A way of reading you can keep: method, tools, and a plan

"They read from the book of God's law, explaining it and imparting insight. Thus the people gained understanding from what was read." (Nehemiah 8:8, NET)¹

"These Jews were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they eagerly received the message, examining the scriptures carefully every day to see if these things were so." (Acts 17:11, NET)¹

Two scenes, about five hundred years apart. In the first, Jerusalem's returned exiles stand in a square from early morning until midday while Ezra reads the Law aloud and thirteen named Levites teach the people the law while the people remain standing.¹ In the second, a synagogue in Berea hears Paul preach and then, rather than taking his word for it, opens the Scriptures every day to check.¹

Put them together and you have the whole of this lesson. Reading with the sense given, so that what you read is what the writer meant. And reading daily, on a schedule, with other people, so that it keeps happening after the enthusiasm has gone. Eleven lessons have given you rules for eleven kinds of text. This one gives you one thing to carry: four questions, a handful of free tools, and a plan you'll still be following in February.

Four questions you already know

You've been asking them since lesson 2. Here they are in one place.

1. What kind of writing is this? Story, law, poem, proverb, oracle, gospel, letter, vision. Lesson 3's rule: genre first, because genres are contracts, and the wrong contract misreads every sentence while feeling perfectly clear.
2. Where in the story is it? Which act of the six, which covenant is in force, who is speaking to whom. Lesson 2's rule: meaning depends on position. A promise to exiles is not a promise to graduates.
3. What did it mean then? To the person who wrote it and the people who first heard it. Fee and Stuart's basic rule, which you met in lesson 3 and used at full strength in lesson 7: a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or readers.²
4. What does it mean now? Where our situation matches theirs, the word applies as written. Where it doesn't, find the principle the particular carries, and be honest about which is which. That is the comparable-particulars test from lesson 7.³

Why these four and not forty? Look back at every misreading this course has shown you. Jeremiah 29:11 on the card skipped question 2. Proverbs 22:6 as a guarantee skipped question 1. Philippians 4:13 on the gym wall skipped question 3. Head coverings applied without argument, or dismissed without argument, skipped question 4. I've not found a misreading in this course that didn't skip at least one of them, and I've not found one that survived all four. That's the mechanism: the questions force the decisions a careless reader makes without noticing.

If you go on to How to Study the Bible, you'll meet the same four under other names. Howard Hendricks, whose Bible-study course Dallas Theological Seminary now gives away free, taught three steps: observation, interpretation, application.⁴ Questions 1 and 2 are observation; question 3 is interpretation; question 4 is application. Duvall and Hays describe the same path as grasping the text "in their town", measuring the width of the river between their world and ours, crossing on a principle, and grasping the text "in our town".⁵ The vocabulary differs and the method does not, which is worth knowing before you open either of them.

Context in widening circles

The four questions tell you what to ask. The habit that answers them is to read outward from the verse in circles: read outward from the verse in circles.

Take Philippians 4:13, since you've done it once and can watch the circles work. The sentence says "I am able to do all things through the one who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:13, NET).¹ The paragraph (4:10 to 13) says the "all things" are hunger and plenty, abundance and need. The book is a letter from prison to a church that sent money. The testament tells you what "in Christ" means across Paul's letters. The whole Bible tells you where contentment sits in the story of God's people. By the third circle the gym-wall reading is gone, and nothing outside the page was needed to remove it.

Or Psalm 137:9, the hardest verse in lesson 5. The sentence is a wish for the death of Babylon's children. The paragraph is a lament sung by people who had watched it done to theirs. The book is Israel's prayer book, which means this is spoken to God, not commanded by him. The testament supplies the covenant curses the psalm echoes. The whole Bible supplies Romans 12:19, vengeance left to God, which is what the psalmist is doing. Five circles, and the verse is still terrible, and it is no longer an endorsement.

The circles are not a formula for making hard verses easy. They are a way of making sure you've read the whole of what's there before you decide what it means. Most misreadings this course has named came from stopping at circle one.

How to start a book you've never read

A whole book is different from a passage. You don't yet know its shape, and until you do, every paragraph floats. Fee and Stuart wrote a companion volume, How to Read the Bible Book by Book, that walks through all sixty-six with the same four headings each time: orienting data, overview, specific advice for reading, and a walk through.⁶ Those four headings are also the pattern for the reading guide you'll write for this course's project, so learn them now.

Orienting data is the who, when, to whom, from where, and why, plus the genre and the place in the story. For an argued question (who wrote Hebrews, when Jonah was written), you write both positions, which is exactly the three-way sort from lesson 10 applied to a book's front matter.

