Welcome to Day 1514 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomBible Study – Formatting Text and Font Styles – Meditation MondayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend; I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1514 of our Trek, and it is time for Meditation Monday. Taking time to relax, refocus, and reprioritize our lives is crucial in order to create a living legacy. For you, it may just be time alone for quiet reflection. You may utilize structured meditation practices. In my life, Meditation includes reading and reflecting on God’s Word and in prayer. It is a time to renew my mind, refocus on what is most important, and making sure that I am nurturing my soul, mind, and body. As you come along with me on our trek each Meditation Monday, it is my hope and prayer that you, too, will experience a time for reflection and renewing of your mind.
 We are continuing our series this week on Meditation Monday as we focus on Mastering Bible Study through a series of brief insights from Hebrew Scholar, Dr. Michael S. Heiser. Our current insights are focusing on what the Bible is. Today let us meditate on:
Bible Study – Formatting Text and Fonts Styles·      Insight Thirty-Five: Pay Attention to the Formatting of Your Bible Translation
No, I’m not recommending that you need a degree in book design for productive Bible study. I am suggesting that you pay attention to how the biblical text is presented in your translation. Believe it or not, Bible publishers use specific formatting conventions to draw the reader’s eye to the text features that do indeed assist in Bible study.
Let’s start with something every English Bible reader has seen but likely not considered: line breaks and indenting. Look at Psalm 1:1-2 in the ESV:
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked.
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law, he meditates day and night.
If you read this in today’s Wisdom Journal, notice how the formatting breaks the poem into stanzas, clearly showing which thoughts are in parallel to each other. Proper formatting is crucial for drawing attention to how Hebrew poetry works. Now look at the same passage in the 1769 edition of the King James Version:
Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.

There is no formatting, no line breaks, and indentation, to bring out the parallelisms. The text is presented as simple prose like a historical narrative would be. The symmetry of the lines is completely lost.
Here’s another example. Modern translations segment chapters into pericopes, sections of prose that the grammar of the original text marks off as thought units. Observing the pericope divisions helps Bible students discern the immediate context of a verse within that unit.
So, yes, formatting matters. Don’t just read your Bible. Observe it.
·      Insight Thirty-Six: Font Styles MattersWhat difference could font style mean in your Bible study? You’d be surprised.
Let’s talk about italics. Did you know that some English translations use italics to indicate words in the translation that have been supplied for the sake of English but for which no word in the original language exists? For example, Genesis 1:2 reads as follows in many editions...