Bible
Greek Prepositions in the New Testament A Semantic Description, 2nd ed. Rachel E. Aubrey and Michael G. Aubrey The meanings of prepositions can be challenging to describe and understand, especially when one preposition is used in a variety of ways. A woman might hold an umbrella over her head while puzzling over a chess problem. She might also be over one hundred years old. These kinds of variations in usage also occur in Greek. Gram- matical differences among the world’s languages and translation from one language to another only exacerbate such difficulties. Greek Prepositions in the New Testament takes a cognitive- functional approach, guiding readers through the diverse mean- ings and usage of prepositions found in biblical Greek. Each article illustrates a preposition’s basic usage before detailing how these patterns are extended and adapted to take on more complex or abstract senses—with examples provided along the way. This book is an indispensable and user-friendly guide for students and scholars. It was previously available electronically, but due to demand, it is now in print for the first time. The second edition includes a new introduction and additional material. FROM THE BOOK We often hear from teachers and translators that they feel that prepositions are some of the more difficult elements of the language to understand. Indeed, we can observe a number of ways that standard textbooks give prepositions the short end of the stick. Most introductory grammars say little about the abstract senses of prepositions. The focus tends to fall on elements that make memorization efficient. Students are given a spatial gloss and shown a chart, perhaps a circle or box with lines and arrows labeled with various Greek prepositions. They might organize them by the number of different cases the preposition governs. . . . Our analysis in this book is an entirely fresh one grounded in an evaluation of the patterns of usage. We look at a variety of factors in organizing the data, including how a preposition collocates with different types of events and objects, the case of the object of the preposition, the type of semantic relationship it specifies, and how various uses relate to one another.
FEBRUARY 2027 • 288 pp. • $32.99p • 9781540971371
Rachel E. Aubrey and Michael G. Aubrey are linguists with SIL Global and Wycliffe Bible Translators, specializing in grammatical analysis of ancient Greek and Hebrew to support minority-language Bible translation around the world.
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