Learning Greek and Hebrew

Introduction

For the many of you who are not using Bible study software I suggest you first read this and then check out the Logos website. Thanks to Logos I have lived a spoiled Christian Bible study life. I’ve never had to have dozens of books lying around me struggling to keep enough bookmarks around me to keep my place. I’ve never spent hours searching through a vast library to find little to nothing on the passage I’m teaching from or studying personally.  In my Hermeneutics class I finished this week, I had people telling me that they had spent hours doing a word study assignment that I did in MINUTES.

You Get What You Pay For

Get yourself the best study software around. You may be scared by the price but I’m telling you it’s worth it. Not only do you get hundreds (or in my case thousands) of books it also simplifies the task for you. Also, it has payment plans. When I got the Scholar’s package a couple years ago I paid it over several months and have done the same for pretty much every major upgrade I’ve done. Anyways, off my soapbox I go.

What I want to tell everyone in this post today is about a new video series Logos has released called “Learn to Use Biblical Greek and Hebrew with Logos Bible Software“. Now I am wholeheartedly recommending it but I want to up front tell you what the video series isn’t before I tell you what it is.

This video series doesn’t teach you the original languages with the purpose of you attaining fluency, in other words when you have mastered the series you will not be able to grab your NA27 or you BHS and read it. As a result, you do not spend the countless hours learning vocabulary, transliterating and translating passages into English. You will not have anything more than a minor grasp of the vocabulary if any by the time you are done. Also, on top of this, your learning is tied in with the Logos software, as in applying a lot of the knowledge to other software isn’t easily transferable.

Now, you may be thinking this is one hectic investment for something that sounds basically useless. I would agree if that was all that was said but there is more to it. The key to the purpose is in the title of the product. When you purchase this video series it teaches you how to use the original languages in the Logos software profitably. In other words it tells you how to use the Logos software efficiently to mine the important information of the original languages and how to apply it to your personal studies, your teaching and of course your preaching. A bold claim given by these guys is by the time you are done you will have the same practical grasp of the language as a 3rd year seminary student.

The focus is on making your knowledge useful and practical. Most people when they leave Bible college or seminary forget a lot if not most of  what they learned about the original languages and as a result use them very little in their personal studies, even when they have software like Logos that does most of the work for them. In the people I know whom have attended Bible college or seminary, several (i.e. most)  have forgotten most of what they learned because they simply don’t use it.  As written on the Logos site “We are aware of the research that suggests less than 20% of pastors who have had biblical language training actually use that training on a regular basis.” The purpose here is to teach you something that you’ll remember because you will use it all the time.

Conclusion

I highly recommend Logos, and I recommend these videos. Luckily, I got them on pre-publication and got it for about a 1/3 of the price but nevertheless it’s worth the investment! The main reason I got this was in preparation of my original language studies beginning next year. With this software I will have a working knowledge of the languages by the time I start going to the classes and learning the vocabulary. In my case, my aim is fluency, but for most people it’s more about the payoff than about the fluency and this is the market these videos are geared towards.

Until next week,

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