Open your Bible¶

Contents Page¶

To begin with, take a look at the contents page. You will see it is divided into two sections, the Old and New Testaments, and shows all the books contained in each. But the list of bare titles from Genesis through Amos and Zechariah to Revelation will not give you much idea of what they all contain.

In these introduction pages we will look at which book is which, how they fit together to tell the Bible story, and at some of the characters and plot themes we will need to know about.

Hebrew Bible¶

The books now making up the Old Testament have their origins in the traditional collection of scrolls written in Hebrew, which were at the centre of Jewish religious life for centuries before the time of Jesus. As this collection gradually grew it came to be sorted into three subsets, the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.

Scripture in Judaism means above all the first of these three divisions – the Torah (usually translated as Law, alternatively as Teaching or Instruction). This consists of the first five books, from Genesis to Deuteronomy. They provide the basis for Jewish religious law, and they also contain ancestor tales set in a distant past. The first book begins at the creation of the world, and the subsequent ones tell the story of a particular people, the Israelites, as they leave Egypt (the Exodus) and migrate towards a land promised to them by their god.

The distinction between the other two categories, Prophets and Writings, is no longer fully evident in the Christian Bible, as the books have been rearranged a little into the order you see in your contents page. For more details see the structure of the Bible in the Topics pages.

Old Testament¶

The books of the Old Testament, after the first five, continue with a sequence from Joshua to 2 Kings which tell how the Israelites conquer and settle the land of Canaan and eventually establish two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. In reading this narrative, let's put aside for the moment any questions about its historical accuracy. Such matters are taken up in the Topics section, but first we will consider the story as it is, on its own terms.

At the end of 2 Kings, disaster falls on both kingdoms as they are conquered by foreign enemies, Jerusalem is destroyed, and many of the people are carried off into exile in Babylon. This exile period is not covered in any detail in itself, but the books of Ezra and Nehemiah describe events after it such as the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Before that, the two books of Chronicles recap the whole history from Adam in a rather hasty way, but with extra genealogies.

This, then, is the narrative sequence that provides the backdrop for many of the other books, notably the Prophets. The prophetic books run from Isaiah to Malachi. Many of these can be related to one or other of the historical books, as the prophet concerned was active at some particular time in the sequence just outlined. For example, Jeremiah describes events that took place during the final battle for Jerusalem, which comes at the end of 2 Kings.

You will notice that there are six books we haven't yet mentioned. These are some miscellaneous books which were originally in the Writings, the third division of the Hebrew Bible, but which don't easily find a place in the historical sequence or the prophetic books. Psalms is a book of hymns, the Song of Solomon is an erotic poem, and the others are variously moral tales and compilations of wise sayings. We will return to these in due course.

New Testament¶

Next we turn to the New Testament (NT), which is a collection of literary accounts, personal letters and other documents central to the movement founded by Jesus of Nazareth and his followers.

The four Gospels are accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus. ‘Gospel’ means literally good news, which is how the earliest Christians described their preaching, more emphatically perhaps ‘joyous message’ (Greek evangelion).

Following these, Acts is (probably) by the same author as Luke and continues his gospel account after the death of Jesus, describing the activities of some of the first generation of Christian missionaries, especially Paul. Then come several Letters, most by this same Paul, or attributed to him. If you see them called ‘epistles’, that’s just a fancy name for a letter (from Greek epistolē).

The book of Hebrews is conventionally included with the letters, although it is more like a sermon, addressed generally to Jewish converts to Christianity, and is anonymous. After it come seven more letters from leaders of the early church (other than Paul). At the very end we have the Revelation of John, an apocalyptic work describing visions of the final judgement.

Finding your way around¶

Precisely because the individual books are not all in a linear order, it doesn't necessarily make sense to read it through from beginning to end, although you can if you like. I will be suggesting an approach that will help you make sense of it.

Book, chapter and verse¶

Before we proceed, however, you should know about the traditional sub-division of each book into so-called chapters and verses.

A book-chapter-verse reference allows you to pinpoint a passage quite precisely, and is essential to following any biblical discussion. They should be thought of as navigational aids. If you are not familiar with this numbering system you are strongly recommended to review the details of it.

The chapter divisions mostly mark separate sections of narrative, although they are considerably shorter than the typical chapter of a modern novel. The verses have little to do with the idea of a poetic verse. Generally they mark a sentence or two, or a few lines of poetry, but sometimes they are quite arbitrary.

Bear in mind that quoting a single verse rarely makes sense, without understanding where it sits within the biblical narrative. The Bible is not a long list of isolated statements. It has story, plot, depth and intricacy. I would generally recommend reading whole books, or at least substantial passages.

This very brief overview is intended to give you some orientation and to help you identify roughly what is where within the long list of books. Next we examine a bit more closely some of the characters and themes in the Bible story.