Reading Nave's Topical Bible

[Update: What's written below is a false start, yet I've been using E-Sword to skim around Nave's Topical Bible, and it is preemminent for doing that. Each verse comes up as a pop up window. Very convenient. The menu of topics is at the right. You can make it all fill the entire page. I think that reading the Bible and pondering and meditation and visualization on each verse and passage (not to mention just drawing the verse/passage into memory while looking away from the page) is my next project. I've always had unique and memorable success in doing that, but I've only done it two or three times, just in a few Psalms or whatever. I'm going to start in the New Testament this time and then begin at Genesis. If my goal is to read the Bible complete seven times I may as well do it. You don't want to be mechanical about it, and doing one complete reading too soon after the last can be seen as mechanical (because you'd like to increase capacity for new understanding some more before you do another complete reading), but since I'm talking about a meditation type reading it is OK. It's very different from a straight read-through.]

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This may be a false start, but I'm thinking of reading a Nave's Topical Bible completely through. It's about the length of the Bible itself. I think there's use in this old reference work if you already have the Bible in you from several complete readings. There's something to be said for reading the Bible topically in a complete way. Not all Nave's editions are the same, and you'd need to use a complete one for what I'm talking about. I'm using the ISBN: 091700602X Hendrickson edition. It appears to be the complete, with all Bible verses included, edition. It's a unique reference work (one thing I like about it is the guy spent 14 years on it with a goal to make it comprehensive, which I like in a reference work), and I've always suspected it could be used in some creative way for learning the Bible. So a simple straight-through reading may be the way. Holding the topic at hand in mind as you go through each verse from the Bible under that topic. A through Z. There are other elements to Nave's work that make is unique too like his lists that aren't just actual Bible verses but are descriptions of each instance of something under a topic like 'courage' or 'spiritual conviction'. These are valuable lists to just read. After a complete reading the chronological whole of the Bible is in your mind anyway, so reading through a Nave's Topical Bible also has the effect of drawing back into mind what you've just gone over. It may be a false start, but I may do this...

I don't know if I will (if I can) call it my 6th complete reading of the Bible, but maybe... I'll see how it all feels as I actually get into it and maybe complete it.

Another approach to do with a Nave's is to simply find the lists and write them down to get them in memory, and then read the main topical entries. More skim the work, yet actually take notes. Write things down on cards and review them to really get them in memory. That may turn out to be the more profitable, if more effort intensive, way to go about it... (Thinking about that, I'm not sure, because most of Nave's is actual Bible verses and passages. The lists are much fewer. I can do both, probably. Just read the work straight through and write down on cards the more substantial lists I come upon...)