One story: Genesis to Revelation in a single sitting

"Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things written about himself in all the scriptures." (Luke 24:27, NET)¹

Two people are walking home from Jerusalem, and a stranger falls in beside them. Over the next few miles he does something nobody has ever done for you: he takes the whole Old Testament and reads it as one thing. Not a shelf of separate books. One story, with a shape and a direction and, he says, a subject.

Most people who own a Bible have never seen that shape. They know episodes: the flood, David and Goliath, Daniel in the lions' den, the birth in Bethlehem. What they don't know is which episode comes before which, which promise each one is carrying, or what the whole thing is moving toward. So every passage floats. A verse from Jeremiah lands on a graduation card next to a verse from Philippians, and nobody can say whether they belong together, because nobody knows where either one lives.

This lesson gives you the shape. By the end you should be able to take any book, or any passage, and say where it sits in the story and which promise is in play there. That single skill is what turns "the Bible says" into "this part of the Bible, at this point in the story, said this to these people".

A story with six acts

Christians have been drawing the shape of the Bible for a long time, and the drawings differ. The one this course uses comes from Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen's The Drama of Scripture, which is widely used in Christian colleges. They lay the Bible out as a drama in six acts, and their own act titles are worth having, because each one names what God is doing:²

1. Creation, "God Establishes His Kingdom". A good world, with people in it to rule it under him (Genesis 1 and 2).
2. Fall, "Rebellion in the Kingdom". People rebel, and the damage spreads from a garden to a whole world (Genesis 3 to 11).
3. Israel, "The King Chooses Israel: Redemption Initiated". God binds himself to one family and makes it a nation, and through that nation the rescue of the world begins (Genesis 12 to the end of the Old Testament).
4. Jesus, "The Coming of the King: Redemption Accomplished". The rescue is carried out in one man (the four Gospels).
5. Church, "Spreading the News of the King". The news goes out to the world (Acts and the letters).
6. New creation, "The Return of the King: Redemption Completed". The world is remade (Revelation, ending in chapters 21 and 22).

Between acts 3 and 4 they put an interlude, "A Kingdom Story Waiting for an Ending: The Intertestamental Period", and they say why it matters: "four hundred years of Israel's history between Malachi and Matthew" that a Protestant Bible passes over in silence.²

I want to say two honest things about this scheme before you lean on it.

First, it's a teaching device. Scripture doesn't number its own acts, and other good teachers cut the story in other places. Vaughan Roberts, in God's Big Picture, uses eight stages, all built on one definition of the kingdom of God, "God's people in God's place under God's rule and blessing": the pattern of the kingdom, the perished kingdom, the promised kingdom, the partial kingdom, the prophesied kingdom, the present kingdom, the proclaimed kingdom, and the perfected kingdom.³ Line his eight up against the six and you can see exactly where the disagreement is. Roberts puts three joints inside the act that Bartholomew and Goheen leave whole: the promise to Abraham, the partial thing Israel actually got under Moses and the kings, and the prophets' announcement that a better one was coming. His last three stages match acts 4, 5 and 6 almost exactly. Graeme Goldsworthy's According to Plan organises the same material around the same kingdom theme again.⁴

And these are all Protestant evangelical schemes, which is a limit worth naming, because the same story gets told with different joints elsewhere. The Catechism of the Catholic Church sets it out as "the stages of Revelation", and its joints are not acts but covenants: the beginning, the fall, "the covenant with Noah", "God chooses Abraham", "God forms his people Israel", and then Christ.⁵ Irenaeus, writing about the year 180, gave the story a different shape again, the one Orthodox theology still uses: Christ "commenced afresh the long line of human beings", so that "what we had lost in Adam... we might recover in Christ Jesus".⁶ That is the whole Bible as one movement out and back, rather than as a sequence of scenes. Nobody in this paragraph disagrees about what happened. They disagree about where the natural breaks fall, and none of the breaks is inspired.

Second, notice how lopsided the acts are. Count the chapters. A Protestant Bible has 1,189 of them,⁷ and Act 3 alone, Genesis 12 through Malachi, has 918.

Fee and Stuart put the same point in words: the Old Testament is "three-quarters of the bulk of the Bible", and "over 40 percent of the Old Testament is narrative".⁸ So most of what you'll ever read sits inside one act, the story of Israel, and that act is the one that needs a map of its own. We'll build it in a minute.

The spine: five covenants

A six-act summary tells you the order. It doesn't tell you what holds the story together. For that you need the covenants.

A covenant is a binding relationship with terms, sealed by promise and usually by a sign. The Bible's story is carried forward by five of them, and every book sits under one or more. Learn these and you can tell, for almost any passage, which promise is in play.

Noah. After the flood God binds himself to the whole living world: "I confirm my covenant with you: Never again will all living things be wiped out by the waters of a flood; never again will a flood destroy the earth" (Genesis 9:11, NET).⁹ The sign is the rainbow. What it promises is a stable stage: the story won't be wiped out before it can be told.