Overview is the book's shape in a paragraph: how it begins, turns, and ends.

Specific advice for reading is what a first-time reader will get wrong and what to watch for instead: the genre's rules, the repeated word, the character the narrator never praises.

A walk through is the sections in order, each in a line or two.

Here is how to gather that from a cold start, and it costs one sitting. Read the book straight through once, fast, in your reading translation from lesson 11, without stopping to look anything up. Short books take minutes: Crossway's reading-time survey puts Ruth and Philippians at about fifteen minutes each.⁷ Then read it again slowly with the four questions and a pencil. The first pass gives you the overview; the second gives you everything else. People who skip the first pass end up writing a walk through with no sense of where they're walking to.

Worked example 1: Philemon, cold

You read Philemon in lesson 7 and reconstructed the situation from the letter alone. Now do the whole method on it, as if you'd never seen it, so you can see what a finished reading of one book looks like.

Question 1, genre. A letter, and an occasional one: it exists because of one situation. So the rules of lesson 7 apply. Think paragraphs; reconstruct the situation; expect one side of a conversation.

Question 2, position. Act five, the mission of the church, in the decade or so after Paul's letters to the Corinthians and Romans, while he is a prisoner (verse 1, verse 9). The new covenant is in force. Slavery is a Roman institution that neither Paul nor Philemon can vote against.

Question 3, then-meaning. Paul appeals for "my child, whose spiritual father I have become during my imprisonment, that is, Onesimus" (verse 10), Philemon's slave, now a Christian, being sent back.¹ The request is that Philemon receive him "no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, as a dear brother" (verse 16), and "accept him as you would me" (verse 17).¹ Paul could command (verse 8) and chooses to ask, offers to pay any debt (verse 18), and closes by saying he knew "that you would do even more than what I am asking you to do" (verse 21).¹ What did it mean to Philemon, sitting in his own house church hearing this read? That the apostle who brought him to faith (verse 19) was asking him, in front of everyone, to treat his slave as his brother, and was leaving the "even more" for Philemon to work out.

Orienting data, in the pattern: from Paul, in prison, with Timothy; to Philemon, with Apphia, Archippus, and the house church; about Onesimus; a personal letter; act five, new covenant; one of the few letters in the New Testament occasioned from the writer's side rather than by a problem among the readers.² Overview: greeting and thanksgiving (1 to 7), the appeal (8 to 20), the confident close (21 to 25). Advice for reading: notice what Paul never says (he never uses the word "free"), and notice the audience in verse 2. Walk through: the three sections above, each in a line. Two readings and about an hour produced all of that.

Worked example 2: Jonah, where the method has to handle an argued genre

Philemon was easy because question 1 answered itself in the first line. Jonah is the case with a wrinkle, and the wrinkle is that the first question is itself contested.

Question 1, genre, and why it is argued. Jonah sits among the twelve prophets, and lesson 4 taught you to expect collections of oracles there. Open it and you find a story about a prophet, with one line of preaching in the whole book: "At the end of 40 days, Nineveh will be overthrown!" (3:4).¹ Everything else is narrative, and narrative with an edge. The prophet runs (1:3). The pagan sailors pray while he sleeps. The Assyrians, Israel's cruellest enemy, repent "from the greatest to the least of them" (3:5) at one sentence, and the king orders the animals into sackcloth along with the people (3:8).¹ Jonah explains that he fled precisely because he knew God was "a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in mercy" (4:2), quoting Exodus 34:6 as a complaint.¹

History establishes that Nineveh was a real Assyrian capital and that a prophet named Jonah son of Amittai appears in 2 Kings 14:25, in the reign of Jeroboam II in the eighth century BC.¹ Scholars argue about the rest. Christine Hayes at Yale calls the book "a comic tale about a reluctant prophet" and "this little satire", and says its date "really can't be ascertained and you will hear arguments in both directions".⁸ The Society for Old Testament Study's guide is worth reading whole rather than in pieces, because it is choosing between non-historical genres rather than weighing history against parable. It opens the question with "Granted that the book is not a historical narrative, how should one regard its genre?", and gives its reasons for that premise: the book calls the Assyrian king the king of Nineveh, its picture of the city's size is exaggerated, and a mass instantaneous repentance of Ninevites is "unlikely and unknown to history". Within that premise it holds the book is "parabolic in intention" but "far too long to be a parable in the strict literary sense", calls it "a didactic story about a prophet", notes that "some have called it a satire", and dates it post-exilic, "probably the 4th century BCE".⁹ Conservative readers reply that the narrative is set in a real reign with a real prophet, and that Jesus says "The people of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it because they repented when Jonah preached to them" (Matthew 12:41), which reads as history rather than fable.¹ Critical readers answer that Jesus could use a known story the way any teacher uses one, and that "the sign of the prophet Jonah" (12:39, 40) is about three days and a return, not about genre.¹

