How to study, what to use....

Larry Swain swainl at rocky.edu
Wed Jun 10 13:57:50 EDT 1998


As for learning the language and increasing the skills, nothing takes the 
place of actually just reading the text not necessarily with an eye to 
exegesis.  And branch out some:  read some Septuagint, Josephus, Philo, 
Early Fathers etc.  If increasing your Greek skills is your primary goal, 
then nothing, nothing replaces reading texts.

If exegesis is your goal, the things you list are good starts, although I 
would warn against a too great dependance on word studies and the Kittel 
approach.  There is a book that since I'm in a hurry for a meeting I won't 
look up, but James Barr is the author, done in 1964 I think, something 
along the lines Art of Biblical Language...in which he argues that the 
Kittel approach of focusing on semantics as a static field is incorrect, 
and that the semantic field is determined by usage.  I certainly do not go 
as far as Barr, but there is wisdom in the argument:  Meaning is not 
static, and nuance does come from immediate context.

Larry Swain



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