In Lesson 7 of How to Read Biblical Greek, Dr. Abidan Shah moves from the second declension into the first — walking through how first declension nouns change their endings, and why the stem of a word determines the pattern it follows. After a recap of the second declension masculine and neuter, he lays out the numbers: 523 first declension nouns in the New Testament, split between the masculine types and the three feminine types — Hemera, Doxa, and Phone.
Using prophetes (prophet) and neanias (young man), Dr. Shah shows how the masculine “-as” and “-es” endings work across all five cases, then declines hemera (day) and doxa (glory) to illustrate the feminine patterns — reminding us throughout that when two forms look identical, context is what tells you the meaning. He closes with a full vocabulary set of words that occur 110 to 124 times in the Greek New Testament, including archiereus (high priest), paradidomi (to betray), dunamis (power), meno (to remain or live), thanatos (death), ekklesia (church), basileus (king), agape (love), krino (to judge), oikos (house), sozo (to save), and aletheia (truth).
Along the way he shares why this matters — the coming Greek learning app the team has been building, a look at how scholars reconstruct ancient pronunciation from scribal mistakes, and a reminder that Jesus, Peter, Paul, and James all lived in the world of this language. You can be saved and grow in English, but the more you grow, the more you’ll want to know what the New Testament actually said.