I’m looking to sell 9 volumes of the Word Biblical Commentary set. I’ve listed them (with full condition details) here. If you want to contact me directly about a possible purchase (i.e., not through ebay), feel free to use this form, and we’ll talk. (UPDATE: Books are now sold.)
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A few more books for sale:
IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament Like New
ISBN: 978-0830814053 Used just a few times. No markings. In great shape. $22 (SOLD)
Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (BDAG)
for BibleWorks Software Compatible with BibleWorks 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. I’ve been in touch with BibleWorks to confirm that on completion of sale, one user license transfers to the buyer with no fee, so that you can use BDAG in your BibleWorks. (Must have purchased and own BibleWorks to be able to use this.) Significant discount from buying new (where it’s $150). $99 (SOLD)
Ezra and Nehemiah: Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ) Like New Taken out of shrink wrap and used just once or twice.
Excellent condition. $40 (SOLD)
Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics
Very Good/Like New Just some edge and cover wear. Light blue cover as pictured, but same contents as dark blue cover. $22
Free shipping on all orders. If you’re interested in buying–or just have questions–you can reach me using this form, and we’ll go from there. (I use PayPal; shipping is free only domestically.)
Recently my Greek reading has improved due to spending regular time refreshing my memory on verb paradigms, rules of syntax, and so on. The tool I’ve been using is Douglas S. Huffman’s Handy Guide to New Testament Greek (Kregel, 2012). Huffman’s Handy Guide consists of three parts:
Grammar (“Greek Grammar Reminder: With Enough English to Be Manageable”)
Syntax (“Greek Syntax Summaries: With a Few Helps to Be Memorable”)
Diagramming (“Phrase Diagramming: With Enough Results to Be Motivating”)
“A Select Bibliography” concludes the guide and points beginning, intermediate, and advanced Greek readers to grammar texts, reading resources, diagramming helps, and more.
How does Huffman’s offering differ? Unlike Paradigms and Principal Parts or Greek at a Glance, the Handy Guide consists of more than simply verb paradigms or noun declension charts. It includes those, but with accompanying explanation along the way. In this regard it is similar to Mounce’s Compact Guide.
Different from Mounce, however, is the lack of any vocabulary-related helps in Huffman. It’s hard to imagine someone wanting a “handy guide” to “New Testament Greek” who doesn’t also want some treatment of vocabulary, which Mounce’s guide accomplishes nicely with its included brief lexicon. Huffman does include information about how words are formed, in his chart on comparative and superlative adjectives, for example:
But vocabulary is otherwise absent from the guide.
Part 1, “Greek Grammar Reminder,” covers everything from accents and breathing marks to nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verb declensions. (Verb paradigm charts take up the majority of part 1.)
Huffman’s “Verb Usage Guide” (from part 2) contains a refreshing amount of detail on Greek verbs for such a short guide. For example, he lists 20 categories of participles followed by a “Participle Usage Identification Guide” to help readers of Greek texts determine what kind of participle is at hand. Part 2 also explains noun case usage. His explanations of nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative cases are short, clear, and include plenty of examples with Scripture references.
Where Huffman is really unique (and what makes this guide desirable especially for a second-year Greek student or pastor) is in his part 3 on diagramming. He briefly treats “technical diagramming” (the kind some of us had to do for English in 5th grade–showing syntactical relationships at the word level) and arcing, then moves into a rich, 22-page description of “phrase diagramming,” which looks like this:
Huffman, p. 103 (1 Peter 1:3-4)
The goal of this kind of diagramming is “to grasp the writer’s general flow of thought and argument, which he has expressed in particular words and sentences” (85). Huffman’s eight steps to phrase diagramming explain the process so that even a beginner can understand it well. His “Special & Problem Issues” section is the icing on the cake of part 3.
The guide is truly “handy”; it fits nicely together with a Greek New Testament, so one can keep it close at hand. The color-coding in the paradigms is done well, so that verb endings stand out for an easy refresher course.
An unfortunate and fairly noticeable drawback to this guide, in my view, is in the layout and color scheme. The orange theme, as attractive as it looks on the cover (pictured above), gets to be an eyesore after looking at more than a page or two. It’s too bright to read comfortably, and there are charts with at least four different shades of orange.
