Pattern Analysis Methodology Remains Essentially Unchanged

The Lord has given me a large project: to analyze the entire Bible using a methodology that I've named pattern analysis. I have now analyzed 14,000 of the 31,000 verses in the Bible which represents 45%. Here is my progress to date:
0% — April 6, 2016
26% — May 6, 2017
30% — August 31, 2017
35% — January 21, 2018
40% — April 20, 2018
45% — October 24, 2018

There are times, such as this moment composing this brief update, where I am in awe at what I am seeing. It is the same Bible that everyone reads but the increased clarity and strong locations of emphasis have made the text much more alive to me. I want to show it to others, yet because I am not complete, I feel released to only present some samples.

At least 20% of every book has been sampled and thirty have been completed. To date, 40% of the Old Testament and 60% of the New Testament has identified literary structures. Over 1,200 literary structures have been documented. Since April 2018, most of my analyses have been in the Old Testament. Still to date, every verse that has been analyzed fits within the model of pattern analysis. That is, pattern analysis continues to point to the belief that there is but one inspiring author of the Bible: the Holy Spirit.

The methodology that was outlined in September 2017 has basically remained—there have been only minor changes since that time. Most of my time since April 2018 has concentrated on the book of Proverbs. Pattern analysis does not replace the more classical exegesis methods, it supplements it. The book Pattern Analysis Handbook will define the methodology.

Christian Authors: Dealing With Aborted Writing Projects

Updates on November 30, 2015 are shown in red
If you are a Christian author, or any other type of author for that matter, you may understand the emotion behind a decision to abandon a work before it is completed. Please allow me to confirm your thoughts: it does bring out a strong emotional response.

Background
In 2010, I received an email from a missionary in Spain asking about A Topical Treasury of Proverbs, "Would you like your book in Spanish?" I responded that I needed to pray about it, hoping to get a direction from the Lord.

In 2011, I sensed the Lord's plans included not just a Spanish version but also versions in several other languages. A significant re-write was needed. I received permission from a well-known publisher that has produced various Bible translations in multiple languages. I began immediately.

The Preparation Effort
After two years effort including thousands of hours of toiling labor, I gave up. Here are the reasons why:

• The Input of Others – With the work probably 85% complete and a series of books under way, I began showing portions to others. Did you know that your comments, when combined with those of others, can really take the wind out of a person's sail? They did for me.
  At 5:30am on Thanksgiving morning, I was drawn back to this effort. The Lord showed me that I have been lured into putting too much emphasis on man's approval and not enough on His. I began again.
  
  
• Technology Issues – My approach was different than most writers. I used Microsoft Access to categorize Proverbs into roughly eighty topics and subtopics. My goal was to completely bypass Microsoft Word, going directly from the database to a PDF. While I used this technique for A Topical Treasury of Proverbs, the effort to include multiple languages with various fonts (think Russian and Chinese) was overwhelming to me. I also began thinking about the marketing effort to these countries. What words do I include on my webpages when marketing to the Spanish or French?
  The Lord basically instructed me to take one step at a time. For now, concentrate on the English version. There is much to be done, get on with my work. Therefore, I put on hold another more ambitious project that I was working on.
  
  
• Retribution – Proverbs includes many verses that discuss punishment and penalties for the disobedient person. Are you perfectly obedient? I'm not. In the New Testament sense, God gives grace to the sinner who believes in Him. He does not demand perfection, He is looking for faith and love. Proverbs does not provide the assurance of grace, faith, and love. I was not able to find a way to include that sense in the manuscript.
  The Lord drew me back to my most recent (2012) revisions about retribution. He had given me some understanding at that time; my sense is that He will complete this. So, there is hope in this after all.
  
  
• God's No Longer In This Project – I have written two other books, Joshua's Spiritual Warfare: Understanding the Chiasms of Joshua and A Garden of Love. In both of those books, I experienced the strong presence of the Lord as the Holy Spirit inspired one portion of the manuscript after another. In this Proverbs re-write, the work became drudgery. During those times, I had some divine inspirations but they were definitely not as frequent.
  As I started working on the description of the topics, the Lord modified my understanding of the major theme over a three-day period. Now I was inspired once again. I suppose the three year hiatus was necessary so that I could remove my old understanding as He revealed it more completely.
  
  

Dealing With Discouragement
Should I have given up? I don't know, but I will say that I have no desire to resurrect that project. The last time I really worked on it was in 2012.

Honestly, I no longer enjoy Proverbs as I do other books of the Bible. Maybe that is the heart issue that I'm dealing with. Or maybe it is deeper.

If I don't enjoy this re-write, why the discouragement? Because I am such a task-oriented fellow.

Yesterday, November 1, 2015, was the last day of a four-year period that I could have used that Bible translation in English. Today I am writing that Bible publisher a letter thanking them for that opportunity. I need to tell them that I was not successful.

