Sunday Morning Greek Blog

I’ve been away from the blogosphere far too long. A number of things have happened since my last post on 7/22/13. I continue to monitor the statistics for my blog, and am humbled that I’m over 9300 views in the nearly four years(!!) I’ve been doing this. My most popular post continues to be my word study on “seer” in the Old Testament. The hits on that post alone, of the 80+ I’ve done, represent over 11% of the total views on my site. I suspect that, since I get large spikes on that one (the last spike was 121 this past July, and it averages about 40 views per month), someone out there has made it required reading on their syllabus. I wish I knew who that was, because I would love to thank them for the traffic.

Another thing that happened is, the day after my last post, I had a first date with someone I graduated from high school with. That turned into a second, third, and many other dates, and this past April, Jill and I got married. We’re quite happy, even though my adjustment to living in a house with her and her two teenage daughters (oh yeah, and the psycho pug dog) is a bit of a challenge at times. She’s a beautiful woman of God and has been encouraging me to get back to writing the blog. I’m need to be more intentional about that, and this post is my way of getting back into that.

In my post on June 9, 2013, I mentioned several projects I had been working on that had consumed much of time to that point. Well, they continued to consume even more time while building my relationship with Jill, and a couple of them have come to fruition now. I’d like to share those with you.

The first is that the study Bible I was working on has now been published, and I was honored to be listed as a contributing writer for the project. The (Dr. David) Jeremiah Study Bible (NKJV) is now available in print. I contributed notes, insight, and background for the following books: 1 Kings, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Ezekiel, Matthew, Acts, 2 Corinthians, and 1 Thessalonians. I found it very rewarding to work with and get feedback from a team of writers who have had my respect over the years (and whose text books I’ve used in classes I’ve taught), including David Veerman.

Another project I took on, one that nearly consumed me, was to develop a concordance for the new Modern English Version of the Bible. Over the past few years, I have taught myself Visual Basic for Applications as a needed tool for my day job, and I was able to adapt some of my work with that to develop a program that searched all 66 Bible books to find terms for the concordance. The concordance has 5000 Scripture references (I think the publisher added more after I got done). I have a new-found respect for both James Strong and Goodrick & Kohlenberger. Strong developed his KJV concordance without modern technology, of course. Goodrick & Kohlenberger used modern technology to develop their NIV concordance, but since I had rather short context lines, I found it nerve racking at times to try to figure out what meaningful part of the context line to keep. I have not seen the MEV on the retail shelf yet, but I know my local Christian bookstore has it on order. The MEV is more of a literal translation, in the tradition of the KJV/NKJV.

I had also mentioned I was working on a stand-alone concordance/lexicon, but as of this post, I’ve not heard whether that has gone to press yet.

I can’t make any promises about my next post, but I do know I’m itching to write again. I learned much from my two Bible projects that I want to share, so I’ll have to go back through my notes to spark my memory. Thank you all for your continued readership, and thank you to the new readers who find me by whatever search engine picks up on my key words.

Peace,

Scott Stocking