When there is Greek in black font (in grammatical category explanations), it looks great. But the Greek in the charts in orange has a fuzzy or slightly blurry, pixelated appearance. There are also quite a few charts that are in landscape orientation (rather than the default portrait orientation), so that the reader has to flip the book sideways. That alone would not be a huge deal, but the orange was distracting to me.
Hopefully there will be demand for future printings, and hopefully future printings will make the layout and fonts more useable. And despite the omission of vocabulary, this guide has great content. Resources on sentence and phrase diagramming for Greek are few and far between, but Huffman’s guide covers that territory well, and having that coupled with quick-reference charts will help just about anyone seeking to retain and improve their biblical Greek.
Kregel sent me a copy of the book for review. Its product page is here, and it’s on Amazon here. The Table of Contents are here (pdf); read an excerpt here (pdf).
“My First Hidden Pictures” and “That’s Silly!” are two favorite features of the magazine. It says it’s for ages 2 to 6, but it’s hard to imagine any two-year-old tracking with it. Better for slightly older kids.
It comes from the National Wildlife Federation. Given our five-year-old’s penchant for all things animal kingdom, this one is a hit. Today we learned from the April 2013 issue that giant tortoises can live to be 150 years old. Whoa.
From the Cricket Magazine Group, Ladybug is the next age level up from Babybug (see below). Max and Kate are a fun ongoing storyline each month. Our five-year-old transitioned to this a year or more ago when he was getting too old for Babybug.
The awesomeness of this magazine caught us all unaware–I’d never heard of it before a grandparent-sponsored subscription began arriving in the mail. The March 2013 issue theme is “The deep blue sea.” Our five-year-old did the “make a fish” project on his own right away, with some scissors and glue. The magazine’s “Ocean Zones” section this month introduced us to the sunlight zone, the twilight zone, and the midnight zone, each of which support interesting and diverse kinds of life.
I just found out that Click is part of the same family as Ladybug and as…
Babybug is really sweet. It is “for babies who love to be read to and for the adults who love to read to them.” (It’s good for toddlers, too.) Kim and Carrots is a favorite each month, and always seems to be appropriately themed for the time of year. Simple yet engaging illustrations go with memorable and fun-to-read poetry. No part of the magazine is more than three pages, so not a long attention span is required. It’s not uncommon for us to ask our two-year-old to pick some books to read, and for him to come to us with three Babybugs.
(It’s also not uncommon for me to walk in to the living room from the back of the house and see my five-year-old curled up on the couch with a New Yorker.)
How about any of you who regularly read to children? What magazines do you recommend?
Her name is Bunmi Laditan. As recently as a week ago, the author of the forthcoming Honest Toddler: A Child’s Guide to Parenting was “anonymous.” But now the book cover (above, from Amazon) shows that HT is “written under the supervision of Bunmi Laditan.” Awesome. I’ve been curious about this since reading HT, as have hundreds of thousands of others. Here is her bio from the HT Google Books page:
BUNMI LADITAN started her first media company at age eighteen. Soon after, she launched and sold a social networking site geared toward moms and began a social media agency, working with Fortune 500 companies. She is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, Mothering and iVillage.com, where her satirical pieces on parenting and politics have often gone viral. In May 2012, she created The Honest Toddler, a character based on her youngest child. She lives with her family near Montreal.
Love it. It looks like she’s just started her own blog, too, which I plan to read regularly. See, too, if you notice another difference in the cover above compared to what was on Amazon when I posted here.
I’ll be reviewing the book as soon as it comes out. Read much more about it (including the table of contents) here at HT’s blog.
Bunmi, thank you. Thank you for HT and for the laughter that little toddler has brought. You live far away, but if you ever want to bring HT over for a play-date, our 2-year-old will be happy to lead an expedition to the beach… or to the fridge.
UPDATE 5/6/13: Go here for a chance to win a free copy of Honest Toddler.
Yes, that image is the book cover of the upcoming Honest Toddler book, which you can now pre-order on Amazon. So excited to read it.
By the way, if you click on the image or link above, Amazon gives Words on the Word a small commission, so feel free to use that link if you’re going to get it anyway. Speaking of WotW, this blog’s url has dropped the wordpress.com ending and is now just abramkj.com. (Old posts automatically re-direct.)