Successful authors must be self-motivated and must complete their work. Readers do not buy incomplete works. I didn't complete it. So the enemy the devil then began to make me believe I am not successful. "No finished work, therefore not successful. God is not in it, stop writing." Can you see that train of thought?

The truth is that I gained a great deal of theological insight during the period when I wrote this. Through this and other venues at the same time, God was teaching me a greater understanding of grace. He was showing me the value of overlooking the high values I placed on myself and others.

God wants relationships, not perfection. Grace is then the vehicle for a relaxed view of perfection. Honestly, I'm still learning that but I believe I am much further than where I was.

How about you? Are there lessons you learned through your failures? What is the Holy Spirit attempting to have you receive?

If you have a large screen monitor, can you see the flower on the right side of the screen? That is the awesome blossom from a relatively unknown plant called Gaura. I placed that photo on this blog in 2011 or 2012. To me, this flower is a symbolic picture of Lady Wisdom – she is a key component to understanding this book of Proverbs.

So now the Holy Spirit has changed my plans. I'm enthused and I'm once again in pursuit. I need to contact that Bible translator for their permission once again. I wonder, do other authors give up, only to find they are led to resurrect a "dead" project?

Chiasm Hint #5 - Look for Meaningful Center Points

I have a friend, a wonderful pastor who is sometimes impatient, that seems focused on quickly finding the center points. As he reads and meditates on God's Word, he of course finds parallel thoughts – they are all over the place in the Bible. Once he discovers a parallelism, he immediately looks for an emphatic word from God that is potentially half-way between the first and last portions of his discovered parallel thoughts. If he finds that emphasis, he meditates on that application for a while; if he does not find it, he continues reading.

I like this pastor's approach to finding the heart of God's Word for him today, but I do wish he would slow down to ensure that it is really a chiasm.

Going back to the story of David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11 and 12 from the previous lesson, it seems to makes sense that Nathan's prophetic word to David would be the emphatic portion of that story. In that prophetic word, Nathan states, "This is what the Lord, the God of Israel says: 'I have anointed you … '" (2 Samuel 12:7). When we think back on that story, we may remember David's sin with Bathsheba, his manipulation that led to Uriah's death, or David's mourning over the newly born son. But God's directive based on David's failures are contained in Nathan's words for David.

There certainly are passages in the Bible that are arranged in a chiastic form that do not have a strong emphasis in the middle. For example,

A	A good man obtains favor from the Lord,  (v2a)
	B	but a man of evil devices he condemns.  (v2b)
	B′	No one is established by wickedness,  (v3a)
A′	but the root of the righteous will never be moved.  (v3b)
	(Proverbs 12:2-3 ESV)

These two verses are a contrast between good (righteous) and evil (wicked) people. They are chiastic (A-B-B′-A′) but the impact does not seem to come from its structure; rather it is the distinction between these two opposing approaches that moves the reader. Here is a similar structure:

A	The wicked earns deceptive wages,  (v18a)
	B	but one who sows righteousness gets a sure reward.  (v18b)
	B′	Whoever is steadfast in righteousness will live,  (v19a)
A′	but he who pursues evil will die.  (v19b)
	(Proverbs 11:18-19 ESV)

Again in these two verses, there is a contrast between the wicked and the righteous. It is chiastic because wickedness pairs with pursuing evil in the first part (A and A′), and righteousness in B is repeated in B′. While there is an urgent call in the Bible to pursue righteousness, I suggest that the power in two verses comes from the contrast between wickedness and righteousness, not its chiastic structure. Most of the book of Proverbs is a contrast between two opposites – contrasts are another form of emphasis in the Bible.

Christian Non-Fiction Authors: Selecting a Bible Translation for Your Manuscript

Christian Non-Fiction Authors BEWARE:

Are you using your favorite Bible translation in your compositions without permission from the one that owns that translation? I fell into that trap – fortunately I found out before the work was published but only after countless hours of effort.

Some people wonder why I chose the New English Translation (NET) Bible for my categorization of Proverbs (A Topical Treasury of Proverbs, $19.95). That was not my preferred translation. The answer lies in the very restrictive copyrights that are in most Bibles.

If you look at the copyright for a Bible from Zondervan, Tyndale House, Thomas Nelson, or most of the other well known Bibles except the King James Version (KJV), you will see that people (including authors) are not permitted to copy an entire book of the Bible unless you have their written permission. For example, the 1984 New International Version (NIV) restricted authors to 500 verses and 25 percent of any book. The newer version of the New International Version is considerably more restrictive.

