How to read it¶

Now we can re-visit the contents page, and take you through how the various books fit together to make up the whole plot. After that, we can consider how to approach reading it all.

Five Act Structure¶

The drama from start to finish, can be broken down into five acts as follows.

The short descriptions given here are necessarily very compressed, given that each Act is itself a fairly long and complex affair. The idea is still to provide orientation, because it is important for you to understand the overview before diving into any part in detail.

How to read it¶

A difficult beginning¶

You might just try to read the Bible for yourself. If you are a reader and like a big book, that is a natural instinct. Start at the beginning and read it to the end. Why not?

If you begin at page one and read, then you initially have a very eventful course through the stories in Genesis. Many well-known tales are included here, including not just the Flood but the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the family history of Abraham which culminates in the polished drama of Joseph and his brothers, familiar to many now as a popular musical. This is all quite readable.

The same is true for the first half of Exodus, until you get to the intricate carpentry and embroidery instructions that make up most of the end of the book. As you move into Numbers and Leviticus, the sections of narrative are interspersed with technical legal material. Deuteronomy is virtually all law, in fact the book's name means the second law.

The conquest under Joshua and the disparate happenings in Judges make for gory and fascinating reading. But it can be hard to discern much of an overall direction. The first seven books in order, which constitute Acts One and Two in the scheme shown above, are all important to understanding the Bible, but they make a difficult introductory pathway. Many set out to read it in this way and lose heart or lose their way.

The question of reading order¶

The early books are not the only trouble. By the time you get through the genealogies of Chronicles into the confused patchwork of Ezra and Nehemiah, you will very likely be lost. Because of the arrangement of books by category, you will not yet have read the vitally important prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, or the minor prophets that are placed to the end. The material in most of these books, on the biblical timeline, is parallel to the books of Kings, and should be read as such.

If you continue in order, then after the rather timeless stories of Esther and Job, you are into the Psalms, a compilation of hymns from different periods. They certainly contain beautiful poetry and theologically important imagery, but who wants to read a hymn-book from cover to cover? I suggest instead that you read them one or a few at a time, alongside other portions of the text as you go along.

Since the Bible is an anthology, it's not necessarily wrong to read it in a different order. It isn't a novel, to be read in sequence. However you choose to approach it, it's a good idea to try to understand how each book relates to the others. I will show you one way in which this can be done.

Start with Samuel¶

Kings and Prophets¶

In this Reading Guide I will begin with the books of Samuel, followed by the books of Kings, which make up what I have called Act Three, Kings and Prophets. These four books together form a continuous prose narrative, and indeed were probably composed as such. They lead up to the climax of the Old Testament, and make a good foundation for understanding the Bible story.

Crucially, we will read them alongside selections from the book of Psalms, as well as books of the Prophets. Most of the prophetic books are associated with one or more of the reigns described in 2 Kings. For example, here is the opening of sentence of the book of Isaiah:

The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning
Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and
Hezekiah, kings of Judah.

The kings mentioned here are covered in 2 Kings 15 - 20, where Isaiah also appears interacting especially with King Hezekiah. There are further cross-references between the books, and the content of the book of Isaiah is directly relevant to the events in 2 Kings. Likewise, Jeremiah and several of the twelve minor prophets can be placed alongside other reigns.

We will read all of these at specified points during the Kings narrative.

Back to the beginning¶

After having read about Kings and Prophets, you will be much better prepared to work on the earlier books if you want to, with more of an understanding of the biblical world and how things fit together. Reading Genesis is highly recommended. Then you can continue with the books from Exodus to Judges as well.

Ruth is a bridging book which prepares the way for the story of the kingdoms, and would bring you full circle to where you began.

If you read all of these, you will have included most of the Old Testament, represented by Acts One to Three in the scheme above.

Read all the OT if you want¶

The remaining books loosely grouped into Act Four take place during and after the exile, but cannot be arranged in such a clear timeline as those which went before. This leaves the dramatic sequence rather confused, and on finishing the last books Zechariah and Malachi, the major question of final judgement and the Day of Yahweh is unresolved.