We hold by faith that the book is God's word and true. We read it as an account of something that happened, because that is how Jesus seems to us to speak of it, and we say plainly that a Christian who reads it as an inspired parable is not thereby denying Scripture; that is the honest range. The mockery is old, too. Around 409 Augustine answered a set of questions a correspondent had put to him, one of them about the fish and the gourd, and the question as it reached him ended "Questions such as these I have seen discussed by Pagans amidst loud laughter, and with great scorn". Augustine's reply was that either every miracle worked by divine power is incredible, or there is no reason to disbelieve this one, since the same objection would sink the resurrection.²⁰ What the argument does not change is the reading. Satire or history, the comic touches are on the page, and they point the same way.

Question 2, position. Set in the eighth century, in the divided kingdom, with Assyria the coming threat; if the critical date is right, written to a post-exilic community that had every reason to resent the nations. Either way, the covenant of Sinai is in force, Exodus 34:6 is the creed Jonah quotes, and the reader is Israel, being asked how it feels about God's mercy reaching Nineveh.

Question 3, then-meaning. Read badly, Jonah is a fish story, or a children's tale about obeying God the first time. The fish gets three verses. Read well, it is a book about God's mercy to enemies and a reader who resents it. The clue is that the prophet is the anti-hero: every pagan in the book behaves better than he does. The ending confirms it. God asks, "You were upset about this little plant, something for which you did not work... Should I not be more concerned about Nineveh, this enormous city? There are more than 120,000 people in it who do not know right from wrong, as well as many animals." (4:10 to 11)¹ The book stops there. Jonah never answers. The silence is the device. The question is left with the reader, and the first reader was Israel.

The wrinkle, stated. The method handled a book whose genre is argued because question 1 does not require a verdict; it requires that you know what the options are and read with the features that are actually on the page. Your reading guide's orienting data will say "genre: narrative about a prophet, with satirical features; whether it records history is argued; here are the two positions". That is a better guide than one that pretends the question away in either direction.

The tools, and which question each one answers

You don't need Hebrew or Greek to read the Bible well. You need the four questions and a few free tools, and you need to know which tool answers which question, because the most common mistake with tools is reaching for a Greek lexicon to answer a question the paragraph would have answered.

For question 1 and the overview: BibleProject. A five- to ten-minute animated overview of every book, with the shape drawn on a poster, free at bibleproject.com and on YouTube.¹¹ Use it after your first read, as a check.

For questions 2 and 3: a study Bible, read knowingly, and the free option first. The notes at the bottom of the page give the date, setting, and cross-references, and they are useful. They are also one scholar's help, dated, fallible, and written from a position. Find out who wrote the notes in yours and which tradition they come from. They are not Scripture, and a note that says "this means X" is a claim to be checked against the circles, not a verdict.

For seeing the words: BibleGateway. Dozens of translations side by side, free, at biblegateway.com.¹² This is the tool from lesson 11: when two translations differ, you've found a place where a decision was made, and the difference is your prompt to ask what the Hebrew or Greek allows.

For the decision behind the words: the NET Bible. A translation that shows its working, with more than 60,000 translators' notes explaining choices, free at netbible.org.¹³ When BibleGateway shows you a difference, the NET note usually tells you why.

For the word under the English: STEP Bible and Blue Letter Bible. STEP Bible, built with Tyndale House in Cambridge, is free, works offline, and puts the tagged Hebrew and Greek under every English word so you can see what's there without knowing the alphabet.¹⁴ Blue Letter Bible does the same with Strong's numbers, an inline interlinear, cross-references, and a library of commentaries.¹⁵ Both will show you in a minute that the word behind "slave" in Philemon 16 is the word Paul uses of himself in Romans 1:1, doulos, which English versions variously render "slave", "servant", and "bondservant", sometimes differently in the two places.