Abraham. God calls one man out of Mesopotamia and gives him four things: a land, a nation, a great name, and a blessing that reaches past him. "Go out from your country, your relatives, and your father's household to the land that I will show you. Then I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make your name great, so that you will exemplify divine blessing. I will bless those who bless you, but the one who treats you lightly I must curse, so that all the families of the earth may receive blessing through you" (Genesis 12:1 to 3, NET).¹⁰ Everything after Genesis 12 is, one way or another, this promise being kept, threatened, or renewed. Paul reads that last clause as the gospel itself, "proclaimed" to Abraham "ahead of time" (Galatians 3:8, NET).¹¹

Sinai. Abraham's family, now a nation, is brought out of Egypt and given the terms of its life with God at Mount Sinai (Exodus 19 to 24), with the law as the stipulations and the land as the setting. This is the covenant the prophets will spend centuries enforcing, and lesson 4 is about it.

Two things about Sinai that readers usually miss. The first is that grace sits inside it. When Moses asks to see God's glory, what he hears is "The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness" (Exodus 34:6, NET).¹² Hold on to that verse; you'll need it when someone tells you the Old Testament is law and the New is grace.

The second is that Sinai comes with sanctions written down, and they're the most quoted and least read part of the covenant. Forty years after Sinai, on the plains of Moab, Moses restates the terms to the generation about to cross into the land, and Deuteronomy 28 lays out the two futures in matching pairs:

"You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the field... Your basket and your mixing bowl will be blessed. You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out." (Deuteronomy 28:3, 5 and 6, NET)

"You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the field. Your basket and your mixing bowl will be cursed... You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out." (Deuteronomy 28:16, 17 and 19, NET)

Read on, and the curses get specific about exactly the things that happened: "You will plant vineyards and cultivate them, but you will not drink wine or gather in grapes, because worms will eat them" (28:39); "You will bear sons and daughters but not keep them, because they will be taken into captivity" (28:41).¹³ Deuteronomy is a renewal document, not Sinai itself, and it says so: 29:1 calls its covenant one made "in the land of Moab, in addition to the covenant he had made with them at Horeb".¹³ Same terms, restated for a new generation, on a different mountain and forty years on. When you get to the prophets and they sound like prosecutors, this is the document they're prosecuting.

David. The nation gets a king, and God promises the king a line that will not end: "Your house and your kingdom will stand before me permanently; your dynasty will be permanent" (2 Samuel 7:16, NET).¹⁴ From here on, "son of David" is a loaded phrase, and the collapse of the kingdom four centuries later becomes a question about whether God keeps his word.

The new covenant. Speaking to a nation about to lose its land, its Temple, and its king, Jeremiah promises a covenant "not like the old covenant that I made with their ancestors": "I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts and minds. I will be their God, and they will be my people" (Jeremiah 31:32 and 33, NET).¹⁵ Jesus takes those words at the last supper (Luke 22:20), and the letter to the Hebrews quotes Jeremiah 31 at length to explain what has changed (Hebrews 8). The New Testament's name for itself comes from this promise.

Look at what the list does. Noah gives the story a stage. Abraham gives it a family and a destination. Sinai gives the family a shape. David gives it a king. And the new covenant answers what went wrong under the others, though notice what Jeremiah says went wrong: "they violated that covenant, even though I was like a faithful husband to them" (31:32).¹⁵ The failure he names is the people's, not Sinai's. That distinction matters, and Christians have not always kept it; a covenant that people broke is a different thing from a covenant that was defective, and Jeremiah says the first.

The map of Act 3

This is the act most readers get lost in, laid out so you can find your place. Read it top to bottom, then keep it open while you read the rest of the lesson.

A few things to notice on the map.

The books are not in this order on the shelf. Lesson 1 showed you that the Old Testament is arranged by kind of book (Law, History, Poetry and Wisdom, Prophets), not by date. So Amos, a prophet from the divided kingdom, sits near the back of your Old Testament, hundreds of pages after 2 Kings, the book that tells you about the kings he preached to. The shelf and the timeline are two different maps, and the reader who confuses them will think Amos comes after Nehemiah.

Where a story is set and when it was written are different questions. The map answers the first one. It has to, because that's the question you need answered to read a passage. But it would be dishonest to let the map imply an answer to the second. Chronicles retells events from Saul to the exile and was put together after the return; Longman and Dillard's standard evangelical introduction calls the Pentateuch "essentially Mosaic", meaning Moses as the substantial source with later editing, while most university scholars reconstruct a longer process of composition.¹⁷ That argument is real, it isn't settled, and lesson 10 gives both sides at full strength. What this map claims is only where each book's story stands in the sequence.

