The Greek Powerhouse Your Study is Missing

Let’s talk about Greek. And what you need to master it. To gain fluency.


Study. Years of hard labor bent over grammars and ancient texts. Speaking Ancient Greek with strangers on Skype. Dreaming in Koine.

Right. Perhaps mastery at that level isn’t a priority. Exegesis is.

Good. Then I want your participation in a project, one that will facilitate your exegesis.

The Brill Greek Reference Collection is a high-level academic powerhouse for anybody working in this, the language of the gods, the philosophers, Josephus, the New Testament.

This 5-volume collection is currently in pre-pub, and includes both:

  • The 3-volume Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics
  • The 2-volume Etymological Dictionary of Greek

I highly recommend that you add these elite resources to your digital research library. To posses them in hardcover sounds lovely, but, really?

Don’t let the Brill Greek Reference Collection molder on your shelf, become a display piece, sold off in a garage sale when you die.

Possess the fully functional, fully searchable powerhouse in its absolutely best format: in your Logos digital research library.

Keep your bookshelves for Harry Potter.


The pre-pub price of the Brill Greek Reference Collection is currently $499.99, compared to the retail digital price of $899.99 and the retail print price of $1,709.

I’ll let you do the math, but those are huge savings. Take advantage.

And help get this powerful collection to publication today.

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Written by
Tavis Bohlinger

Dr. Tavis Bohlinger is Editor-in-Chief of the Logos Academic Blog and Creative Director at Reformation Heritage Books. He holds a PhD from Durham University and writes across multiple genres, including academia, poetry, and screenwriting. He lives in Grand Rapids with his wife and three children.

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7 comments
  • Part of this collection (the two-volume Etymological Dictionary of Greek) is already available and currently on sale for $115: https://www.logos.com/product/55648/etymological-dictionary-of-greek

    Knowing the etymology of Greek words seems useful enough, but it appears that even the authors are not too certain about their findings. However, one of the “elite” benefits of having this resource in digital format is that you can do “powerhouse” searches for how many times the dictionary uses certain words:
    “unknown”- 2254x
    “probable” – 1625x
    “perhaps” – 1129x
    “uncertain” – 959x
    “possible” – 917x

    So perhaps it is possible that your exegesis could improve, but it’s probably still unknown or at best uncertain. It could definitely be useful for preventing word-study fallacies as discussed by D.A. Carson in his book “Exegetical Fallacies”:
    https://www.logos.com/product/6874/exegetical-fallacies-second-edition

    I’ll share a quote from Carson’s book (p.33):
    “I am far from suggesting that etymological study is useless. It is important, for instance, in the diachronic study of words (the study of words as they occur across long periods of time), in the attempt to specify the earliest attested meaning, in the study of cognate languages, and especially in attempts to understand the meanings hapax legomena (words that appear only once). In the last case, although etymology is a clumsy tool for discerning meaning, the lack of comparative material means we sometimes have no other choice. That is why, as Moises Silva points out in his excellent discussion of these matters, etymology plays a much more important role in the determination of meaning in the Hebrew Old Testament than in the Greek New Testament: the Hebrew contains proportionately far more hapax legomena. “The relative value of this use of etymology varies inversely with the quantity of material available for the language.״ And in any case, specification of the meaning of a word on the sole basis of etymology can never be more than an educated guess.”

    Speaking of etymology, why do people park on a driveway and drive on a parkway?

    Tavis, what has been your experience using these tools?

    Kind regards,
    Joe

    • Agreed! Especially for pastors who work diligently to prepare each week to proclaim God’s word to their people. Most do not have the kind of expense account that would allow such expense on so few volumes that would not necessarily impact each week’s study.

  • “The language of the gods” . . .? Not the greatest way to encourage bible students to improve their accuracy in Greek.

    • Hi Mark, this phrase is referring to Greek mythology, written in Attic Greek (hence the lower case).

Written by Tavis Bohlinger
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