I went out for coffee with my wife last week. She studied for class, I think reading about clitics and morphology, while I worked on my project in 4 Maccabees. With my computer presently out of action, I’ve been writing out the entire Greek text by hand and translating it underneath. Its actually been a fantastic excercise and I’m greatly improving my Greek. As I write it, I say the words out loud and then I go back and translate. When I’m out of the house and away from extra resources, I only bring my copy of BAGD. Yes the second edition. My copy of the third is digital.

Anyway, we were sitting there in the coffee shop and I was working on a set of verses where I knew the vast majority of the vocabulary so I wasn’t using the lexicon. Across the way was a couple who had just come in. The wife was reading the paper and the husband was just sitting there. To my utter surprise, he turned to me and asked if he could read my lexicon, that he just needed something, anything, to read.

I debated the question in my head for a moment. After all, it is a big, important book. But in the end I handed it to him. I was between him and the door anyway. He flipped through it for about ten minutes or so. I don’t know how much he actually read or whether he understood any Greek. And I didn’t get a chance to ask. Right after he handed it back, he and his wife left the coffee shop.

Strange…