Only a few dates are printed, and it is worth knowing which kind each one is. Three are events: 722 BC for the fall of Samaria, 586 BC for the fall of Jerusalem, and about AD 30 for the crucifixion. The first two are fixed points of ancient Near Eastern history; Christine Hayes, teaching the Hebrew Bible at Yale from the critical side, gives the same years.¹⁸ The third is not seriously disputed either. Two more marks are objects rather than events, and they are there because they're the earliest hard anchors we have for anything in the pre-exilic stretch, and it's worth being exact about what each one carries. The Tel Dan stele, a broken Aramaic inscription found in 1993 and dated to the ninth century BC, names the "House of David".¹⁹ What that establishes is that within roughly a century and a half of the time the Bible puts David, Israel's neighbours referred to the southern kingdom's royal house by the name of a founder called David. That is strong evidence for a real David, and it is not the same as confirming the Bible's account of him; the size and character of his kingdom are argued between maximalist and minimalist scholars, and the stele settles none of it. The Ketef Hinnom silver amulets, found in 1979 and dated to the late seventh or early sixth century BC, carry a form of the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24 to 26, which shows that wording in use before the exile.²⁰

For the rest, the map gives periods rather than years, and that's deliberate. The dates of Abraham, the exodus, and the conquest are argued. So, for some of them, is more than the date: the scale of the exodus, the extent of the conquest, and the historicity of the patriarchal narratives are all live scholarly disputes, and this course will say so in lesson 10 and hand the detail to Hard Questions. You don't need those dates to read. You need the order.

The gap is real, and it's a fact about this Bible. Between Malachi and the Gospels, Persia gives way to Alexander's Greece, Greece to the Maccabean revolt and a short-lived Jewish kingdom, and that to Rome. The Pharisees, the synagogue as the Gospels know it, and the Greek translation of the Old Testament all take shape in those centuries. So does a large body of Jewish writing: Sirach's grandson, translating his grandfather's book in Egypt, dates his own work to about 132 BC in its prologue, which makes it a document written from inside the supposed silence.²¹ Catholic and Orthodox Bibles carry several books from this period, 1 and 2 Maccabees among them, which is one reason their Old Testaments are longer, and lesson 8 gives that case in full. So the honest sentence is that the Protestant Old Testament has nothing from these four centuries, not that the centuries were empty. They were among the most productive in Jewish history. If you open Matthew straight from Malachi and wonder why everyone is suddenly speaking Greek and paying taxes to Caesar, this is where the answer went.

Three levels at once

Now the tool that makes the map useful. Fee and Stuart, in the chapter on Old Testament narrative that lesson 3 will use in full, say that every biblical story is being told on three levels at the same time.⁸

The top level is the whole plan of God: creation, fall, rescue, new creation. The middle level is the story of Israel: the family, the nation, the land, the kings, the exile, the return. The bottom level is the individual story in front of you: this famine, this woman, this king.

Most readers only ever see the bottom level, and the bottom level on its own is where the graduation-card readings come from. The middle level is what the map gives you. The top level is what Jesus was showing the two on the road.

Watch the three work together on one sentence. Take Ruth 1:1: "During the time of the judges, there was a famine in the land of Judah. So a man from Bethlehem in Judah went to live as a resident foreigner in the region of Moab, along with his wife and two sons." (Ruth 1:1, NET)²² On the bottom level, a family leaves home in a famine. On the middle level, "the time of the judges" is a period the previous book has just summed up with the line that in those days Israel had no king and "each man did what he considered to be right" (Judges 21:25, NET),²³ and "Bethlehem in Judah" is a town the reader will hear of again. On the top level, a family from Abraham's line leaving Abraham's land is a promise in danger. Three readings of one sentence, and only the first is visible without the map.

Ruth, read on one level and then on three

Ruth is four chapters long and you can read it in twenty minutes, which is why I'd like you to have it open. First the usual reading, then the reading the map makes possible.

Read badly. A stand-alone love story. A loyal daughter-in-law, a kind landowner, a courtship on a threshing floor, a wedding. Sermons on loyalty; sermons on finding a good spouse. All of that is in the book. None of it is the point, and if you stop there you'll never notice how strange the ending is.

Read well. Start at the middle level. The book opens "during the time of the judges", so we're in the period after the conquest and before the kings, and the reader who has just finished Judges knows how badly it has gone. It opens with a famine in Judah, in the land God promised Abraham, and the family goes to Moab, which isn't that land. Everyone in the first five verses dies except the widows. So the story begins with Abraham's promise, a family and a land, at its lowest point in miniature: no land, no men, no children.

Then a foreigner, a Moabite, chooses the God of Israel. A kinsman-redeemer (the Hebrew is go'el, a relative with the duty to buy back family land and keep a name alive) does his duty. A child is born.

"The neighbor women gave him a name, saying, 'A son has been born to Naomi.' They named him Obed." Then the same verse names Obed as the father of Jesse, and Jesse as David's father (Ruth 4:17, NET).²⁴ Then the book closes with ten generations, ending "Obed was the father of Jesse, and Jesse was the father of David" (Ruth 4:22, NET).²⁴

A romance doesn't end with a family tree. A story on the middle level does. The last word of Ruth is David, and David hasn't been born yet. In the days when there was no king, in a famine, through a foreign woman, God is keeping the promise to Abraham on its way to the promise to David. Ruth is the hinge between Judges and Samuel, and the writer tells you so by ending where he does.

