Biblical Greek: Illustrated by Examples by Maximilian Zerwick S. J.

I was told about this book in 1988. I'm still using it almost every week. For a pastor who tries to study the Greek NT for sermon exegesis weekly, this book gives me a quick way to understand more about textual issues and nuances of meanings that I would normally miss. One can learn a lot over time by referring to this book for 10 minutes or so for each sermon you develop...cherry picking relevant issues that relate to the text you are studying. Find the lesson to focus on in the Grammatical analysis book...then just read and reread the lesson in this book until you see clearly how it applies to your sermon (if it does). That can be done in ten minutes or less for each grammatical lesson related to a paragraph of Greek NT. Often he has 4 to 7 lessons associated with a paragraph! Each lesson varies in length from a couple lines of text to maybe a half page of stuff. References and exampls in the NT are there so you can see clearly what he is talking about. That's a lot of practical Greek training built into a sermon! If you put that into the regular mix of your sermon exegesis, you will find your confidence in things like simple prepositions and the various meanings they can be used for growing by leaps and bounds. I think every pastor who works in the Greek NT should refer to this book alongside of Grammatical Analysis by Zerwick. Gordon Fee also recommends this book in his NT Exegesis (3rd Edition) which is used in Bible Colleges and Seminaries around the world. If you haven't used this book, you need to start in my view.

This book is an excellent discussion of applied grammer. But the reader must already know how to decline nouns and conjugate verbs, and know which cases go with which prepositions. A thoughtful textual study. This book has been chosen by professors at CTS in Ft. Wayne, which is a recommendation all by itself.

This very slim book has extremely clear, simple explanations. Better yet, it is keyed to a verse-by-verse grammatical analysis which tells you exactly which article to turn to in the grammar when you are looking at a difficult construction in the Bible. Highly recommended. Maximillian Zerwick originally wrote this in Latin, but Joseph Smith translated it into English for those of us who couldn't imagine learning Latin to read a book on Greek. For more reviews on grammars, lexicons, textbooks, and other Greek resources, see "http://www.mindspring.com/~jwrobie/littleGreek.html".