Tim Ricchuiti picked up on a theme from John Anderson, who got it (in a manner of speaking) from Celucien Joseph and broadcast a question to all his readers: which seven biblioblogs do you actually read most often? Please note that the question does not ask for your “favorite” biblioblogs, or the “best” biblioblogs, but simply the seven that you “actually read most often” (to use John’s wording). Well, Joseph started out at ten, not seven. And Tim cited eight. What’s a blogger to do with this much inconsistency in the meme?

Anyway …

  • Jim West’s blog, whatever he happens to be calling it this week. Jim’s shotgun style of posting makes it almost inevitable that he’d be in the top seven; if I read even half of Jim’s posts, that adds up to more than ever shows up on a lot of other blogs. I usually skip Jim’s posts on news items, giving most attention to Jim’s bibliographical notices and such.
  • Ancient Hebrew Poetry by John Hobbins. I read just about everything John posts on AHP, except the obdurately technical essays about prosody. I mean, yuck.
  • Anumma by Brooke Lester. Brooke blogs about Hebrew Bible and pedagogy—sometimes both in the same post. How am I not going to read that?
  • Ketuvim by Jim Getz. S.v. “Anumma,” mutatis mutandis.
  • Biblical Studies and Technological Tools, where Mark Hoffman keeps me up-to-date on the latest and greatest.
  • Dr. Claude Mariottini‘s eponymous blog. Sometimes I agree with Claude, and sometimes I don’t—but I never find his posts trite, superfluous, or irrelevant. Somehow, Claude always manages to hit on things that interest me.
  • PaleoBabble by Michael Heiser. This is a new addition to the list, a blog I’ve started gobbling up with relish. Specifically, mustard relish. But with dill pickles. Not sweet pickles. If you don’t mind. Speaking of minds, I’m probably losing mine. The aliens took it. To Nazca. To feed it to the dinosaurs.

Honorable mention goes to Biblia Hebraica—it undoubtedly will return to the list when Doug Mangum returns to active blogging. Michael Heiser’s Naked Bible is mightily competing for a spot.

I should also like to mention two blogs that I don’t think of, strictly speaking, as “biblioblogs,” but which occupy the same basic range of interests in my news reader:

  • Duane Smith’s Abnormal Interests. I put up with pictures of his garden and cat, and his unseemly hero-worship of Mark Twain, for the sake of his enlightening posts on Akkadian texts and such.
  • Richard Beck’s Experimental Theology. It’s not the same as sitting down with Richard for a cup of coffee, but given the 2,000 miles between us most of the year, it’ll do.
  • The Los Angeles Times “religious news” features. I like to keep up with religious news in and around SoCal. Wouldn’t you, if you lived here?
  • The Christian Chronicle news feed, from a newspaper focused on Churches of Christ.

So there you have my—what, you want to know why you didn’t make the list? Probably:

  • I don’t know that you and/or your blog exist.
  • Your blog focuses on Tanakh studies, but is relatively new—at least to me—and hasn’t displaced old friends from the top seven yet. John, Joseph, and Richard, I’m looking at you. Consider yourselves “honorably mentioned.”
  • Your blog focuses more on New Testament studies, Targumic studies, theology, history, or translating obscure Greek Orthodox poetry than on Tanakh studies. You know who you are.
  • Your blog is kind of a one-trick pony, and you haven’t done much lately to shake me out of my complacency. (C’mon, James McGrath. Another post about Lost?)
  • I felt constrained to stop at seven, because John stopped at seven. So cut me some slack, huh? I subscribe to eighty-six biblioblogs, theology blogs, or church blogs—so the “top seven” represent rather less than 10% of my actual blog-checking and blog-reading.

If anybody cares, here are some other blogs (not counting news feeds—you know, like the Los Angeles Times local headlines or ESPN football news) that I read (not just check frequently):

So, my friends … what should I be reading that I’m not reading? Besides your blog, of course.