How do you do your Greek/Hebrew study/translation?
This question is for anyone but I'm mostly interested in how pastors approach their study of the original languages.
Depending on what I am doing, I often like to translate the text I will be preaching the following Sunday morning. This is especially the case if I'm preaching through a book and I'm about to launch a new book series so I'm taking another look at my approach.
My approach is fairly thorough but not very fast, so I tend to spend more time than I should on the translation. In a word processing document I break the passage down verse by verse then word by word and fill in parsing/declension info as well as lexical data. If I pursue a word study of a particular word I may add an extra note somewhere in the document or just add the note with my other comments on that word. Once I've made notes for all the words in a verse I look at the verse syntax as a whole to translate the verse. Once I've done this for all the verses in my passage I put the verses together to look at the whole thing and I plug this into a larger translation file if this passage is part of a book I'm working through.
Again, the method leads to good study but I don't always have the time to go through all this. So what methods do you use? How do you make use of the exegetical guide? Do you keep your study notes in Logos notes or an external word processor? Etc, etc.
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Hi Chris,
I thought I would let others who probably do this better than I answer, but since no one else has shared I will. When I was fresh out of seminary I translated then diagrammed the passage using the outline system taught by Lee Kantwein. He later put that in book form and it is available in Logos. http://www.logos.com/product/1794/diagrammatical-analysis From that diagram I developed an outline and then began to do word studies, and eventually a sermon outline. It, like what you are doing, was thorough but time consuming. I would preach Sunday morning and evening, do a short Bible study at Wednesday night prayer meeting, teach a Sunday School class, preach at a local nursing home, and speak at another gathering of senior citizens. Finding my self speaking an average of five times a week, doing pastoral counseling and visitation, and the variety of other things a pastor is called upon to do, it became obvious that I had to shorten my study time.
I came to the realization that some passages should be handled that way, but not all. You can spend a lot of time analyzing a narrative passage and when you are done parsing verbs and diagramming sentences you still just have the story you started with. In those types of passages I read a couple of English texts (usually NASB and ESV) and then compare them with the Hebrew or Greek texts to see if there is anything that stands out or seems to be a little strange in translation. I may still end up doing a word study or noting some grammatical construction and spending some time thinking through those issues as well as consulting some good commentaries. After that I will put together an outline and then focus on application (something that used to suffer when i ran out of time in the past). There are, however, some passages that one must just put the work into, and so I still fall back to something like I used to do. My Hebrew has slipped, because there aren't as many Old Testament passages that demand the same study time as some New Testament Greek ones. I'm committing myself to regaining at least a little bit of proficiency in it this year, but that is going to be difficult.
I really believe that preaching the Word is the primary task of a pastor, but it is certainly not the only task we are called to do. If we allow our study time to keep us away from our people it is not profitable. I don't do as much as I would like and live with that vague sense of guilt that pastors have as we balance our work, but I also have learned that the Lord can use even my feeble efforts to accomplish much.
I don't use the exegetical guide that much as I do a lot of my exegesis is Bibleworks and use LOGOS to find and read material on the text afterwords. That is changing somewhat as I have begun to use LOGOS 4 more and more. I am old-school and I have always loved to work on yellow legal pads so that is where much of my note-taking and organizing takes place. I usually complete my outline on paper and then just put it right into powerpoint on my computer. That is not the best system, but it's what I do.
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Thank you, Nord. Some good comments. My preaching schedule is similar to yours - three primary messages a week with a few others scattered in. I usually only do heavy language work for Sunday morning sermons, though language study of some sort goes into many of my sermon preps.
I haven't done much with diagramming, primarily because of the time it takes for me to diagram a passage, but do tend to spend more time religiously parsing every word and doing more word studies than I really need. It is often fascinating, but not often as productive as it should be for the particular sermon at hand.
For me, the great value of word studies is it often turns up things elsewhere in the Bible, or helps me notice things in the passage I had not noticed. What would you say is the particular value from diagramming when dealing with passages that warrant careful language work?
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Diagramming forces me to focus on the grammar. Otherwise I can tend to just focus on the meaning of words without noting the interplay between them. Sometimes just sitting back and looking at the diagram helps me to see patterns and structure of thought that are worthy of emphasis. It is a lot of work, but can be useful. There are others who have published diagrams and that can be helpful when one is pressed for time, but that also makes you dependent upon their scholarship (which often is probably better than my own!).
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