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Excavating the Text

About this site

The home base for Biblical Studies and Reviews — where the videos, notes, and tools gather.

What this site is

A quiet desk for careful work in Scripture.

This is the home base for Stephen Hackett’s channel, Biblical Studies and Reviews. Here you’ll find video Bible study, textual criticism, and work in the original languages; a running blog for things that don’t fit neatly in a video; a Resources shelf of public-domain texts; and a path to Digging Deep: Notetaker Deluxe, the Bible study notebook app that grew out of this same habit of reading slowly.

The aim is simple: digging into the text, the manuscripts, and the questions worth resolving — without rushing past the hard places.

What’s here

A map of the main rooms on the site.

Videos & studies

Videos / studies

New studies and reviews posted regularly — verse-by-verse work, textual questions, and tools worth knowing about when you sit with a passage instead of skimming it.

Browse videos
Resources

Public-domain Greek New Testament

Free PDFs of the Robinson–Pierpont Byzantine Text (Guardian Press edition) — a plain edition and a hyperlinked edition with bookmarks, a clickable table of contents, and a clickable manuscript apparatus index. They’re hosted here simply because the text is free and public domain. Hosting is not an endorsement of Guardian Press, and hosting doesn’t mean Guardian Press endorses anything else on this site.

Open Greek NT PDFs Homepage Resources
Hardbound printing

An independent project

The hardbound printing of that Greek New Testament is an independent project of Biblical Studies and Reviews (Stephen). It is not affiliated with, published by, or endorsed by Guardian Press. When more copies become available, the hardbound waitlist is the place to hear about it.

If you’re comparing Byzantine hardbounds from different publishers, there’s a short quiz for that (separate from this site’s independent hardbound waitlist).

Hardbound waitlist / printing Compare Byzantine editions →
The app

Digging Deep: Notetaker Deluxe

A running Bible study notebook built alongside this channel — read, resolve, write it down, and cross-reference later. Access is through excavatingthetext.com (the donation path / gate on the homepage). That’s the only door; please start there.

Go to The App on the homepage
Courses

Member & course work

There’s a courses area under /courses/, including Foundations of the Septuagint. Details and enrollment live there — this page doesn’t invent those particulars.

How the site is built

Light notes — nothing operational.

The site is hand-built static HTML — no CMS. It’s hosted on GitHub Pages from a public repository, with the domain excavatingthetext.com.

That’s enough of the plumbing for most visitors. The interesting part is still the text.

Visual identity

A field notebook feel, not a generic ministry page.

Warm manuscript palette: parchment ground, dark ink, brass and rubric accents. Display headings in a serif face; kickers and labels in a small-caps sans. Navy is reserved for quote and callout treatments — a quiet shelf-mark rather than a brand shout.

Contact / elsewhere

Where to find updates without inventing a new inbox.

On X: @stephen_hackett.

For news and Resources, the homepage newsletter and Resources section are the best places to start — rather than hunting for an email that isn’t listed here.

Prefer the quiet path: newsletter · Resources · Greek NT PDF · Hardbound · home