Now the top level, which is our reading and which we hold as Christians. Matthew opens his Gospel with a genealogy too, and Ruth the Moabite is in it (Matthew 1:5). The line that runs through a famine in Bethlehem ends in a birth in Bethlehem. We read Ruth as one step on the road to Jesus because Jesus, on the road to Emmaus, read Moses and the Prophets that way, and we take his reading as the true one.¹ That's a faith commitment, and it's ours, and this lesson labels it rather than smuggling it.

The objection to that, at full strength

You should be uneasy about the paragraph you just read, and if you aren't, here's why you should be. Twenty lines from now this lesson is going to say that a text can't mean what it never could have meant to its author. The writer of Ruth was not thinking about Jesus. Nobody in the story is. So the Christian top-level reading looks like exactly the move the lesson forbids: a later meaning read back into an earlier text, which is called retrojection, and once you allow it there seems to be no limit. A reader can find anything anywhere if the rule is that a later book gets to say what an earlier one meant. This is not a cheap objection made by hostile people. It is the standard critical objection, it is made in these words by scholars of every conviction, and a serious Jewish reader will press it hardest, because the reading in question annexes their scripture.

Three things to say back, and the third is a concession.

First, a distinction that all sides accept: what an author consciously intended and what an author's words come to mean inside a story that finishes after them are not the same thing. G. K. Beale's observation, which covenant theologians and dispensationalists both grant even while they disagree about nearly everything else, is that the Old Testament writers did not exhaustively grasp what they wrote.²⁵ That's not a religious claim. It's true of any writer whose work sits inside a larger unfinished thing. The writer of Ruth knew he was writing toward David. Whether David's line was going anywhere further was not his to know.

Second, the Christian claim isn't that any later reading is licensed. It's that one specific later reading is: the one Jesus and the apostles actually made. John Wenham's argument in Christ and the Bible is that a Christian's doctrine of Scripture has to start from Jesus' own use of it, because a Christian is by definition someone who has taken Jesus as authoritative on other things too.²⁶ So the top level is not a licence to find Christ under every stone; it's a claim that Luke 24:27 records a reading, and Christians follow it. The test of a top-level reading is whether the New Testament actually makes it, not whether it can be made.

Third, and this is the concession: none of that compels anyone who doesn't already share the faith commitment. It is an argument that runs from inside Christian belief outward, not from neutral ground inward. A Jewish reader who grants the distinction in the first point and the honesty of the second will still say that the story of Ruth is complete in the Tanakh without Jesus in it, and they'll be reading well. This course holds the Christian reading and says so on its first line. It doesn't pretend that saying so is the same as proving it.

One more thing, and it matters

In the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, Ruth doesn't sit between Judges and Samuel at all. It sits among the Writings, with the other four short scrolls read at the festivals, and it's read at Shavuot, the festival that falls at the wheat harvest and that Jewish tradition connects with the giving of the Torah at Sinai.²⁷ Read there, the book is about a harvest and about a foreigner who takes on the covenant, which fits that festival exactly. The Christian order makes Ruth a hinge in a history; the Jewish order makes it a festival scroll about faithfulness. Same words, two shelves, two readings, and a Jewish reader is reading well. Where you place a book is already a decision about what it means, and that's the second time in two lessons you've seen the point.

Jeremiah 29:11, the verse on the graduation card

Now the hard one, and the one you've probably met on a card, a mug, or a graduation programme.

"For I know what I have planned for you," says the Lord. "I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with hope." (Jeremiah 29:11, NET)²⁸

Read badly. A personal promise. God has a plan for my life, it's a good one, and this verse is his word to me about my next step. Nearly everyone reads it this way the first time, and I'm not going to sneer at that; the person who brought this verse on a card is the person this course is for. The reading feels right because the words, taken alone, say exactly that.

Read well. Ask the map's first question: who was this said to, and when?

The chapter tells you in its first line: "The prophet Jeremiah sent a letter to the exiles Nebuchadnezzar had carried off from Jerusalem to Babylon. It was addressed to the elders who were left among the exiles, to the priests, to the prophets, and to all the other people who were exiled in Babylon" (Jeremiah 29:1, NET).²⁸ So we're in Act 3, at the exile, among people who have lost the land, the Temple is about to go, and the king of David's line has been carried off. Deuteronomy 28's curses have arrived, right down to the sons and daughters taken into captivity. Now read what the letter tells them to do:

"Build houses and settle down. Plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and allow your daughters to get married so that they too can have sons and daughters. Grow in number; do not dwindle away. Work to see that the city where I sent you as exiles enjoys peace and prosperity. Pray to the Lord for it. For as it prospers you will prosper." (Jeremiah 29:5 to 7, NET)²⁸

And then the timescale: "Only when the seventy years of Babylonian rule are over will I again take up consideration for you. Then I will fulfill my gracious promise to you and restore you to your homeland" (Jeremiah 29:10, NET).²⁸ Verse 11 follows straight after.