I began my first analysis of Proverbs in 2004 by naively using one of those restricted translations. I put hours and hours and hours into that study only to hit bottom: no authorization. In 2007, my pastor suggested I look at the NET Bible. After some research, I found it is a good translation, was heavily researched during the translation from Hebrew, and is totally free without copyright restrictions. Again countless hours based on a nearly fresh start and frankly a better approach – it was published in 2008.

Today we find many translations of the Bible that are available on-line and totally free. BibleGateway.com offers many translations but there are many other on-line providers. But that does not mean you may copy and use them in your manuscripts!! Authors BEWARE.

Besides the NET Bible, consider also the English Standard Version (ESV) but still look at the copyright page before proceeding. Some publishers may grant permission to you on an individual basis. If you know a publisher that is easy to work with in that way, please make a comment on this blog. Thank you.

How to Prepare a Topical Study of the Bible

Have you considered delving into one or more topics in the Bible? Has the Lord been prompting you to research something with more clarity than a simple word search? This article identifies the steps that I took in preparing a topical study of the book of Proverbs. A topical study, that is the look at specific subjects or themes, may not be for everyone, but if it is for you, this is my approach.

The Problem with Word Searches
A word search is good in that it can help you find occurrences of an English, Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic word in a portion or all of the Biblical text. For example, if you were looking into ‘grace’, you might open a search engine in a concordance, Bible software or through the internet. If you are using a Bible in your native language such as English, you would have to choose the translation of the Bible and which books of the Bible to investigate. If you want to look at it in the Greek, you might look for the word charis through a tool such as BibleHub: Greek word charis. There you will find there are five spellings for the word charis in the Greek.

But what about those times where Jesus extended grace to someone but the word ‘grace’ was never used? When Jesus met the woman at the well, some would suggest that he extended grace rather than criticism for her. And when he met Paul on the road to Damascus, the Lord's demonstration of blinding power was done with grace rather than condemnation. Hopefully you see that word searches can be limiting.

Topical Studies

Three times I've tackled the topical study of Proverbs – the second of those has been published. Here is my approach:

1. The first and possibly most obvious thing I did was download a copy of Proverbs to my computer using a translation that I liked. On my first attempt, I failed to check the copyright permissions for that translation – ultimately that decision led to my abandoning that attempt. My second attempt used the NET Bible (New English Translation) because it is free of copyright restrictions as long as you stay within their rules.
   
   
2. In my opinion, the Bible verses should be placed in a database application. While a spreadsheet might work for a while, I believe you will quickly outgrow that approach unless you are extremely clever. I used Microsoft Access which worked very well for me, placing each verse in a separate row in one common table. I also had tables that listed each book of the Bible and each translation that was being used. When the Bible verses were added, I recorded the ‘address’ information: translation, book, chapter, verse number and verse text.
   
   
3. I then created two additional tables: keywords and topics. Keywords and topics were added as I discovered them. For each keyword, I tentatively identified the topics. Even the keywords were tentative at this stage because what I was looking for a working set of topics.
   
   
4. The next part was a bit more complicated: I designed two more tables that contained just the relevant verses for each topic. In the case of Proverbs, many times the reference was restricted to just one verse but that was not always the case. If you are working with a narrative portion of the Bible, it is important to know the beginning and end of the passage. There also can be breaks where the narrative begins for a few verses, something irrelevant is discussed, and then then passage continues. The relevant portion may also be restricted to just a portion of a verse. The two tables that I designed were a) the reference and b) the specific verse portions for each reference.
   
   
5. The time consuming portion came next: I read the entire text in context. By using the keywords, the references were located along with the verse portions. I found it absolutely necessary to read what preceded and what followed the identified verses, else I incorrectly categorized something or missed verses that were relevant. During this period, I finalized the list of topics and added other passages that the keyword search did not identify.
   
   
6. I can't tell you how many times I analyzed Proverbs but it was a lot. At times it was numbing. Most of the time I found it necessary to categorize a verse into more than one topic. When I've looked at how others have categorized Proverbs, that is most important: verses are often not restricted to one topic.
   

   “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down into a person’s innermost being.” (Proverbs 18:8 NET)

   That particular verse was categorized under ‘Gossip / Rumors’, ‘Heart’, and ‘Speech that Destroys’.
   
   
7. In time, I found that the English language sometimes twisted the original intent of the passage. I found a location that had all the Strong's Numbers for each verse, loaded that into another table in the database, and used that to refine my queries. This proved very helpful.
   
   
8. To each topic / reference combination, I identified a keyword or keywords that qualified the passage. In the case of Proverbs 18:8, for example, the word gossip was highlighted for the ‘Gossip / Rumors’ topic which the words innermost being were highlighted for the ‘Heart’ topic.
   
   
9. Sometimes I had comments to make about the passage that I felt were relevant to the topic. For example,
   

   “‘I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me.’” (Proverbs 8:17 NET)
   The words “I” and “me” give personification of Wisdom.

