A Reader's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament

If you are going to study the NT seriously, you will have to put the $125 on the table and get the BDAG lexicon. This lexicon was never meant to take the place of a serious, in depth book which has the dimensions to impress your friends and a pricetag to irritate your wife. That said, it will take you decades to get the gist of the NT in Greek if you spend all of your time working through passages with a lexicon and a grammar. But with this handy little tool, if your word frequency knowledge is better than 50 occurences, you can do your daily devotional with your handy-dandy UBS4 or NA27. I read ten pages in the Greek New Testament per day, hoping to read through the GNT four times per year. I use Kubo to help me get a relatively good translation in my head of what I'm reading in Greek and it works wonderfully. The key to using this book is in carefully reading the title: it's not "A Translator's Greek-English Lexicon..." but "A Reader's Greek-English Lexicon..." For $30 or less, this thing is a steal.

This work was suggested to me by my seminary Greek professor after going through a basic textbook. His reasoning was that in class we learned all of the words that appeared at least fifty times in the New Testement and Kubo's lexicon gives a simple definition of the words that do not appear fifty times. Simply open your Greek New Testament and this book to the corresponding chapter and verse and you are set to read. This has cut my reading time in half! Besides UBS Greek New Testament and the BDAG Lexicon, this is the most important book for a biblical Greek scholar's library!

This book exists to solve a very specific problem. Once you've worked through a basic grammar (e.g., Mounce), you want to get into the text -- but at first, your vocabulary in the language leaves something to be desired. You've diligently studied your vocabulary lists from the basic grammar, but these are only the most common words; nearly every sentence has words you don't know. Eventually, though reading the text, you'll learn many of them, but at first you'll find yourself needing to look up so many words, it takes forever to translate a passage. This book helps with that. It helps quite a lot.This book is not, and is not intended to be, the only lexicon you need. If you can only get one lexicon, get the big one (Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, Danker). The big lexicon has all the words; this one only has the words that occur fewer than fifty times. The big lexicon gives the full range of meaning for each word; this one only gives a basic meaning for each word. The big lexicon gives examples of sentences from the text, showing how the word is used; this one does not.However, the big lexicon is big; you'll want it on your desk, but you won't want to haul it around everywhere you go; this one is small enough to take with you; it's barely larger than a copy of the NT.But the really big difference is the arrangement: the big lexicon (and almost all lexicons, for that matter) are arranged entirely in lexical order -- all the words starting with alpha are at the front, and so forth. This one is different: it lists the words in the order in which they occur in the text. (This means it repeats them each time. That's why it has to leave out the common words.) So, if you're reading a certain passage, you can open your Kubo lexicon to the corresponding section, prop it open with a rubber band or clip, and refer to it repeatedly as you work through the passage, without a lot of page-flipping. This is a huge time-saver.When you start digging into the more nitty gritty details of a shorter passage, studying each word carefully, you'll want the bigger lexicon. This one is too basic for that. But for reading through longer passages, for understanding the whole context of a passage and getting the big picture, this lexicon will save you a lot of time. Highly recommended.

A very very helpful tool for translating the Greek NT. It proceeds through the NT verse by verse, giving the lexical form and meaning (from BAGD) for words that occur 50 times or less throughout the NT. There are other helpful features as well, such as a special vocabulary list, at the beginning of each NT book, of words that occur 50 times or less (throughout the whole NT), and more than 5 times in that particular book. Very helpful, especially for the student translating the Greek New Testament!

Kubo's book is everything you need to quickly and efficiently read Greek with a limited vocabulary. Verse by verse the book lists definitions for the Greek words used most frequently in the New Testament. One of the biggest time consumptions in my translations has been the time it takes to look up words I don't know. Now they are all right there in one place!