Now the wrinkle. May a Christian still take comfort from this verse?

Yes. But watch how. Not by lifting the sentence off the page and addressing it to yourself; that route ignores who "you" is and makes the verse promise something it never promised anyone. The route that works goes through the story, and there's a published procedure for walking it. Duvall and Hays call it the Interpretive Journey, and it has five steps: grasp the text in their town; measure the width of the river you have to cross, which is the distance in time, culture and covenant; cross on the bridge of the principle the text is stating; check that principle against the rest of the Bible; then grasp the text in your own town.²⁹

Run Jeremiah 29 through it. Their town: deported Judeans in Babylon, told that God has not finished with them and that the seventy years are part of his plan. The river: wide. Different covenant, different millennium, and they are a nation with a land to return to while you are not. The bridge: God's commitment to his people is not cancelled by the disaster he has brought them into, and his timescale can be longer than a lifetime. The rest of the Bible: Romans 8:28 and Hebrews 12 say something recognisably similar to Christians, so the principle isn't being invented here. Your town: you may take from it what the exiles took, that a long hard stretch is not evidence that God has dropped you. What you may not take is a guarantee that your own plans will prosper, because the letter never said that to them either.

That's the shape of the move. Lesson 7 gives you Fee and Stuart's formal tool for the same job, the "comparable particulars" test, and lesson 3 gives you the rule that governs step one.

Where this argument stops, and why

One step in that reasoning needs labelling, because it's the step most books take silently.

To get from Jeremiah's exiles to you, I said the promise travels through the new covenant. Christians agree that it does. They don't agree on what that means for Israel. Covenant theology holds that there's one covenant of grace unfolding through the Bible, and that the church is now the people of the promise made to Abraham. Dispensationalism holds that Israel and the church remain distinct, and that promises made to Israel about land and nation keep a literal future referent that the church doesn't absorb. Progressive covenantalism and progressive dispensationalism sit between them.³⁰ These are not fringe positions; they're the two main families of English-speaking evangelical reading, and which one you hold changes how you read Ezekiel 40 to 48, Romans 9 to 11, and most of the prophets.

Paul himself is careful here in a way that popular teaching often isn't. In Romans 11 he pictures Gentile believers as a wild olive shoot grafted into a cultivated tree, and then says: "do not boast over the branches. But if you boast, remember that you do not support the root, but the root supports you" (Romans 11:18, NET).³¹ Whatever else that image allows, it rules out the idea that the church has replaced Israel and inherited the address on the envelope.

So this course will say that a Christian may take Jeremiah 29 through the new covenant, and will not tell you which of those systems is right. Lesson 4 sets them out properly. When you meet a teacher who moves from an Old Testament promise to you without pausing at this step, they've made a decision. It may be the right one. You should be able to see that it was made.

Why position changes meaning

You've seen this work twice now, so let me state it plainly.

Meaning depends on position in the story. A promise given to exiles carries the exile with it. A law given at Sinai carries the covenant it belongs to. A psalm sung in the rebuilt Temple carries the memory of the ruined one. When you lift a sentence out of its act, the words stay and the meaning goes, and what fills the empty space is usually your own situation. That's why the card reading of Jeremiah 29:11 feels so natural: the sentence, emptied of Babylon, fills up with you.

The reader who knows where they are can ask the one question that stops most misreadings before they start: what did this mean then? Lesson 3 gives that question its formal name, Fee and Stuart's basic rule, that a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or readers.⁸ Everything in this lesson is that rule in its simplest form. You can't know what a passage could have meant to them until you know where on the map they were standing.

What people get wrong

"The Old Testament is law; the New Testament is grace." This is the oldest misreading of the shape there is, and it's usually answered too cheaply, so let me give it in its strong form first. Marcion, teaching in Rome around the year 144, was not a careless reader. He had noticed that the God who orders the destruction of Canaanite cities and the Father Jesus prays to are described very differently; he had read Paul's contrast between law and gospel and taken it at its word; and he concluded that the honest thing was to stop pretending the two were one God. He produced a Bible of his own: an edited Luke and ten of Paul's letters, with the Old Testament left out. Plenty of modern readers arrive at a softer version of the same place without ever hearing his name.³²

The church rejected him, and in doing so had to say out loud that it already had a larger collection and meant to keep it. The reason it could reject him is that the pattern he claimed to find isn't there. Grace shows up in the act everyone calls law: Exodus 34:6 is God describing himself, at Sinai, as compassionate and slow to anger, and it's the most quoted self-description in the Hebrew Bible. Law shows up in the act everyone calls grace: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish these things but to fulfill them" (Matthew 5:17, NET).³³ What changes across the gap is the covenant a reader stands under, not the character of the God on either side of it.