Who is Honest Toddler? In the bio on the book’s Amazon page, we finally learn a few things about the writer behind HT:
The author was raised in the Bay Area. She started her first media company at age eighteen while attending Long Beach State University. Soon after, she launched and sold a social networking site geared toward moms and began a social media agency, working with Fortune 500 companies. She is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, Mothering, and iVillage.com, where her satirical pieces on parenting and politics have often gone viral. In May 2012, she created Honest Toddler, a character based on her youngest child. She lives with her family outside of Montreal.
But it’s still by “Anonymous.”
Looking forward to more sage counsel from the most stress-relieving writer on parenting I’ve read.
Psalms of Lament is a heartbreakingly beautiful collection of poetry. Weems alarmingly yet assuringly gets right down to business in her Preface:
This book is not for everyone. It is for those who weep and for those who weep with those who weep. It is for those whose souls struggle with the dailiness of faithkeeping in the midst of life’s assaults and obscenities. This book is for those who are living with scalding tears running down their cheeks.
Her Psalms are for those whose experiences are “painful, too painful for any of us to try fitting our souls into ten correct steps of grieving.” They come from experience: Weems unexpectedly lost her son (“the stars fell from my sky”) just after his 21st birthday.
Drawing on the great biblical lament tradition, Weems writes lament psalms of her own. David’s familiar structure of
“How can you leave me like this, God?”–>”Yet I will trust you”
is on display throughout the collection. As personal as Weems’s psalms are, like David’s and Jeremiah’s laments, they are universal and could be prayed by anyone who is lamenting.
If you read with an open heart, Weems’s laments can evoke tears at nearly every line. And it’s a profound Godward lament in which she engages: “Anger and alleluias careen around within me, sometimes colliding.” There’s no bitterness here, but neither is there a naïve attempt to placate reality (as if we could!) with boring pseudo-truths like, “Everything happens for a reason,” or, “God took her away because he needed her for his heavenly choir.” Here is Lament Psalm Twelve, one of the starker and more personal psalms, in its entirety:
O God, what am I going to do?
He’s gone–and I’m left
with an empty pit in my life.
I can’t think.
I can’t work.
I can’t eat.
I can’t talk.
I can’t see anyone.
I can’t leave my house.
Nothing makes any sense.
Nothing seems worth doing.
How could you have allowed this to happen?
I thought you protected your own!
You are the power:
Why didn’t you use it?
You are the glory,
but there was no glory in his death.
You are justice and mercy,
yet there was no justice, no mercy for him.
In his death there is no justice for me.
O God, what am I going to do?
I’m begging you to help me.
At least you could be merciful.
O God, I don’t remember a time
when you were not my God.
Turn back to me;
you promised.
Be merciful to me;
you promised.
Heal me;
you promised.
My heart is broken.
My mind is broken.
My body is broken.
Nothing works anymore.
Unless you help me
nothing will ever work again.
O Holy One, I am confident
that you will save me.
You are the one
who heals the brokenhearted
and binds their wounds.
You are the power
and the glory;
you are the justice
and mercy.
You are my God forever.
The six “I can’t” statements (“I can’t think. I can’t work. I can’t eat. I can’t talk. I can’t see anyone. I can’t leave my house.) evoke the monotony and hopelessness that the grieving one feels. Yet three times: you promised… you promised… you promised. Given the way the poem begins, the last stanza seems almost out of place. But it’s a move David made (forced himself to make) in his Psalms.
I only wonder if those who grieve will be ready to pray along to the end of each psalm with Weems, as her laments so often end with an affirmation of God’s promises. For those whose grief is acute, fresh, and numbing, such prayers may at the moment be impossible.
Yet Weems gives us language for when we need it most, for when words of any kind are impossible. A person in the throes of grief not yet be able to say, “Alleluias spin in my heart!” But she or he may want to be able to make such affirmations, if not now, then eventually. Weems offers wording for the griever to attempt that journey. In so doing she provides a pattern for lament that is true to the biblical tradition, true to life.
