On Bible Notes

My plan here is to not rely on Bible notes that can be found in many Bibles or on Bible commentaries of which there are numerous fine ones. This technique for examining the Bible is not THE mode available to the scholar. It is A mode. I wanted to focus on The Word, plain and simple.

When I was in grad school, I was surprised to find so much attention being paid to commentaries on the works of great authors and so little emphasis being placed on reading the works being commented on. It is a core belief of mine that if you want to get to know the text, you have to deal with it. Deal with it, not just the commentaries on it and the interpretations of others. Those may be valuable. They may help in understanding a poem, or story, or play, or (in this case) a Bible verse, but they should never take the place of one’s own encounter with the text. This blog is a record of my encounter with a particular text – The Bible. In this sense, the blog is meant for my own consumption even though it is on a public forum.

If Thoreau went into the woods in order to face life, I maintain this blog in order to record my facing the Bible. I hope this serves as inspiration for some reader to do the same – to confront the Words of the Bible and discuss that confrontation, make sense of it, fully explore it. Maybe in a blog or journal. Maybe in a Sunday School class or Bible study group. Maybe in a conversation.