I’ve been having trouble getting to sleep the last few nights.  That’s unusual for me, sleep is normally one of the things I rather enjoy.  I would like to say that I was good at it, but the truth is that I’m a terribly light sleeper.  I wake up at sounds, lights, movement.  I wake up for no apparent reason many times a night, to roll over or shift positions.  Generally though, as long as there’s nothing bothering me (externally, like someone snoring, or a bright light, etc) I go right back to sleep.  Same thing at bed time, while I’m not the best sleeper, I generally go to sleep easily enough (given the right circumstances.) 

Ok, it turns out that I’m pretty picky about how, when and where I sleep.  Dang it!

My toilet is burbling.

I’ve started reading a book called New Age Bible Versions:  An Exhaustive Documentation Exposing the Message, Men and Manuscripts Move Mankind to the Antichrist’s One World Religion.  Now, that is a mouthful!  I bought this book at a thrift store several years ago.  It’s basically a “Kings James Only” manifesto.   I got it because I was genuinely interested in why some people insist on KJV only.  Yeah, it does sound cool, but I really enjoy many of the other versions.  I have  a vague idea of how translators and editors come up with different versions, why they have different phrases and grammar structures, why different vocabulary is used when they are all to mean the same thing. 

I wonder what other language has such a lot of Biblical translation versions as English.

I looked up the Amazon reviews on this book before I started reading.  I’ve gotten into the habit of seeing what other people think about a book.  I don’t read many of the reviews, I just look at the numbers.  How many people have reviewed this book?  What are the percentages with 4-5 stars and the percentages with 3 and with 1-2 stars.  This current book, has over 100 reviews split almost perfectly down the middle with 5 stars and 1 stars and just a very few 2-4s.  I read two 1 star reviews.  Those folks sounded pretty informed and said, while it was researched and documented, it seemed more like the author was a conspiracy theorist and if she knew more about  Biblical languages she would be in a much better position to analyze the original material herself and come to more informed conclusions.

I wish I knew more about Biblical languages.  Forgetting sucks, I studied Biblical Greek once . . .

I started reading this book and by the time I got to page 22 I wrote the number 27 at the top of the page.  That is 27 mistakes; grammatical, logical, untruths- not to mention the lies of omition and decontextualization. It was just silly.  I’m not a scholar- but even I could pick out that silliness. I put it down for the night.  I decided to sleep on it to decide if it was worth my time to read it.  (For some reason once a book comes into my possession, I feel obligated to read it.)

This evening I decided to go for chapter two after all.  I’d been writing comments and marking the text with a purple colored pencil as I read last night, I decided I sort of enjoyed arguing with this book.  I haven’t had a good argument with a book in a long time.  It is  introducing many interesting things I didn’t know about as well.  It mentions the names of the manuscripts, church fathers, cult leaders,  Bible version editors, and it does have some very interesting ideas about the coming of the antichrist.  

I've read several interesting book this year- if only the Zombies weren't currently monopolizing my time, I'd have more to say about all those books.