I feel that it is best to begin by thanking my wife, Mary Beth, for this blog. She gave me the confidence to begin blogging on my own and as proof of her support, she has created and designed it for me. Thank you love!

Today’s thoughts:

1) Regarding blogging, I believe Dr. Black has the right of it. Too often I would refrain from posting on http://21stcenturytabletalk.blogspot.com/ because I had not formalized my thoughts into an essay format. This blog will contain a mixture of day to day musings and snippets from my life. Thus, if this begins to look a lot like http://www.daveblackonline.com/blog.htm then I apologize.

2) Word of the day: neologism (n.)- lit. a new word. This is a particularly important term in Septuagint studies. When the translator came across a word in the Hebrew text and did not have an adequate Greek rendering, he would combine Greek words in order to adequately convey the Hebrew meaning.

3) About two weeks ago I started waking up at 5:30 in the morning. Why? Why not? Our dogs wake us up at this time in order to be fed anyways! This has allowed me a great deal of productivity. I have read the following books in the past two weeks: Dr. Black’s “The Jesus Paradigm,” “Why Four Gospels?,” “New Testament Textual Criticism,” “Linguistics for Students of New Testament Greek,” E. Tov’s “Septuagint,” Jennifer Dines’ “Septuagint,” and Tim McLay’s “The Use of the Septuagint in New Testament Research.”

4) As a result of this newfound productivity, I have found myself watching less television. My desire for excelling in my studies has far surpassed the passivity of watching my favorite shows. Sorry Netflix, or whatever it is you call yourself these days.

5) Greek students, yes you, I have been working on compiling complete flash card sets for Black’s Grammar and frequency lists of the LXX and Metzger’s list. In due time, I will post links to the cards, which have been made public.

6) While the previously mentioned cards will most likely be available within the week, I also plan on developing a frequency list of words used from 1-10 times within the NT. This may take a few weeks. Please be patient.