NEW WEBSITE LIVE. This month we’ve updated and improved both of our websites: The CasualEnglishBible.com first, a couple weeks ago. And this one last night (which I have looked at but not test-driven). Scout them out if you have a few minutes. You can search for Bible maps on the Bible website, which is wonderful. I love that feature.
WELL, THIS IS DIFFERENT. We just launched a new version of my main website, a couple weeks after the new version of the Casual English Bible site.
So it has been a little wild on the prairie lately.
So I’m trying to learn some new coding, new software, and new procedures, which we are inventing from thin air, while I’m paraphrasing Isaiah’s visions and prophecies from Hebrew poetry and song lyrics into casual English for Bible newcomers.
Oh yeah, I’ll have to make maps for Isaiah, too.
The maps are one of my favorite things about the new Casual English Bible website. When I need a map that I know I have somewhere in this now massive archive, I go to the Maps page and type in a place name, person’s name, or topic. Hit the button, and suddenly the page fills with maps. Lots of maps for some places, like Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth.
Could you do me a favor? I don’t usually ask you to do much more than read. But would you look over the two for me and let me know what’s helpful, or confusing, or dumb as all get out?
A peek at Isaiah in process
Isaiah is strong-worded in the more archaically phrased Bible versions I’ve used throughout my life and career. But when you have put him across the table from some of my friends and relatives who don’t speak the churchy language, he gets even more blunt.
I was working in Isaiah 14 yesterday. I haven’t posted this. But listen to what he says will happen to the Babylonian king after Babylon’s soldiers wipe the Israelite nation off the map, level Jerusalem, and deport the surviving Jews into what is now Iraq.
The grave is eager to meet you
And welcome you into the ground.
It’ll wake the dead to join the welcome,
Kings and rulers of kingdoms gone…
Your pomp and ceremony
Aren’t pompous down here.
It’s the wrong place to listen for harps.
When you lay down to sleep
You’ll lay on a mattress of maggots
And cover yourself in worms.
How far you have fallen
from heaven to here,
Your highness, bright star, son of dawn…
Here you are
Dropped deep in a grave.
In a pit in a hole in the ground.
Excerpts from Isaiah 14, Casual English Bible
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