More Light on the Path: Daily Scripture Readings in Hebrew and Greek [Paperback]

David W. Baker (Author), Elaine A. Heath (Author), Morven Baker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1999

Hone biblical language skills while studying God's Word in a daily devotional format. Include meditations, grammatical notes, and translation aids.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The authors are to be congratulated for an excellent devotional guide based on the original languages of Scripture. But make no mistake about it: this is a dangerous book. Pastors wishing to preach from the canteen of Saturday night rather than from a reservoir of Bible knowledge should steer well clear of it! -- David Alan Black, Professor of New Testament and Greek, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

This is an inspired, wonderful book. Prayers provoking devotional reflections winsomely and irresistibly beguile you into working out the Hebrew and Greek that follows. The most creative and painless way to keep up your Hebrew and Greek that I know. -- John Goldingay, David Allan Hubbard Professor of Old Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary

Language Notes

Text: English, Greek, Hebrew

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Baker Academic (May 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801021650
• ISBN-13: 978-0801021657
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #577,101 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Baker is Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages at Ashland Theological Seminary, Ashland, OH, where he has taught for 25 years. Prior to that, he taught at the University or Durban-Westville and the University of the Witwatersrand, both in South Africa, and Bethel College in St Paul, Minnesota. He has also lectured at: Laidlaw College, Auckland, New Zealand; Queensland Theological College, Brisbane, Australia; South America Theological Seminary, Colon, Argentina; River Plate Adventist University, Libertador San Martin, Argentina; Tyndale Theological Seminary, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Ontario Theological Seminary (Now Tyndale Seminary), Toronto, Ontario, Canada; and Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. As well as traveling, David enjoys editing as well as writing, having written or edited over 40 publications.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Study Tool, December 16, 2004

By 

Joshua V. Schneider (Hawaii) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: More Light on the Path: Daily Scripture Readings in Hebrew and Greek (Paperback)

I was somewhat torn on how to rate this item. From the standpoint of having a daily-devotional book that will lead you to spend more time practicing your Hebrew and Greek skills, it probably deserves a 3.5-4 star rating. From the standpoint of its usefulness for doing so, it deserves a 2. The most valuable aspect of the book is the simple fact that it gives short reading selections for you to practice each day, which will help you get into a healthy regimen of study.

However, the biggest downfall of this book is the poor study helps they made. Judging from what another reviewer said, they seem to have actually taken a step backward on the usefulness of the Hebrew helps. I agree. For the beginning student in Hebrew, the helps are so limited that you will not be able to translate the passages without another complete study tool. You might as well just ignore the Hebrew helps in the margins. They assume far too much regarding your knowledge of Hebrew vocabulary. I'm judging that by comparison to the Greek helps, where they provide far more help, and even on relatively simple and common Greek words. There really is an imbalance, and if you want to keep up BOTH your Greek and Hebrew, you will need a supplementary tool for the HEbrew like the Armstrong, Busby, Carr "Reader's Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament." This book has a very useful glossary as well as verse by verse helps with those less-common words that don't occur in the glossary. It also is much simpler and more user-friendly than the dreaded Brown Drivers Briggs Lexicon. Its a pity that More Light on the Path didn't do a better job with the text helps. The other frustrating part about the helps is the original language spelling errors that are so frequent. That certainly doesn't help out the beginning student either.

Despite all the negative feedback I gave on this book, I'd still probably recommend buying it, simply because I'm not aware of any other daily Hebrew & Greek readings books that are in print. If you get an additional study tool for either the Greek or Hebrew along with it, you should be fine.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars More Light on the Path, May 9, 2001

By 

"acmbyars" (Prescott, Arizona USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: More Light on the Path: Daily Scripture Readings in Hebrew and Greek (Paperback)

While this work does have some improvements over the original Heinrich Bitzer work, it has some downsides. Bitzer's work contained much more help with the Hebrew, which is generally what more people need more "crutches" for. This version makes it appear that the authors are more preferential towards those users who make Greek a priority & Hebrew an afterthought, a study kept up only by a few hard-core users who are willing to daily dig out their Hebrew lexicons.

Also, Bitzer gave "dictionary forms" or "roots", which is helpful. And, I enjoyed Bitzer's tri-lingual translations, to help me keep up on German and Latin, also, when I so chose.

This volume does have the advantage of being more "devotional" in the sense that it is set up around the liturgical calendar and there are prayers and commentary included. Of course, I've heard it argued that Bitzer's occasionally "obtuse" connections in the 2 verses he chose were actually more thought-provoking, sending you on an internal search and reflection for what Bitzer saw.

All in all, it is good for pastors and Bible language scholars to keep a volume such as this around to keep language learning integrated into an active devotional life. But perhaps Baker Books has been a little too hasty in consigning Bitzer's original works to the dust heap.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Need help getting into Hebrew and/or Greek Bible?, January 14, 2010

By 

SomethingLatin (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: More Light on the Path: Daily Scripture Readings in Hebrew and Greek (Paperback)

After studying Hebrew & Greek in seminary, I had some difficulty using the languages and keeping up with reading to actually _learn_ them. I was especially "afraid" of my large Hebrew Bible. "More Light on the Path" helped me to get in to reading the Bible in the original languages every day. Its short readings are 'easily digestible' and will help a student or pastor who wants to gain more familiarity with these languages to keep up and build their skills. If you have difficulty reading the Hebrew OT and/or the Greek NT, but want to get better, this is a good book to consider purchasing. It helped me to get to the point where I didn't need this book any more, and I gave it to a friend who is a pastor who wanted to work on his language skills.