Psalms of Lament is a gift to the Church and to those who grieve. Pastors, campus ministers, youth ministers, and worship leaders would all do well to have copies on hand. While Weems seems to have composed her laments with the individual in view, I’m intrigued by the possibility of reading and praying these psalms in corporate worship settings. A funeral or a Sunday after a tragedy would be particularly appropriate times. Yet if we consider, as Weems notes, the possibility of weeping with those who weep, those who pray would do well not to wait until a tragedy to employ these psalms.
Weems’s prayers floored me. I had turned to her before. As I read her again I never made it very far without choking back tears. (In my better moments, I gave up on trying to choke them back.) The tears Weems evokes, though, are not just tears of sadness, but tears of hope in the God who “will put the stars back in the sky.”
Thanks to Westminster John Knox Press for the review copy. I am confident I’ll want to pick up additional copies of Psalms of Lament for others. You can preview a good deal of the book at Google Books here.
I’ve got a few more books to offer for sale–largely an effort to make a bit more space on the shelf.
Here are some books and reference works (including a little bit of Bible software) that I’m offering for sale at a discounted rate. All prices include free shipping to U.S. addresses. Interested in anything? Contact me using this form, and we’ll talk.
IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament Like New
ISBN: 978-0830814053 Used just a few times. No markings. In great shape. $22 (SOLD)
Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (BDAG)
for BibleWorks Software Compatible with BibleWorks 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. I’ve been in touch with BibleWorks to confirm that on completion of sale, one user license transfers to the buyer with no fee, so that you can use BDAG in your BibleWorks. (Must have purchased and own BibleWorks to be able to use this.) Significant discount from buying new (where it’s $150). $99 (SOLD)
Paradigms and Principal Parts of the New Testament
Very Good Inside clean, no marking. Sticker on back and ink/scuff mark on the front, other slight markings on cover, but nothing that obscures text $22SOLD
Word Biblical Commetary: Mark 1-8:26 (Guelich)
Very Good Clean inside. Strong binding. Barely used. Some wear to dust cover (small tear, small fold). $20SOLD
Ezra and Nehemiah: Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ) Like New Taken out of shrink wrap and used just once or twice.
Excellent condition. $45 (SOLD)
Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics
Very Good/Like New Just some edge and cover wear. Light blue cover as pictured, but same contents as dark blue cover. $22
A Handbook on the Books of Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah
(UBS Handbook) Like New condition Barely used at all. Pulled off shelf just a couple of times. $29 SOLD
The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament,
2 volume set (HALOT) Very Good condition
ISBN: 978-9004124455 In great shape. Just some wear and tear (rubbing on page edges, e.g.).
No internal markings. 2 volume study edition (same full contents as 5 vol. edition). $179 SOLD Note: I also have HALOT in BibleWorks (see BDAG note above). Would possibly consider an offer.
A Reader’s Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament
Very Good condition
ISBN: 978-0310369806 Former owner’s name on inside, no other markings. Small rip on top left corner of dustjacket, which has some other wear. Small crease on back cover of book, but does not affect integrity of book. Book itself in great shape.720 pages.
All words that occur less than 50x in OT are listed in canonical order, verse-by-verse. $39SOLD
Free shipping on all orders. If you’re interested in buying–or just have questions–you can reach me using this form, and we’ll go from there.
To add to the three books I mentioned in yesterday’s post, here are three more books about Romans I’ve enjoyed using the last couple months, with sample quotes.
The foregoing overview of the interpretation of Gen 15:6 in Jewish theology has yielded a wide array of results and by no means a straightforward line of development in the way how the authors conceived of Abraham’s faith and God’s judgment on it.
Consequently, Romans is central to our understanding of Paul, not because of its doctrine of justification, but because the doctrine of justification is here in its original and authentic setting: as an argument for the status of Paul’s Gentile converts on the model of Abraham (Romans 4).
Rom. 4:3-8: Paul’s First Argument from Genesis 15:6
Rom. 4:9-12: Second Argument from Genesis 15:6: Faith, Circumcision, and Gentiles
Rom. 4:13-22: Third Argument from Genesis 15:6
Rom. 4:23-25: Fourth Argument from Genesis 15:6: “For us also…”
Over the past couple of months I’ve spent a good deal of time in Romans 4. The more I study Paul’s magnum opus, the more amazed I am by all that he packed in and the way he did it.
