{Book Review} An Introduction to Biblical Greek: A Grammar with Exercises

An Introduction to Biblical Greek: A Grammar with Exercises is authored by John D. Schwandt, president of Redeemer Seminary and teacher of Greek and New Testament for seventeen years. This book is published by Lexham Press. 

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An Introduction to Biblical Greek: A Grammar with Exercises

I can’t praise this book highly enough! As a lover of biblical Greek, I view this book as a must-have. I greatly appreciate Schwandt’s approach. First of all, I love that he approaches the “why” questions as he teaches Greek. I am not satisfied with merely memorizing paradigms and spelling and grammatical patterns. I want to understand the why behind those things, and that is exactly what Schwandt aims to accomplish. I also like the emphasis he places on exercises.

Now to be honest, when I took Greek in seminary, exercises weren’t my favorite. However, it’s definitely true that I learned and retained Greek the best when I spent time doing the exercises. For that reason, I applaud his approach. 

I really like the explanations that Schwandt provides, but I also like the simplicity of the layout. The charts are very nice and easy to follow (making the patterns and such easier to memorize). I love that the section headings are found in bright blue, making it very easy to navigate through the chapters. 

Besides the excellent content that fills the chapters of this book, the reader of the book will also greatly benefit from the appendices. There the reader will find the answer key, accentuation helps, an appendix on prepositions, morphology reference tables (super helpful!), and then an English-Greek glossary as well as a Greek-English glossary. And by the way, the physical book itself is a beautiful hardcover with very thick pages. 

I have only been able to compare this book to maybe two or three other Greek textbooks. In comparison, however, this book is superior! Again, I love Schwandt’s approach, and I’ve enjoyed reading through it over the past month. It’s been a tremendous refresher to me. For that reason, I highly recommend this book to new students of Greek, but it’s also an excellent resource for those who have learned Greek previously and are interested in keeping up with it.

Tolle lege, take up and read! 

Disclaimer: My thanks to Lexham Press for providing me with a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. The opinions expressed are my own. 

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