[B-Greek] TDNT, TDNT abridged, or NIDNTT?
Trevor & Julie Peterson
06peterson at cua.edu
Tue Mar 11 07:05:36 EST 2003
Luke wrote:
> As a young theology student, I was wondering which of these reference
> works would be most useful. I don't exactly understand the differences
> between them. Can you abridge 10 volumes of TDNT into one and still
> keep it useful? I have BDAG and LN...are either of these items useful
> for background info in addition to these works?
Some of the answer depends on your training. Since you have BDAG and LN (and
since you're on the list), I'm going to take a guess that you're learning
Greek. If you are, you may want to consider that you will find yourself more
often than not preferring to do your own word study work. I'm not saying
these resources are utterly worthless. It's certainly good to see what
others have come up with, and as you start out, you probably won't be able
to do any better. But word studies are an acquired skill, and you really
ought to take the opportunity to practice.
For whatever it's worth, I've had the 10-vol. TDNT for several years now and
never used it with any regularity. (In fact, right now it's on loan to my
church library.) Some of that may be a factor of my choice to pursue Semitic
languages more in-depth, so that I've had little time to do serious work
with Greek lately. But I can say the same for TWOT, which I've had just as
long, and NIDOTTE, which I've had almost since it came out. I'll probably
appreciate having them at some point, but right now I'd be just as happy to
have the money that was spent on them to buy more useful tools (Hatch &
Redpath, BDF, LSJ, to name a few).
If you're at a point where you feel like you need to be able to profit from
word studies that you don't yet know how to do yourself, I'd say get the
cheaper resources to use for now. If you have access to a good library, you
can use TDNT when necessary and get a sense of how valuable it is to you.
Perhaps better, if you have ready access, don't buy any of them until you've
had a chance to work with them extensively (or to get along just fine
without them and realize that you don't need them).
Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics
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