"Christians don't need the Old Testament." Count the quotations. Roger Nicole, working only with passages the New Testament writers introduce with a formula that shows they mean to quote, counted 224 direct citations; those citations draw on 278 different Old Testament verses, 94 from the Pentateuch, 99 from the Prophets, and 85 from the Writings, and his own conservative total of separate references runs to at least 295. Scholars who count looser echoes as well as formal quotations reach much higher: 613 on Toy's count, 1,640 on Dittmar's, 4,105 on Huehn's.³⁴ Jesus taught from the Old Testament; on the road to Emmaus he had nothing else to teach from, since none of the New Testament existed yet. Set the Old Testament aside and you've set aside the book the New Testament assumes you've read.

"The timeline is the order of the books." Said above, and worth repeating because it's the mistake that puts Amos after Nehemiah. It also puts Job wherever the reader last saw it, which is usually "somewhere near the end", though Job is the eighteenth book of thirty-nine and sits at the front of the poetry shelf. The Old Testament's shelf order is by kind of writing. The timeline is a separate thing you carry in your head, and this lesson has just handed it to you.

"The Old Testament is Judaism's Bible with a Christian sequel." Careful here. The same twenty-four books are, for Jews, the Tanakh: a complete Scripture with its own order and its own ending (Chronicles, and the call to go up to Jerusalem, as lesson 1 showed), read on its own terms by a living community today. Hayes tells her Yale students that she'll avoid the phrase "Old Testament" because it "sort of suggests the doctrine that the New Testament has somehow fulfilled or surpassed or antiquated the Bible of ancient Israel", and she's right that the phrase carries that claim.¹⁸ This course uses "Old Testament" because we hold the claim: we read the whole as pointing to Christ because Jesus did, and we say so as our faith. But we also say plainly that a Jewish reader reads the same books as a different story with its own integrity, ending not in Bethlehem but in the return to Zion, and that when this course describes that reading it will try to describe it as a Jewish reader would.

Practice

Connections

Lesson 1 gave you the shelves; this lesson gives you the timeline behind them, and you've now seen twice (Daniel last time, Ruth this time) that which shelf a book sits on is already a reading of it.

Every genre lesson from here on starts by asking where a passage sits on this map, because "what did it mean then?" can't be answered without it. Lesson 3 turns the three levels into a full method for reading narrative and gives you the rule this lesson kept pointing at. Lesson 4 comes back to the covenants in detail, Sinai above all, and to the systems that disagree about how they fit together. Lesson 7 gives the Jeremiah 29 move its proper name. Lesson 8 takes up the books in the four hundred years and the canons that carry them. Lesson 10 returns to the dates this lesson left unmarked, and to the question of who wrote the early books, as a real argument with two sides.

The Story of Scripture, later in this school, walks the six acts one at a time. This lesson is the map in a single sitting, so that the next verse you meet has an address.

Go deeper

• Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen, The Drama of Scripture, 3rd edition (Baker Academic, 2024). The six acts, one chapter each, with the interlude on the four hundred years. The scheme this course uses, from the people who drew it.
• Vaughan Roberts, God's Big Picture (IVP, 2002). Shorter and simpler, eight stages under one definition of the kingdom; the best first book on the shape of the Bible for someone with an evening a week.
• J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays, Grasping God's Word, 4th edition (Zondervan, 2020), chapters 1 and 2. The Interpretive Journey worked out at length, with exercises. If you want one procedure to carry into every passage, this is where to get it.
• The Jewish Study Bible, 2nd edition (JPS Tanakh translation, Oxford University Press, 2014). The Tanakh with introductions and notes from inside the tradition, including the festival readings and the logic of the Writings. The book Hayes sets for her own students, and the fastest way to see how differently the same books read in their own order.
• Christine Hayes, RLST 145, lecture 1, "The Parts of the Whole" (Open Yale Courses, 2006). Fifty minutes, free, with transcript. The Hebrew Bible as a library and as Israel's own story, taught by the historical-critical method rather than from a confession. Worth hearing in her own voice rather than in our summary of it.
• BibleProject, "The Story of the Bible" and the "How to Read the Bible" series at bibleproject.com. Free, short, and drawn; the poster videos for each book will tell you where it sits before you open it.
• Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th edition (Zondervan, 2014), chapter 5. The three levels of narrative and the ten principles that lesson 3 will build on.

