Preface

Because it is so common for Greek professors to write Greek grammars, it is now common to begin with a defense of why yet another Greek grammar is needed. Do we really need this particular grammar? What distinctive features does Reading Greek Deeply have that other Greek grammars do not? Five main features stand out.

To begin with, I am not a seasoned Greek professor who has written this book with years of experience teaching Greek in the classroom. My background is in linguistics, the scientific study of language. As such, the scholarly field that I am primarily drawing from is fundamentally different than that of most Greek grammars. I still interact with other Greek grammarians, but my categories are developed from a different set of literature. I do not say this disparagingly of those who are not trained in linguistics. It is a simple fact that the bibliography of this textbook looks different than any other Greek textbook on the market, including those grammars that incorporate more linguistics. I believe the field of linguistics has not been utilized enough in Greek grammatical studies and that we can learn about Biblical Greek through analyzing it as linguists.

The second distinctive feature is that this is not a book primarily about Greek morphology, which is to be followed by another book about Greek exegesis (as is common in the world of Greek grammars). This single textbook covers both morphology and exegesis interwoven throughout. There are a number of reasons for this, but the most salient one is I believe Greek should be taught primarily as a language to be used. If the primary goal in language learning is to use the language (in reading, writing, speaking, or listening), then learning a meaningful unit in a language must involve learning the range of meaning of that unit. Exegesis is determining the meaning of the meaningful units in a particular text; to learn a meaningful unit is to learn its range of meaning. Since students of Biblical Greek want to use such knowledge to figure out what specific texts mean, we have demonstrated how to do exegesis throughout the book from the very beginning.

Thirdly, this book incorporates research on the science of learning. Not all learning methods are created equal. To illustrate, it is possible to learn Greek by moving from one topic to another, but this kind of progression is a sub-optimal presentation of the material, at least according to the science of cognitive learning strategies (recognized as far back as the 1960s; see Underwood & Ekstrand 1967). While new Greek grammars often do make minor improvements to older grammars in the order of what is taught, all Greek grammars that I know of teach the grammar by moving from one large topic to the next. By contrast, this book incorporates the cognitive learning strategy of interweaving dissimilar material together to prevent interference between similar concepts. Other cognitive learning strategies (and second language acquisition research) could be enumerated that make this book unique. Greek grammars do not normally take such research into consideration.

The fourth feature is the “workbook” associated with this textbook, i.e. the Biblingo app. To learn a language is to learn to use a language, and the only way to learn to use a language is through practice. Biblingo has been designed to give students near-limitless practice using the language, focusing especially on reading fluency. Each lesson in the textbook is paired with associated activities in the app, and these activities are designed to make you a fluent reader of Biblical Greek.

Finally, this is the only open access modern Greek grammar, to my knowledge. Although you cannot learn to read Greek with this book alone (again, you need practice for that, which can be found in the Biblingo app), this textbook provides enough information on the grammar of Greek for most people’s needs – at no cost. This is in keeping with Biblingo’s mission to make the biblical languages “more accessible and easier to learn through technology.”

The fourth feature deserves more elaboration. In my original vision for this textbook, I had included an English-Greek glossary, so students could look up an English word or phrase and see how a concept or idiom was expressed in Greek. Most Greek grammar books do not do this because they are focused on translating from Greek to English. However, attempting to produce Greek from English can reveal gaps in knowledge, thereby serving as a useful language-learning tool. Useful as it may be, creating such a glossary would have added considerably to the length of this already long book. While this kind of use-case can be accomplished using a textbook, conducting a search from English to Greek is far more useful within Biblingo than within a textbook. Besides being faster, any word in the NT (or outside of it) can be mapped to whatever English word is being searched for. Thus, there are some “features” that might have otherwise been included in this textbook but are not because the Biblingo app is used for that functionality.

In addition to being more suitable for certain functions, software also changes much faster than textbooks. Even as I write this, we are in the process of completely revamping Biblingo’s learning system. When this book is published, the new system should be out, but it will almost certainly look different than what I am envisioning now. Such is the nature of software, which means that the most up-to-date information on the app can only be found on our website at

XVIII Preface

1. Learning system that optimizes for learning efficiency and reading fluency

2. Graded reader based on a custom “readability score” for each chapter in the NT and other Koine texts

3. Searching, including English-Greek searching, complex morphology and lexical searching, etc.

It is my conviction that any one of the above five reasons would warrant publishing another Greek textbook. The cumulative weight of all five together has compelled me to write this book. Along the way, I also hope that my analyses will prove useful for both students and scholars.