HOW I STUDY THE BIBLE
I am not a seminary graduate. I do not have a theology degree. What I have is a large library, years of reading, a warehouse floor that gave me time to think, and forty years of wrestling with a God I could not fully explain.
This page is not a tutorial. It is not a five-step system. It is just an honest description of how one person in Jackson, Ohio works through the text — what changed the way I read, what tools I actually use, and how the writing on this site gets made.
Start Plain
The first thing I do with any passage is read it straight through. No commentaries, no interlinear, no Logos open. Just the text in a clean translation — usually the ESV or NASB — and whatever the words do on their own.
This matters because the plain reading is what most people in a pew have access to. If I cannot understand what the text is doing at the surface level, I have no business going deeper. The depth should explain the surface, not replace it.
After the plain read I sit with the questions it raises. What does that word actually mean? Why is that detail there? Who is the audience? What would a first-century reader have understood that I am missing? Those questions are the engine. Everything else is how I answer them.
The Shift That Changed Everything
For most of my reading life I approached the Bible the way many modern Western Christians do — as a collection of timeless principles dropped into a historical wrapper. The history was scenery. The theology was the point.
Understanding the Ancient Near East changed that completely.
The biblical authors were not writing in a vacuum. They were writing into a world that had assumptions about gods, cosmic geography, temples, kingship, and the nature of reality that most modern readers have never encountered. When you do not know that world, you miss what the text is actually arguing. You read it as if it were written for you, in your century, with your categories. It was not.
Once that clicked — that many biblical texts are making specific polemical arguments against competing worldviews — the text opened up in ways I had not expected. Not because the text changed, but because I finally understood more of the world the authors lived in. Passages I had read for decades suddenly had weight and specificity I had been walking past.
Michael Heiser’s work, particularly The Unseen Realm, was the primary catalyst for this. It is the book I recommend most often to people who want to read the Bible more honestly. John Walton, N.T. Wright, and Second Temple scholarship more broadly have filled in the wider picture. This is not a Heiser site. It is a site that takes the same scholarly instincts seriously.
How the Study Actually Works
Step 1 — Plain read. One or two translations. No notes open. Just the text.
Step 2 — Questions. What do I not understand? What seems odd? What word is carrying weight I cannot see in English? I write these down in Obsidian before I open anything else.
Step 3 — Logos. This is where the real work happens. I pull the passage in the interlinear, look at the Greek or Hebrew terms, check the Factbook entries for key figures and concepts, and run a text comparison across translations. The goal is not to become a linguist — it is to understand what the original language is doing that English cannot capture.
Step 4 — ANE background. For any passage involving the divine council, cosmology, temple imagery, kingship, or covenant — I pull the ANE background material. Logos has significant resources here. This is where Heiser, John Walton, and others become essential. I am always trying to ask: what would this passage have meant to someone who lived in that world?
Step 5 — Synthesis. This is the step I take seriously and take slowly. What does the sourced scholarship say? What do I actually think? I keep these two things explicitly separate — Logos research in one column, James’s thoughts in another. The distinction matters. I am not a credentialed scholar. I can read carefully, synthesize honestly, and mark clearly what is my own working conclusion versus what the sources support.
Most of this work lives inside a large interconnected Obsidian vault — timelines, passage studies, source notes, language work, and cross-links that let me trace ideas across the canon over time. The vault is not the point. It is just what the work produces when you do it consistently.
Step 6 — Write. Most of what appears on this site started as a study note. The writing is how I find out what I actually think. If I cannot explain it clearly, I do not understand it yet.
What I Am Not Doing
I am not trying to produce academic papers. I am not trying to replace a commentary. I am not trying to be the next Michael Heiser.
I am trying to do what Heiser himself advocated — close the gap between what serious biblical scholarship has established and what ordinary people sitting in pews on Sunday morning actually know. That gap is enormous. Most people have never heard of concepts like the divine council. Most people think the Bible was written to them directly, in their cultural moment, with their assumptions intact.
It was not. And understanding that is not a threat to faith. It is the most interesting thing that has happened to mine.
The Tools
The methodology above runs on a specific stack. If you want to know what software and apps I actually use — the Logos setup, the Obsidian workflow, the AI tools, the mobile stack — that is on a separate page.
One person doing the work in public. If something here serves you, that is gain.