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.
When I was nineteen I worked the paper machines at a 120-year-old mill in southeastern Ohio. The plant was big enough that abandoned wings of it had not been used since before the Second World War. On my lunch breaks I would walk the catwalks all the way to the top of the building, push into corners nobody went to anymore, and explore. It felt like cave exploring. That kid is the same man in the Logos library now. Same instinct. Same gift for noticing where the interesting work is buried. Forty years apart.
This page is not a tutorial. It is just an honest description of how one regular working guy in Jackson, Ohio works through the text — what changed the way I read, and how the writing on this site gets made. Not because I think you should copy my process, but because if you are sitting in a pew on Sunday morning suspecting there is more in the text than your church has handed you, the answer is not seminary. The answer is you doing the work.
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 writing into a world with 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 — passages I had read for decades suddenly had weight I had been walking past.
Michael Heiser‘s The Unseen Realm was the primary catalyst. John Walton, N.T. Wright, and Second Temple scholarship more broadly 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
Plain read. One or two translations. No notes open. Just the text.
Questions. What seems odd? What word is carrying weight I cannot see in English? I write these in Obsidian before I open anything else.
Logos. The passage in the interlinear. The Greek or Hebrew terms. Factbook entries for key figures and concepts. A 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.
ANE background. For any passage involving the divine council, cosmology, temple imagery, kingship, or covenant, I pull the background material. What would this passage have meant to someone who lived in that world?
Synthesis. What does the sourced scholarship say? What do I actually think? I keep these two things explicitly separate — Logos research in one column, my own thoughts in another. The distinction matters. I am not a credentialed scholar. I can read carefully and mark clearly what is my own working conclusion versus what the sources support.
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.
Most of this lives in a large interconnected Obsidian vault. The vault is not the point. It is just what the work produces when you do it consistently.
Why I Built My Own Tools
When I worked at the mill, an office boss gave me a spreadsheet job he knew I would hate. Pull data from SAP. Paste it into Excel. Format it. Four hours a day for somebody who actually did it.
I did it that way exactly once.
The next morning I came in, taught myself enough VBA to make Excel pull the data directly, and turned four hours into one button push.
That is the same instinct that runs my Bible study now. The tools are not the point. The work is the point. If a tool does not get you closer to understanding the text faster, throw it out. If it does, learn how it actually works.
I am suspicious of the man who collects Bible-study apps the way some men collect knives — proud of the inventory, never having used most of them on real work. The point of a tool is the work it gets you to.
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 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 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 the right response to that is not to panic. It is to do the work.
Why This Matters for a Man
I do not study the Bible because it is interesting, though it is. I do not study it to win arguments, though some are worth having. I study it because my household depends on it. If I am going to lead my wife and the people God puts in front of me, I cannot teach what I do not know. I cannot defend what I have not examined. I cannot pass on something I have not actually held in my hands.
The world is happy to disciple my family for me. The world will do it through screens, algorithms, default settings, and whoever is loudest in the room. If I am not actively studying — sitting with the text, doing the work, holding the questions until something opens — then I have outsourced my household’s spiritual formation to whoever happens to be paying attention while I am not.
That is what this is for. Not credentials. Not academic respect. Stewardship.
A man does the reading because the people in his household are going to inherit whatever he actually knows. So he had better actually know something worth inheriting.
The Tools
The methodology above runs on a specific stack. If you want to know what software and apps I actually use, that is on a separate page.
→ Book Recommendations — the library that shaped the reading.
→ Websites and Online Resources — the free external library that supplements this site.
One person doing the work in public. If something here serves you, that is gain.