   You too might wish to add relevant comments either for your own use or eventually end up being published.
   
   
10. Using database software, it was a relatively easy matter to prepare the final text in alphabetical order with the references organized sequentially. In my case, I was able to create a PDF from Microsoft Access that was sent to the publisher – it never touched a word processor.
    
    

I took the above approach because I like a challenge and because I believe that the Lord prompted me, “Tom, you can do something that many other people are not trained to do.” However, by the third time I went through Proverbs, I became ready to move on – that work remains nearly finished but unpublished.

If you are considering the analysis of just one topic such as “money”, this type of structure may an overkill. A word processor might do just as well. But whichever you use, be very, very careful to never modify the Biblical text. Your final proofread should include a line-by-line comparison of your text with a paper copy of the Bible. Never assume your work is error free.

For more information about Tom, see A Bit About Me. You may also want to see more details about A Topical Treasury of Proverbs.

Is Bribery Okay for a Christian? Understanding Proverbs 17:8

A friend approached me on Sunday about a verse in Proverbs. He remembered that I had written a book about Proverbs and confessed some confusion about a particular verse. It was Proverbs 17:8 and he was using the NIV.

A bribe is a charm to the one who gives it; wherever he turns, he succeeds. (Prov 17:8 NIV 84)

My friend said that it appeared from this verse that bribery is okay for a Christian, yet he knew it was not. He had looked at some commentaries but they had nothing to offer about that verse. I told him I would be glad to do some research and get back to him. Here are the results of my study:

To me, by far the best resource for Proverbs is the dual book set by Bruce Waltke. Volume I gives a detailed and tremendous overview of Proverbs, and then provides a verse-by-verse analysis of chapters 1-14. The second volume in this set and the one I used is shown to the left. I have many other resources on Proverbs and none come close.

I gave my friend four points for his consideration. Most of this analysis comes directly from Waltke's book, pages 48,49.

1. What the Pentateuch states
   Proverbs is consistent with the law that was given in Exodus through Deuteronomy. Here are the two main references from the law:
   

   And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right. (Ex 23:8 ESV)
   
   ------
   
   You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. (Deut 16:19 ESV)
   

   Immediately we see that the law requires the avoidance of bribery. Remembering that the Lord is not a respecter of people, this would mean that He does not give preference to those that offer money. We are not expected to be that way either.
   
   
2. Evidence within Proverbs
   The pursuit of internal evidence asks, "Is Proverbs consistent with itself?" or "What else does Proverbs state about bribery?" There are four references besides verse 17:8.
   

   He will accept no compensation; he will refuse though you multiply gifts. (Prov 6:35 ESV)
   
   There are three characters in Proverbs 6: the seducing adulterous woman, the one being seduced, and her husband. In this verse, the husband will refuse any gifts that the tempted one might offer.
   
   ------
   
   Whoever is greedy for unjust gain troubles his own household, but he who hates bribes will live. (Prov 15:27 ESV)
   
   ------
   
   The wicked accepts a bribe in secret to pervert the ways of justice. (Prov 17:23 ESV)
   
   ------
   
   A gift in secret averts anger, and a concealed bribe, strong wrath. (Prov 21:14 ESV)
   
   This last verse seems to offer some confusion as well. By looking at the surrounding verses, it is seen that the one offering the bribe is oppressing the poor (v13), and that evildoer will be brought to justice (v15).

3. The Proverb itself
   My friend was using the NIV 1984 Bible. I believe that the newer NIV 2011 offers a better understanding of Proverbs 17:8 – it clarifies that it is the briber's thought process that is involved.
   

   A bribe is seen as a charm by the one who gives it; they think success will come at every turn. (Prov 17:8 NIV 2011)
   
   A bribe is a charm to the one who gives it; wherever he turns, he succeeds. (Prov 17:8 NIV 84)
   
   

   Bruce Waltke suggested that the phrase "in the eyes of" (KJV) is the fool's opinion of himself, and therefore renders this verse with the word "think." I think that insight adds considerable value to this verse and the NIV 2011 leaned on that understanding.
   
4. The Proverb in context
   Waltke also suggests that most of verses 7 through 28 in Proverbs 17 are teachings about foolishness. Here is my look at some of those verses.
   
   • It is foolish to have lying lips (v7)
   • The one who repeats a transgression is foolish (v9)
   • Rebellion is being foolish (v11)
   • An adverse brother is acting like a fool (v17)
   I had not seen this cluster of foolishness in my previous reviews of Proverbs; I found that was enlightening.
   
   

While Waltke offers other good points about this verse, I suggest that the above four points are sufficient in themselves to conclude it is incorrect to either offer or accept bribes. That is based on these selections from Proverbs or the Bible as a whole. As the adulterous woman offers temptation, the one being tempted should not present bribes, and the righteous spouse should not accept them.