FAQs

The Old Testament is the Septuagint (Updated Brenton: ENGLXXUP); the New Testament is the Text-Critical English New Testament (TCENT / BTV). Details in Texts and Translations.

Because it's the Old Testament the Church has primarily prayed and read from since the beginning. The Apostles quote it, and the Orthodox lectionary follows its numbering. The Hebrew tradition is fascinating, part of the Scriptural heritage, and shows up often in the notes; it just isn't the base text here.

They're probably not wrong, just different. This site follows the Septuagint (LXX) for the Old Testament, and its chapter and verse numbering does not always line up with the Hebrew (Masoretic) Bible that most English translations follow.

A few reasons a passage might land somewhere you didn't expect:

• The Psalms are the usual culprit. The LXX and the Hebrew number them differently, so through most of the Psalter the LXX number runs one behind the Hebrew. For example, the beloved "The Lord is my shepherd" is Psalm 23 in Hebrew but Psalm 22 in the LXX. You will often see it written as Psalm 22(23) to show both.
• Chapter and verse breaks are late additions. Chapters were not added to the biblical text until around the 13th century, and verse numbers not until the 16th, so different traditions sometimes cut the text in slightly different places.
• Some books differ in content or arrangement. A handful of books read considerably differently in the LXX (e.g., Daniel, Jeremiah, Ezra and Nehemiah), and several (the Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, and others) are not in the shorter Hebrew canon at all.

As a rule I follow the LXX numbering for the Old Testament and note the Hebrew numbering where it helps. When a source I am quoting uses yet another system, I cite whatever text I am referencing. If you are hunting for a verse, try looking a chapter or a verse or two on either side.

It's a portmanteau of "Byzantine," "antique," and "mozzarella stick." Pick two.

Hint: I can't eat the wrong answer most Wednesdays and Fridays. Pardon the cheesy humor.

Why would you want to? Just kidding: feel free to reach out—unless you're a jerk. My name is Dan. You can email me at qohelet.dan at pm.me .

The address is stitched together in your browser when you hover or click, so the spam bots that troll the internet scraping pages for addresses (hopefully) never actually see it.

Entirely possible, and I'd genuinely like to know. I write these notes as a student, not an oracle, so mistakes happen: typos, a botched citation, or just a take that turns out to be unhelpful. I fix them as I learn. Drop me a line at qohelet.dan at pm.me and I'll take a look.

Technically inclined? The whole site lives on GitHub, so feel free to open an issue. And if you're really high speed, submit a pull request with your proposed fix.

One caveat: I'll gladly fix something that is factually wrong or plainly broken (a misspelling, a dead link, a mangled citation). I'm far less likely to change a note simply because someone disagrees with it. A fair amount of what's here is an object of study rather than a settled verdict, so "I'd read it differently" is a conversation, not a bug report.

Bear in mind that these are my notes on the Scriptures, not a community wiki. I'm not crowdsourcing the commentary or taking requests for passages I haven't gotten to yet, and you'll notice there's no comment section anywhere on the site. It's simply where I keep my own notes, opened up in case they help someone else.

No ads, no tracking cookies, and nothing of yours for sale. The only thing collected is cookieless, aggregate analytics through Cloudflare, which counts visits without building any profile of you. The full details, in plain language, are on the Privacy page.

I'm not a priest, and I'd never call myself an expert. That said, I'm not winging it: I've done years of formal study in seminaries across several Christian traditions and I'm finishing a Master of Arts in Orthodox Biblical Studies. At the end of the day, though, I'm still a guy with a Bible, a notebook, and too many tabs open. This site is the work of a perpetual student, not an oracle, so weigh everything accordingly. See Approach for the longer disclosure.

Not even close. A lot of this is an object of study, not an article of faith, including scholarship I find interesting and don't believe a word of. Sharing isn't endorsing.

No, it is not. These notes don't speak for the Church, my diocese, my parish, or my boss — only for me, and even then provisionally.

The commentary is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (credit Byzantique, share alike). The biblical texts carry their own licenses: see Texts and Translations.

Why not? Mostly I got tired of paying rising rent to store my own words. The notes themselves were everywhere: Evernote, Obsidian, documents on my computer and across numerous cloud storage providers, things I'd written, and a few apps and blogging platforms that have since died and taken my data with them. Each survivor seemed to charge more every year for roughly the same features (or for new features I don't need). A website, by contrast, is free to host. Building it (with a generous assist from Claude Code) let me organize everything the way it actually fits together, and a public link turns out to be far easier to share than "hang on, let me find that note." So here we are.

Inspiration for this site includes:

• Buls' Notes
• Search The Scriptures
• Lord of Spirits podcast
• The Whole Counsel of God blog
• BibleProject

This is a distinctive feature of the TCENT / BTV translation which indicates the singular second-person pronoun. Details in Texts and Translations and the translation's Introduction.

Check out the Abbreviations page.

Pick a Testament from the menu, then a book, then a chapter, and any notes appear right alongside the text. The slim bar next to each book shows how much of it has commentary so far, so you can see at a glance where the notes are. You can also use the search box in the top bar to jump to a word, a phrase, or a reference. Fair warning: this is a growing collection, so plenty of passages have no notes yet.

Two kinds of markers. The slim bar is a coverage meter: it fills to show roughly how much of that book has commentary, and stays empty where I haven't written anything yet.

The little word labels sort the books two ways. Some describe grouping (Pentateuch, History, Gospel, Epistle, and so on); others describe a book's standing in the tradition, including Anagignoskomena (the "Readables" of the wider Orthodox Old Testament, beyond the shorter Hebrew canon), Homologoumena (the New Testament books received without dispute), and Antilegomena (those whose place in the canon was once debated). Hover any label to see its definition.

The more interesting question, I'd suggest, is in Whom do I place my trust and hope? Christianity has always been less a set of propositions to affirm than a Person to follow, and that Person is Jesus Christ. If you're looking for a denomination or a statement of faith, you're thinking in categories that would have puzzled most Christians throughout history. I follow Jesus, I pray with the Eastern Orthodox Church, the ancient apostolic faith that predates the category of "denomination" altogether, and I confess what the Church has always believed:

I believe in one God,
    the Father, the Almighty,
    maker of heaven and earth,
    of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
    the Son of God, the only-begotten,
    begotten of the Father before all ages.
    Light of Light, true God of true God,
    begotten, not made,
    of one essence with the Father,
    by whom all things were made.
    For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven,
    was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,
    and became man.
    And he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate,
    and suffered, and was buried.
    On the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures,
    and ascended into heaven,
    and sits at the right hand of the Father.
    He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
    and his kingdom shall have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
    who proceeds from the Father,
    who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified,
    who has spoken by the prophets.
    I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
    I acknowledge one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
    I look for the resurrection of the dead,
    and the life of the age to come. Amen.