The Animated Hebrew site, the creation of Charles Grebe at Briercrest Seminary, has been around for a while, so you’ve probably heard of it. If you haven’t, you need to go check it out. Charles is sympathetic to living language approaches and has numerous audio, video and graphical resources on his site. My favorite is the Hebrew Jonah comic, which Charles developed from the comic strip version of Jonah produced by Philip Williams of Staircase Studio. Philip has also produced a comic book of the Elijah story.
Well, Charles’ work inspired me to develop a Greek version of the Jonah comic
(Charles’ version already lets you hover your mouse over the Hebrew to have the Greek appear at the bottom of the page, but that’s not ideal!). My version is much more low-tech. I opted to create a pdf version, which I’ve posted here for you to download. I’ve just taken the LXX text of Jonah and plugged it into the speech bubbles. The comic strip was designed to present one verse per frame. I’m planning on uploading audio of LXX Jonah soon to accompany the comic.
This can be a good learning tool for students. It’s short, but long enough to have a substantial plot. It’s a familiar story, so they won’t feel like they’re in totally unknown territory. The vocabulary and style are pretty simple (translation Greek), and any vocabulary that the students weren’t familiar with could be pre-taught so that they could enjoy reading the comic strip, rather than translating. At some point, I hope to create some versions of the comic strip with even simpler Greek so that a beginning student could read it with no problem.
Click on the pic below for a sample:
Click to Enlarge
Please let me know if you find any errors, so that I can correct them. Also, feel free to comment on any interesting elements in the LXX version. For example, notice the direct interrogative use of εἰ in ch. 4.
Update: Thanks to suggestions from Donald Cobb and the comments below, I’ve added some punctuation where the BibleWorks text I had used was lacking it. That should make it a bit more readable, hopefully. Make sure you download the updated version (at the same link above).
καὶ τὰ λοιπά 
It would be great to see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Genesis_%28comics%29 in Greek! I’m kind of a comics fan myself, and appreciate this Jonah story. It’s not a great graphic novel, a bit lame actually from artistic point of view, but it’s not bad either. The pictorial story helps to understand how the discourse is going on, and so do the text bubbles. Text and pictures work surprisingly well together. The prayer of Jonah is the most difficult part to understand, the rest is quite easy and clear. Adding some punctuation and dividing lines by phrases would help in many places.
Absolutely first rate! This is exactly the sort of stuff we need.
In the tenth frame I think there needs to be question mark between ῥέγχεις and ἀνάστα.
Thanks, see the update.
Daniel,
I love Philip’s artwork. We actually had him create a whole set for our Hebrew textbook and are also licensing his Elijah comic for an intermediate reader. It’s a great way to teach.
Thanks for linking to my post on NWS pedagogy, by the way.
Best,
Robert
That’s awesome! Thank you. I’m in need of more resources for class.
thank you SO MUCH! My Greek II students have their final exam on Wednesday, and I’m recommending this Jonah-in-Greek as review before or relief after or both…. :-)))
and thanks to Eeeli for posting the link on b-greek, too!
Glad I could be of service! Most of the credit goes to the artist, though. We need more of these kinds of resources.