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Congratulations on your progress through this forty-day journey! Are things beginning to come back to you? After yesterday’s focus on articles, plus the noun overview from a few days ago, you might be recognizing a lot of the noun endings that you encounter in your exercises and fifteen-minute bonus time. (You are keeping up with that fifteen-minute personal commitment, aren’t you? Oh! I said I wasn’t going to mention it again . . . oops!)

Well, it’s now time to tackle one of the big mental hurdles of the refresher—the dreaded third declension. If you had a typical journey through your beginning Greek course, you were doing great for the first five to seven weeks. You had conquered the notion that case endings, not word placement, determined which word was the subject, which word was the object, and so forth. You had become fairly good at recognizing the case endings for common masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns. You were beginning to think that maybe all the horror stories about how hard Greek is were just not going to happen to you—but then third declension hit.

All of a sudden all those familiar endings started shifting on you. What used to be “for sure” a nominative, now just might be a genitive. And what your teacher had told you was always a genitive plural now shows up as a nominative singular! How can this be? Suddenly, panic began to set in, and you began to doubt you would ever be able to read Greek—real Greek.

If that scenario even remotely describes you, you may be feeling the third-declension panic rising within you again right now! You may have read the words “third declension” in the first paragraph and felt like giving up again. But if you have read this far, that means you have successfully fought off that first wave of panic! That’s a step in the right direction, because you really can handle these things. You can do it, and I’m here to help!

Let me begin by saying that you do not have to completely master the third declension in order to enjoy reading New Testament Greek. You don’t have to spend hours upon hours memorizing all the possible third-declension endings before you can begin to read the New Testament again. In fact, I estimate that you will be able to handle about 90 percent of third declension words if you simply remember the articles (which you’ve got down cold now) and the normal third declension endings. The last 10 percent you can get from context (usually) or by looking it up (only once in a blue moon). So you’ve already conquered the articles, and now let’s look at that important “normal” third declension ending pattern.

But first, let me introduce you to a friend of mine. Her name is Sashia Es-own-sea-as. She likes to have her name repeated out loud over and over every time someone thinks of her! Sashia Es-own-sea-as . . . Sashia Es-own-sea-as . . . Sashia Es-own-sea-as.

Okay, okay, so you’re thinking Sashia is my imaginary friend, but you’re only half right. I didn’t make her up (another Greek teacher did), but she’s not imaginary; she lives in the third declension endings: S-ASH-I-A ES-OWN-SEA-AS stands for

Nom. Sing.	-ς		Nom. Pl.	-ες
Gen. Sing.	-ος		Gen. Pl.	-ων
Dat. Sing.	-ι		Dat. Pl.	-σι(ν)
Acc. Sing.	-α		Ac. Pl.	-ας

Once you are good friends with Sashia, it’s pretty easy to recognize her aliases, er, I mean . . . it’s pretty easy to remember the variants:

	Masc/Fem	Neut
Nom. Sing.	-ς/-	-
Gen. Sing.	-ος
Dat. Sing.	-ι
Acc. Sing.	-α/ν	-
Nom. Pl.	-ες	-α
Gen. Pl.	-ων
Dat. Pl.	-σι(ν)
Ac. Pl.	-ας	-α

Keeping Sashia Es-own-sea-as in mind, try naming the case of the following words. I’ve given the article to help out on most of them, since most of the time you’ll have the article available in the New Testament, too! Cover up the case column and name each case. Then check yourself.

	Case	Number			Case	Number
ὁ αἰών	n	s		τῶν πατέρων	g	p
τῆς μητρός	g	s		τοῦ ἀμπελῶνος	g	s
ἄνδρες	n	p		τῇ ἀναστάσει	d	s
ὁ δράκων	n	s		ὁ ἀλέκτωρ	n	s
ἡ ἀνάστασις	n	s		αἰῶνας	a	p
τῇ ἐλπίδι	d	s		τοῖς σφραγῖσιν	d	p
τὰς νύκτας	a	p		τοῦ αἰῶνος	g	s
τῇ χειρί	d	s		πόδες	n	p
τοῖς ἄρχουσιν	d	p		τοῦ ἀστέρος	g	s
σώματα	n/a	p		τὴν σάρκα	a	s

How’d you do? About 90 percent? If so, you’re right on track. If you really want to go deeper into the third declension, that’s great. Here are the page numbers that cover third declension from several popular beginning Greek grammars: Machen 97–101, Mounce (2nd ed.) 75–88, Mounce (3rd ed.) 77–88, Summers (revised by Sawyer) 83–92. Feel free to look them up. But remember, you don’t have to memorize all those third declension variants. After all, you’re trying to read the New Testament in Greek, not write in Greek!

So, there you have it . . . a rough-and-tumble review of the third declension. Not so bad, right? Before I send you off to practice a little, let me say one more time: don’t feel like you have to master the third declension before you move on to the next lesson. Don’t get bogged down in the details. You’ll pick up on the details as you practice more and more. Just concentrate on getting the basics presented here, and then move on. The last thing we want at this stage is to get discouraged. Don’t even think about giving up now! You’ve tackled one of the rough spots head-on and you’re coming out the other side. Be encouraged. You’re making great progress!

Exercise 9

Read as many of the following verses as your time allows. Identify the third declension words and sort out the subjects, objects, indirect objects, and “possessives” in each sentence. Use one of the literal translations to check your work.