In my reading and writing on Romans, I’ve come across some great monographs. Here are three, with a sample quote from each. I’ll do three more tomorrow.
In sum, Christians in the Church, stemming from Jewish and Gentile origins, can rejoice together in the salvation available by faith in Christ to all without distinction. “Rejoice, O nations, with his people!” (Rom 15:10). With humility, they can marvel at God’s plan for Israel, of which the Gentile-Christians in particular are beneficiaries. “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!” (Rom 11:33) (p. 328)
In Romans 4, Paul elevates Abraham as an ancestor of a new Israel, which includes Jews and Gentiles. …In this new situation, Paul gives a new meaning to the Torah as an integrator of all nations of the world. (p. 98)
Philip Francis Esler, Conflict and Identity in Romans. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009.) I love this assessment. Before reading Esler, this is just how I had begun to understood Paul’s use of Abraham in Romans 4. Though he expresses it more eloquently than I could:
Above all, [the account of Abraham in Romans 4] carries forward Paul’s aim of recategorizing Judean and non-Judean Christ-followers in Rome into the new ingroup identity and does so by mobilizing collective memories to explain how both subgroups claim ancestry from Abraham in the same way—righteousness credited to them through faith. Abraham thus becomes the prototype of the new identity, portrayed by Paul in a manner peculiar to the needs of this communication and in the face of many rival construals of this patriarch that were possible in the ongoing processing of the past to serve the needs of the present. (p. 194)
So here are some books and reference works (including a little bit of Bible software) that I’m offering for sale at a discounted rate. I have them listed online elsewhere, but the lowest rate I offer is here. It’s also generally the lowest rate online for a used copy. All prices include free shipping to U.S. addresses. Interested in anything? Contact me using this form, and we’ll talk.
Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (BDAG)
for BibleWorks Software Compatible with BibleWorks 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. I’ve been in touch with BibleWorks to confirm that on completion of sale, one user license transfers to the buyer with no fee, so that you can use BDAG in your BibleWorks. (Must have purchased and own BibleWorks to be able to use this.) Significant discount from buying new (where it’s $150). $119 (SOLD)
BHS (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia), compact edition
Very Good condition
ISBN: 978-1598561630 No markings inside. Binding is a bit loose from front cover, but barely noticeable, and book is still in great shape. $34 (SOLD)
A Handbook on the Books of Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah
(UBS Handbook) Like New condition
ISBN: 978-0826701329 Barely used at all. Pulled off shelf just a couple of times. $29 (SOLD)
The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament,
2 volume set (HALOT) Very Good condition
ISBN: 978-9004124455 In great shape. Just some wear and tear. No internal markings. 2 volume study edition (same full contents as 5 vol. edition). $179 (SOLD) Note: I also have HALOT in BibleWorks (see BDAG note above). Would possibly consider an offer.
IVP Dictionary of the Old Testament: Historical Books Very Good condition (2 available1 available)
ISBN: 978-0830817825 No marking inside. Barely used. One has rubbing on page edges. $33 (SOLD)
A Reader’s Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament
Very Good condition
ISBN: 978-0310369806 Former owner’s name on inside, no other markings. Small rip on top left corner of dustjacket, which has some other wear. Small crease on back cover of book, but does not affect integrity of book. Book itself in great shape.720 pages.
All words that occur less than 50x in OT are listed in canonical order, verse-by-verse. $39 (SOLD)
Luke (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament)
(2 Volumes), by Bock
Very Good condition
ISBN: 978-0801010514 Hardly used. Only flaws: name inscribed on inside of one book, tiniest of rips on part of dust cover, small smudge mark on outside of pages. Inside clean. $60 (SOLD)
1 Peter (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the NT), by Jobes
Very Good condition
Barely used: remainder mark, small dings on spine and corners of cover. $22 (SOLD)
Free shipping on all orders. If you’re interested in buying–or just have questions–you can reach me using this form, and we’ll go from there.
I’m looking to sell 9 volumes of the Word Biblical Commentary set. I’ve listed them (with full condition details) here. If you want to contact me directly about a possible purchase (i.e., not through ebay), feel free to use this form, and we’ll talk. (UPDATE: Books are now sold.)
Words on the Word 