skillset for those entering the ministry but for most people the languages is probably the most helpful thing one can get in seminary that isn’t as easy to learn “on the job” or through self-study alone.  However it is a skill that can easily be lost if one doesn’t engage in expository preaching or work with the biblical languages in other ways.  It is with this perspective that I appreciate this new resource from Kregel Academic titled The Handy Guide to Difficult and Irregular Greek Verbs: AIDS for Readers of the Greek New Testament.

As the subtitle suggests this work is a helpful aid for readers of the Greek New Testament.  For those who are familiar with resources on New Testament this work is similar to Bruce Metzger’s Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek except it kind of compliments that by building upon that and supplement that with a treatment on difficult and irregular Greek verbs.  Like Metzger’s work part one of this book provides us a frequency list of difficult and irregular Greek verbs that is helpful for those who are trying to learn and expand their Greek vocabulary in order to read the New Testament.  This list has breakdown of verbs grouped in 1000-200 times in the New Testament, then forms occurring 1990100 times in the New Testament, etc.  Part two is another list that arranges alphabetically the irregular and difficult verbs plus with their compounds.  This section is the largest portion of the book and one that most readers would find most helpful as it serves as a lexical and parsing guide for those verbs in Greek that is hard to decipher as to its lexical roots whether because of changes when letters elide with the principle parts and endings; or it is because of other morphological changes. I love how this work is small enough as a handbook and reference to have on hand while I’m studying the New Testament in the Greek.

The meat of the book is the two lists mentioned above but I recommend that readers also read the introduction, the “Note to instructors and interested students” to better understand how to use this resource.  It is incredibly helpful reference and the two authors skillfully organized the material which is quite a feat for something that involves irregular and difficult verbs that by definition is not easy to arrange and organize.  I also appreciated the book’s two appendix in which the first one gives us charts of conjugations of “eimi” which is a reference for readers to remember the basic.  The second appendix is surely something I have to revisit again as it looks at the perfect and pluperfect indicative and optative mood which explains why words look different in those mood and in those principle parts.

Overall a great resource to have for the exegete.  I recommend it and I believe the costs is worth it for years if not decades of it being a reference in one’s study and ministry.

NOTE: This book was provided to me free by Kregel Publications without any obligation for a positive review. All opinions offered above are mine unless otherwise stated or implied.