Update (publ. 2023-12-16)

Sorry for the long space with out any new posts to this gemlog. The approach I had been using was to translate several verses and then write a devotional post with all my insights. This requires a routine study study cycle that involves deep lexical and grammatical analysis in the early morning hours before the rest of the family woke up. That study routine was pretty much destroyed when our fourth baby came along about three months ago. The baby sleeps fairly well at night, but unfortunately he doesn't settle down until about 11pm. So, it has been all I have been able to do just to get in a few minutes of prayer time before needing to be at work at 6am. And it doesn't work well for me to stay up studying late at night, even assuming I can get the other kids to bed on time.

I'm still in the text, but have been mainly just reading and meditating using a Hebrew-English parallel Bible, more specifically a printed Bible released by the Bible Society in Israel (Copyright 2014) which has the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia in one column of each page, and the NASB 1995 in the other column. I found this is pleasant and practical for me. For a while, I used a different parallel Bible which used the JPS translation (Jewish Publication Society). The JPS seems like a decent translation, but it often gives a very dynamic translation, with a lot of rearranging of the syntactical structure, which made it difficult to compare word-for-word with the Hebrew. The NASB on the other hand seems to generally follow closely the syntactical structure of the Hebrew text, and the meaning of the individual words is easier to see in the translation.

I've been having a lot of joyful meditation the last few months especially in the book of Isaiah. But it is has been difficult to figure out how to transfer that into gemlog posts that I feel are worth sharing. I have been pondering using a different format and approach to the post content, which might allow me to get back into posting about once a week or so. We will see. I've heard the plans of mice sometimes work out too. :)