Lesson 1 | The First Pass: Divide
The Big Idea
Let’s start with a definition:
Block Diagramming
A visualization of how the phrases of a passage fit together grammatically.
That is, Block Diagramming is used to identify the grammatical subordination of phrases. It is not sentence diagramming—which grammatically accounts for every word in a sentence. Rather, we will work with phrases.
What Is a Phrase?
Perhaps it would help to see the different units of meaning used in the Bible so we can understand more clearly what a phrase is. Here they are, in order from largest to smallest.
First, the books of the Bible are composed of paragraphs.
Paragraphs are usually built using more than one sentence, and can even contain a large number of sentences.
A sentence can be simple, containing just one proposition, or complex, containing more than one proposition, as in the following graphic.
A proposition can be simple, including just one phrase, or it can be complex, made up of more than one phrase. It almost always includes a verb or verbal (like a participle or an infinitive) and makes an assertion—hence its name.
A phrase is the smallest unit we work with in Phrasing.
Thus, a phrase is a group of words that form a conceptual unit. Examples include conjunction phrases, prepositional phrases, and relative phrases. (We’ll learn more about the types of phrases later in this lesson.)
By breaking up a passage into phrases, you are uncovering the grammatical structure an author used to make an argument or tell a story. This, in turn, allows you to more easily separate the main ideas from the secondary ideas and discover parallel thoughts. Where thoughts are not parallel, but one depends on the other, indenting and arrows then force you to contemplate the subordination between those phrases.
Block Diagramming Gets Down to the Most Detailed Level of Bible Study Possible…
...when using a translation. You don’t need to know Greek or Hebrew to benefit from Block Diagramming and be wonderfully precise in your Bible study. The reason this is so is because most of your phrases will line up with the original language, where inspiration and inerrancy ultimately lie. This is not true on the word level where Greek and Hebrew grammar differ greatly from English, making work with translations at the lowest grammatical level—the level of words—unhelpful. Thus work at the phrase level is the most detailed you can get with a translation.
Block Diagramming Is the Basis for Phrasing
The subtitle of this course is The First Three Passes of “Phrasing.” So you should naturally wonder what “Phrasing” is. We define it this way:
Phrasing
A grammar-oriented tool for breaking down a passage for in-depth study.
Phrasing is a hermeneutical technique that is designed to help you see (1) the structure of an author’s writing, (2) the basic flow of thought of a passage, and (3) relationships between phrases and clauses.
That third point of that definition captures the fourth (and somewhat more difficult) pass in Phrasing, and leads into the fifth pass of meditating on the text in the light of your study. Some students will be interested in continuing on to these fourth and fifth passes of Phrasing after learning Block Diagramming. Whether that turns out to be you or not, let’s finish off this step with a brief overview of all five passes from the Phrasing course.
Cheat Sheet: Phrasing - The Five PassespdfThis is your roadmap for the Phrasing Bible study method. Print it out and keep it on hand as you progress through this course.