Sources

1. NET Bible, netbible.org. Luke 24:27 and 24:44. Jesus reading "Moses and all the prophets" and "the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms" as about himself; the course's warrant, held by faith, for reading the whole as one story pointing to Christ. All scripture in this lesson is quoted from the NET unless another version is named. Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NET) are from the NET Bible® copyright ©1996, 2019 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
2. Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story, 3rd ed. (Baker Academic, 2024). Act titles as given: "God Establishes His Kingdom: Creation"; "Rebellion in the Kingdom: Fall"; "The King Chooses Israel: Redemption Initiated"; the interlude "A Kingdom Story Waiting for an Ending: The Intertestamental Period", described as "four hundred years of Israel's history between Malachi and Matthew"; "The Coming of the King: Redemption Accomplished"; "Spreading the News of the King: The Mission of the Church"; "The Return of the King: Redemption Completed". Chapter structure confirmed from the publisher's listing; the fact-check should confirm the interlude's wording against the book.
3. Vaughan Roberts, God's Big Picture: Tracing the Storyline of the Bible (IVP, 2002). Eight stages of the kingdom (the pattern, the perished, the promised, the partial, the prophesied, the present, the proclaimed, and the perfected kingdom) under the definition "God's people in God's place under God's rule and blessing".
4. Graeme Goldsworthy, According to Plan: The Unfolding Revelation of God in the Bible (IVP, 1991). A kingdom-centred reading of the whole story, named as an alternative scheme.
5. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 53 to 64, "The Stages of Revelation" (Libreria Editrice Vaticana; English text at vatican.va). "God communicates himself to man gradually. He prepares him to welcome by stages the supernatural Revelation that is to culminate in the person and mission of the incarnate Word" (53); the section headings "The covenant with Noah" (56 to 58), "God chooses Abraham" (59 to 61), and "God forms his people Israel" (62 to 64). Cited as the Catholic ordering of the same story by covenants rather than acts.
6. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.18.1 (c. 180), ANF translation at New Advent: Christ "commenced afresh the long line of human beings, and furnished us, in a brief, comprehensive manner, with salvation; so that what we had lost in Adam... we might recover in Christ Jesus". The classic statement of recapitulation; the ellipsis marks a clause omitted for length ("namely, to be according to the image and likeness of God").
7. Chapter counts. The Protestant Bible has 1,189 chapters (standard count; recorded in research/SOURCES.md). The per-act arithmetic in the chart is ours: Genesis 1 to 11 is 11 chapters; Genesis 12 to Malachi is 918 (929 Old Testament chapters less 11); the four Gospels are 89; Acts through Jude are 149; Revelation is 22. 11 + 918 + 89 + 149 + 22 = 1,189.
8. Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2014), chapters 1, 4, and 5. The Old Testament as "three-quarters of the bulk of the Bible"; "over 40 percent of the Old Testament is narrative"; the three levels of narrative (the whole plan of God, the story of Israel, the individual stories); the basic rule that "a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or readers".
9. Genesis 9:11, NET. The covenant with Noah.
10. Genesis 12:1 to 3, NET. The promise to Abraham: land, nation, name, and blessing to all families of the earth. The land is promised in verse 1 and again at 12:7; the earlier draft of this lesson announced a land promise and then quoted only verses 2 and 3, which do not contain it.
11. Galatians 3:8, NET. Paul reading Genesis 12:3 as the gospel "proclaimed" to Abraham "ahead of time".
12. Exodus 34:6, NET. God's self-description at Sinai; grace inside the Sinai covenant.
13. Deuteronomy 28:3, 5, 6, 16, 17, 19, 39, and 41, and 29:1, NET, fetched verbatim from the bible.org API. The blessings and curses of the Sinai covenant as restated on the plains of Moab. Note 29:1 (28:69 in the Hebrew versification): the covenant made "in the land of Moab" is distinguished by the text itself from "the covenant he had made with them at Horeb", so Deuteronomy is a renewal document rather than the Sinai narrative.
14. 2 Samuel 7:16, NET. The promise to David of a house and kingdom that "will stand before me permanently".
15. Jeremiah 31:31 to 33, NET (31:32 and 31:33 quoted). The new covenant promised to Israel and Judah in the shadow of exile; taken up at Luke 22:20 and quoted at length in Hebrews 8. Verse 32 locates the failure in the people ("they violated that covenant"), not in the covenant.
16. Christine Hayes, RLST 145, lecture 8, "Exodus: From Egypt to Sinai" (Open Yale Courses; transcript at oyc.yale.edu), on the six elements of the second-millennium Hittite suzerainty treaty form, including the historical prologue, and on Hittite treaties of "1500 to 1200, or so"; the underlying argument is George E. Mendenhall, "Covenant Forms in Israelite Tradition", The Biblical Archaeologist 17 (1954), 50 to 76. Exodus 19:4 quoted from the NET.
17. Tremper Longman III and Raymond B. Dillard, An Introduction to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Zondervan, 2006), for "essentially Mosaic" as the mainstream evangelical position on the Pentateuch (Moses as substantial source, later editing allowed). The critical alternatives are set out in John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Fortress, 2018). Lesson 10 treats the question at length; it is cited here only to keep "where a story is set" separate from "when a book was written".