Apart from the books which are listed in the Act structure above, there are also the other writings mentioned previously which don't fit easily onto the timeline and are less specifically linked to events in the narrative. If you are keen to read the whole Old Testament, you will need to include the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, which are collections of wise sayings and moral instruction, and the self-contained folk tales Esther and Job.

To be honest, though, some of the OT is rather dull. You won't find all of it to your taste. It also gets a bit repetitive. The books of Chronicles recap a lot of the history told in the other books, mostly abbreviated but in some parts embellished with new detail. You may not feel it is essential reading. You might do better to move on to the NT or even some of the apocryphal works, like Maccabees, Enoch or Jubilees.

Act Five: New Testament¶

When you are ready, the action comes to its final conclusion in the New Testament. This takes place entirely in a later period, some centuries after the last books of the Old Testament.

Indeed, you may be impatient and think, "I’m mainly interested in Christianity not the Old Testament. Can't I just start with the New Testament?" Possibly, but it’s bound to be more difficult. Here I explain why you need an understanding of the Old Testament before tackling the New.

Can you read the NT first?¶

The New Testament is the story of Jesus, of course. From a Christian perspective, everything which went before is simply leading up to, indeed prefiguring, his arrival.

For this very reason, the early Christian authors continually reference the Hebrew Bible, especially to interpret passages in it as pointing to the arrival of their messiah. It is hard to grasp what they are saying without an understanding of what went before.

Jesus, a practising Jew, went to the synagogue and read from the book of Isaiah. That’s because he, and the earliest Christians, were fully immersed in their tradition’s thought and expectations. The accepted religious scriptures were taken for granted and heavily cited by Jesus himself and all his early followers.

To illustrate this, let’s just look at the opening of the New Testament, the very beginning of the first book, Matthew’s Gospel.

A quick look at the Gospel of Matthew¶

Matthew opens with a record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham (1:1), thus announcing a clear purpose to his book. In this single sentence he accords Jesus the title of Christ, plus an ancestry associating him with two key characters from Jewish tradition, King David and the patriarch Abraham.

The title Christ is the Greek translation of the Hebrew title Messiah, meaning anointed. Anointing is the ritual by which one is elevated to the kingship. We will encounter several anointings in the books of Samuel and Kings.

Then Son of David establishes Jesus as heir to the legendary King David, an essential claim for anyone seeking the title of Messiah. Lastly he is a son of Abraham, who above all others is regarded as the original ancestor of all the Jews. The majority of the subsequent genealogy (1:2-12) is taken directly from the Old Testament.

Already Matthew is relying on biblical characters and symbolism which would have been understood by his first readers. Five times in the first two chapters he states that events in the life of Jesus occur in order that prophecy be fulfilled, making reference to specific prophetic passages in the Old Testament.

In chapter 3, John the Baptizer quotes from Isaiah concerning the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and wears clothing made of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, matching a description of Elijah, the prophet who was expected to return before the final times.

In chapter 4, Jesus is tempted by the devil, who actually quotes a psalm at him. In reply to the taunting, Jesus himself three times quotes from Deuteronomy. Already we are only a few chapters into the book, and we have Jesus situated as (a) heir to the Davidic throne; (b) the promised hope for the children of Abraham; (c) the subject of various scriptural prophecies; (d) responding to the temptations of evil with quotes from the Torah, reaffirming the importance of the divine law.

Such references are found most copiously in Matthew, compared to the other gospel authors. This is one of the distinguishing features of his approach. Yet the connections between Old and New are there, in differing ways, throughout all four gospels, very much in the letters of Paul, and all the way to Revelation, which relies heavily on earlier prophetic visions of the Day of Yahweh, and on the predictions especially of Daniel.

This constant intertwining with what has gone before makes it untenable, in my opinion, to try to understand the New Testament on its own without a grounding in the Old. Therefore, our next step is to read the epic Kings and Prophets.