Hans Arneson

Ph.D. Candidate in Religion, Duke University

Reader's Lexica for the Jewish Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

THE PROBLEM AND THE SOLUTION

During my time at Duke, I have served as the instructor for NT 2A and 2B, courses designed to develop students' facility in Hellenistic Greek. Frustrated by the ease with which students would shift from engagement with the particularities of New Testament syntax to mere translation from memory, I've begun channeling them to resources less familiar to them. Lately, these have included readings in Wisdom of Solomon, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Testament of Abraham. I find students are generally delighted to confront a text they know little about and find themselves learning more and enjoying class time more frequently. As such, I hope to continue to post a few materials on this page in an attempt to help other teachers of Greek faced with the same predicament. To begin, I am posting a few reader's lexica for apocrypha and pseudepigrapha that I have modeled on the very useful NT study tool by Sakae Kubo, A Reader's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (Andrews University Press, 1971 [often reprinted]). I offer a brief description of the project and its logic below:

A NOTE ON PEDAGOGICAL PHILOSOPHY

This project seeks to address two of the biggest challenges facing the Greek instructor in a modern seminary setting: (1) preexisting familiarity with English translations of the Greek New Testament and (2) the widespread availability of computerized tools for the grammatical analysis of these texts. The basic idea behind any reader’s lexicon is to allow student ease of access to basic definitions of less frequent words or idioms. Less time spent flipping the pages of a heavy dictionary means more time for analyzing specific forms and pursuing the sense of the text. Reader’s lexica have a distinct pedagogical advantage over digital parsing programs in that they do not give too much information to the reader. With the exception of the occasional glossed idiom, only the lexical form of a given word is provided, forcing the reader to parse or decline the word herself, rather than simply allowing her to accept that parsing or declension provided to her by the same computer program used to look up the most common meaning of the word in the first place. Tools of this type are, predictably, most often developed in relation to canonical texts. Unfortunately, the familiarity that any students have with canonical texts occasionally excuses them from the hard work of grammatical analysis. One easy remedy is to train students on less familiar Greek materials. The Jewish apocrypha and pseudepigrapha offers just such an opportunity, allowing the student of Greek to explore historically and theologically relevant materials while working on their Greek more efficiently.

Please note that these aides will likely undergo changes as I seek to provide a better gloss here or there for various Greek terms, a better format for the lexica, or what have you. Feedback on this is welcome at any point; please do let me know if anyone finds them useful: hka(at)duke.edu.

READER'S LEXICA CURRENTLY AVAILABLE