18. Christine Hayes, RLST 145 Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), lecture 1, "The Parts of the Whole" (Open Yale Courses, Fall 2006), transcript at oyc.yale.edu. 586 BCE for the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the exile; her reason for saying "Hebrew Bible" rather than "Old Testament", quoted in the text. Lecture 14, "The Deuteronomistic History: Response to Catastrophe", for the fall of the northern kingdom to Assyria in 722. Hayes retired in 2023 and is Sterling Professor Emerita.
19. Avraham Biran and Joseph Naveh, "An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan", Israel Exploration Journal 43 (1993), and "The Tel Dan Inscription: A New Fragment", Israel Exploration Journal 45 (1995), 1 to 18. The stele: fragment A found July 1993, fragment B June 1994; ninth century BC; Aramaic; naming the "House of David"; now in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. What it establishes and what it does not is stated in the text; research/SOURCES.md, contested question 7, classifies the existence of a king David as established and the size of his kingdom as argued.
20. Ketef Hinnom silver amulets (KH1 and KH2), found 1979 in a burial chamber south-west of Jerusalem, dated on palaeographic and archaeological grounds to the late seventh or early sixth century BC; they carry a form of the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24 to 26 and are the oldest surviving fragments of a biblical text. Recorded in research/SOURCES.md; the excavation reports are Gabriel Barkay's.
21. Prologue to Sirach (c. 132 BC). Ben Sira's grandson, translating in Egypt, dates his own work by the reign of Ptolemy VIII and refers three times to "the Law, the Prophets, and the rest of the books". Cited here as a dated Jewish document composed inside the four hundred years.
22. Ruth 1:1, NET.
23. Judges 21:25, NET: "In those days Israel had no king. Each man did what he considered to be right." The familiar wording "everyone did what was right in his own eyes" is the ESV and KJV rendering and is not quoted here; see Editorial Standards 4.7.
24. Ruth 4:17 and 4:22, NET. The book's ending in Obed, Jesse, and David. The second half of 4:17 is paraphrased rather than quoted because the NET renders it with a dash.
25. G. K. Beale's observation that the Old Testament authors did not exhaustively grasp what they wrote is common ground between covenant theology and dispensationalism; see research/SOURCES.md, contested question 5, where both positions are recorded as granting it. Beale's own extended treatment is Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Baker Academic, 2012).
26. John W. Wenham, Christ and the Bible, 3rd ed. (Wipf & Stock, 2009 reprint). The argument that a Christian's doctrine of Scripture begins from Jesus' own use of it, offered here as the faith's own case for the top-level reading and labelled as such.
27. "Megillot, the Five", Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), jewishencyclopedia.com, for Ruth as one of the five festival scrolls (with Song of Songs, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther), read at Shavuot. The Jewish Encyclopedia is a 1906 reference work and is cited only for the scroll list, which is not in dispute; the practice it describes continues, and a current source from inside the tradition is The Jewish Study Bible, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2014), listed in Go deeper. The article records a midrashic reason for the Ruth and Shavuot pairing and flags it as a later addition; the harvest and Torah connections given in the text are the standard ones and are not attributed to the article.
28. Jeremiah 29:1 to 14, NET (verses 1, 4, 5 to 7, 10, and 11 quoted). The letter to the exiles: addressee, instructions, the seventy years, the promise.
29. J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays, Grasping God's Word, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2020). The Interpretive Journey: grasp the text in their town; measure the width of the river to cross (differences of time, culture, and covenant); cross the principlizing bridge; consult the biblical map, checking the principle against the whole Bible; grasp the text in our town.
30. research/SOURCES.md, contested question 5, "How the Old Testament relates to the New", which records covenant theology, dispensationalism, and the progressive positions between them, and instructs that the course present them as a range and not resolve the question. Primary statements: Charles C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism, rev. ed. (Moody, 1995); Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant (Crossway, 2012); Craig A. Blaising and Darrell L. Bock, Progressive Dispensationalism (Victor, 1993).
31. Romans 11:17 to 18, NET (verse 18 quoted).
32. F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (IVP, 1988), on Marcion: Rome, c. 144; an edited Luke plus ten Pauline letters; rejection of the Old Testament; the church's response as evidence it already held a wider collection. Marcion's own writings do not survive and are known through his opponents, chiefly Tertullian's Against Marcion, which is a limit worth remembering when his position is described.
33. Matthew 5:17, NET.
34. Roger Nicole, "New Testament Use of the Old Testament", in Carl F. H. Henry (ed.), Revelation and the Bible (Baker, 1958), 137 to 151, reproduced at bible-researcher.com. 224 direct citations introduced by a definite formula; 278 different Old Testament verses cited within that tally (94 Pentateuch, 99 Prophets, 85 Writings); a conservative total of at least 295 separate references; and the looser allusion counts of Toy (613), Dittmar (1,640), and Huehn (4,105).
35. The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text (Jewish Publication Society, 1917), public domain. 2 Chronicles 36:23. Used for the Tanakh's ending because it is the Jewish translation of the Jewish arrangement; see Editorial Standards 4.7.