10 Places in the UK with a Regis

Old Direction Sign - Signpost by White Post Cross,
Brompton Regis parish by Alan Rosevear, CC BY-SA 2.0
 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Regis signifies "of the king"

1. Bognor Regis in West Sussex
2. Houghton Regis in Bedfordshire
3. Salcombe Regis in Devon
4. Bere Regis in Dorset
5. Lyme Regis in Dorset
6. Milton Regis in Kent
7. Beeston Regis in Norfolk
8. Grafton Regis in Northamptonshire,
9. Brompton Regis in Somerset,
10. Newton Regis in Warwickshire

(Also Rowley Regis in the West Midlands, Melcombd Regis and Wyke Regis in Dorset, etc)

The World around the Old Testament: The People and Places of the Ancient Near East

As readers of this blog will be aware I have been reading this big book for a while now but have eventually now finished it. It was recommended at one of the recent Tyndale House gatherings. It's the sort of book I should have read when preparing for ministry I guess. Better late than never. Thirteen contributors introduce us to peoples and places either mentioned in the biblical text or from that part of the world. Those covered include the obvious Egyptians, Philistines, Babylonians, Persians and Greeks but also the Assyrians, Phoenicians and Transjordanians (Moab, Ammon and Edom) and further, the Amorites, Ugaritians, Hittites/Hurrians and Arabians. The essays are similar in length but necessarily vary in approach and some contain rather difficult passages that are not easy to negotiate. One huge disappointment is the pretty complete sell out to modern academia that means a very sceptical attitude is taken to Scripture. Not only is this not an evangelical postion but I would guess a lot is lost simply because the academic world is currently so atheistic. Copious footnotes and plenty of pictures add to the value of this very interesting book.

New Day One Book Now Out

 More details here

Midweek Meeting May 6 2026

Six of us gathered in Wednesday with one online. After looking at the dn of Romans 15 we all prayed. What a blessing to be there.

When you share your home with a Welsh speaker

 

(The dog is being groomed today)

Day Off Week 19 2026

I had a sort of day off Tuesday, although following a bank holiday I felt I needed to get some things done. Eleri and I went for a pleasant walk on Monday but she was in work Tuesday so I filled the day with reading and blogging and cataloguing books on Library Thing and so on. The main book I am reading at the moment is Where the music had to go by Jim Windolf about Bob Dylan and the Beatles. Very interesting. Another thing taking up my time is annotating an interesting book I found online. I got down to West Hampstead only to find that my favourite of the two bookshops there is closing down House of Books). I took opportunity to buy two Chiltern Classics for Eleri and my son to give me on my birthday this month (forgetting Eleri has spent more than enough on a pair of Birkenstocks for me).

10 Unnamed women in the Bible

Here are ten women who appear in the Bible but whose names are not given and the names given them by tradition.

1. Noah's wife (Naamah)
2. Lot's wife (Ado or Edith)
3. Job's wife (Sitis or Dinah; some traditions posit a second wife, Rahma)
4. Potiphar's wife (Zuleikha)
5. Pharaoh's daughter (Thermutis or Bithia)
6. Jephthah's daughter (Seila or Adah)
7. Manoah's wife (Tzelelponit)
8. The widow of Zarephath
9. Peter's mother-in-law
10. The widow of Nain

(There are as many as 600 of these)

10 Unnamed men in the Bible

Leonardo Campitelli Filho, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>,
via Wikimedia Commons

Here are ten men who appear in the Bible but whose names are not given and the names given them by tradition.

1. The blasphemer of Leviticus 24
2. The prophet of Judges 6 (Phinehas)
3. The man of God in 1 Kings 13 (Iddo or Jadon)
4. The Magi or wisemen (Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar)
5. The rich young ruler
6. The man born blind in John 9 (Celidonius)
7. The thief on the cross who repented (Dismas)
8. The thief on the cross who didn't repent(Titus or Gestaas)
9. The soldier who pierced Jesus's side (Longinus)
10. The Ethiopian eunuch (Simeon Bachos or Djan Darada)

10 Commentaries on The Book of Jonah

1. Hugh Martin
2. M R DeHaan Fact or Fiction
3. T Desmond Alexander
4. Peter Williams Running from God
5. Henry M Morris The Remerkabke Journey
6. O Palmer Robertson A Study in Compassion
7. Ian Barclay The I of the Storm
8. Sinclair Ferguson Man Overboard
9. Frank Sellar Anywhere but Nineveh
10. Gordon Keddie Preacher on the Run

(Also Keller and Rosemary Nixon)

Lord's Day May 3 2026

We began with communion last Lord's Day. We then had a very well attended morning service (lots of Iranians) and a very small number in the evening. I preached on from Luke 20 morning and evening consecutively - taxes to Caesar and the woman with multiple hsbands.

Lumos in West Hampstead

My kind wife took me down to a church in West Hampstead (a horrible high church with a statue of Jesus I'm afraid) where we spent an hour listening to Lumos. The Lumos style is to put hundreds of candles out (battery operated but looking like the real thing) and then preform. This time round it was a violin, a viola and a cello and mstly Einaudi compositions. So a very pleasant time that we enjoyed. I've almost never been into a church to listen to music before, although many people do I know.

Dai and the Arabian gods

I came across a passage today in a book.It had me thinking for a while.

"Secondly, the Assyrian annals identify the gods of the Arabian pantheon as Atar-Samayin, Dai, Huhai, Ruldāwu, Abīrillu and Atar-qurumā."

10 on the 10

Plenty of good books on the ten commandments have come out over the years, including these

1. Thomas Watson
2. Jochem Douma
3. Kevin DeYoung
4. Edmund Clowney How Jesus tranforms ...
5. Brian Edwards ... for today
6. Norman Shields Pattern for life
7. D James Kennedy Why the ten commandments matter
8. David Searle And then there were nine
9. Peter Masters God's rules for holiness
10. Michael Horton The law of perfect freedom

(Also, Ernest Reisinger Whatever happened to ..., Stuart Bonnington Love Rules)

Day Off Week 18 2026

We haven't had a formal day off for a while but we tried to have one last Tuesday. There were a few things that needed to be dealt with but otherwise there was time for reading, coffee and to receive a parcel of books by Benjamin Beddome, vry kindly sent by someon eno longer needing them. In the evening I drove up to The Stables, Milton Keynes, to catch Focus on their latest tour. Bed by midnight.

Ecclesiastes 11:3b

 

Childs Hill Park

Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north,

in the place where it falls, there it will lie.