For reading and listening: ESV.org and YouVersion. ESV.org gives the ESV free with cross-references and audio; the YouVersion app carries most translations and hosts most of the reading plans below, including BibleProject's.¹⁶

Here is where this course stops. Knowing that STEP shows you the Greek word is not the same as knowing how to do a word study: how to check every use, how to weigh a range of meaning, how not to commit the errors that a half-trained reader with a lexicon commits daily. Cross-reference technique, the use of a concordance, and how to read a commentary against its author's position are the same kind of skill. All of that is How to Study the Bible, the next course, and it assumes what this one has given you: the genres, the story, the basic rule, and the four questions. This lesson names the tools so that you know they exist and which question each one answers. It does not pretend that a lookup is a study.

A plan that survives February

The number matters less than the shape of it. Seventy hours once is a lot. Twelve minutes a day is not, and the difference between those two ways of spending seventy hours is the whole reason a plan exists.

The mechanism is simpler than the one people usually reach for. A little on a schedule beats a lot once mostly because it happens at all, and because a book read across two weeks accumulates context in your head that a book read in one evening does not.

Be careful with the learning research here, because it is easy to misuse and this lesson is not going to. Cepeda and colleagues' review of 317 experiments found that study spread over time reliably beats the same time spent in one block, and that the best gap grows with how long you need to keep the material.¹⁷ But that result is about coming back to the same material, and a straight-through reading plan gives you new material every day, so it is not spacing in that sense. Where the research does bite is in two specific places. M'Cheyne's calendar has you read the New Testament and Psalms twice in the year, and that genuinely is spaced re-reading of the same text.¹⁷¹⁹ And the log's demand for one observation per sitting is retrieval practice, which is the effect Roediger and Karpicke measured: producing something from memory makes it stick in a way that rereading does not.¹⁸ A log makes the schedule real, because the schedule you don't record is the one you'll believe you kept.

The plans worth knowing.

M'Cheyne. Robert Murray M'Cheyne, minister of St Peter's, Dundee, drew up a calendar for his congregation in December 1842 and called it "Daily Bread".¹⁹ Four chapters a day, two for the family and two "secret", and over the year "the Old Testament once, the New Testament and Psalms twice".¹⁹ On 1 January you read Genesis 1, Matthew 1, Ezra 1, and Acts 1, and the whole of Scripture is in play from the first morning. It is the classic, it is free at mcheyne.info and on BibleGateway, and it is a lot: four chapters is about fifteen minutes on a good day.

A Gospel-first plan. One Gospel, a chapter a day, then the next. BibleGateway's "Read the Gospels in 40 Days" is the ready-made version.¹² For someone new, or coming back, this is where I'd start: the person the whole book is about, in the order the church has always begun.

The one-year plan with the map. BibleProject's "One Story That Leads to Jesus" plan on YouVersion reads the whole Bible in a year with their overview video at the start of each book, so lesson 2's map is redrawn for you as you go.¹¹

The New Testament in a year. On BibleGateway; a chapter most days, about three minutes on Crossway's own rate of twelve minutes for the whole Bible.¹² Small enough to keep with a job and children.

Which one? The one you will actually keep, and M'Cheyne said so himself. Before the calendar he listed the dangers of using it, and the fourth was "a yoke too heavy to bear": "If this be the case with any, throw aside the fetter, and feed at liberty in the sweet garden of God. My desire is not to cast a snare upon you, but to be a helper of your joy."¹⁹ The man who wrote the most demanding plan in common use told his people to drop it the moment it became a burden. The man who wrote the most demanding plan in common use told his own congregation to drop it the moment it became a burden, which is the measure: a plan you admire and don't keep is worth less than a chapter a day you do.

Reading together. Look again at the two scenes this lesson opened with. Ezra reads to a crowd; the Levites explain it and impart insight; the Bereans examine the scriptures as a synagogue. M'Cheyne set out his purpose for a shared calendar as wanting "all might be feeding in the same portion of the green pasture at the same time", and among the advantages he numbered, the third is that friends will "have a subject for profitable conversation in the portions read that day" and the fifth that "the sweet bond of Christian love and unity will be strengthened".¹⁹ Private reading was rare for most of the church's history, because copies were expensive and few people could read; the normal mode was reading together, aloud, with someone explaining. That is a fact about literacy and cost rather than a rule, and Acts has a man reading Isaiah by himself in a chariot. But the practice the Bible mostly shows is the shared one. Find one other person and read the same book on the same days. The log you'll keep for the project is easier to keep when someone else will see it.

What people get wrong

"I need Hebrew and Greek to read the Bible well." You need the four questions, a good translation, and the tools above. Nearly every misreading in this course was made by people reading in their own language and skipping a question, and the languages would not have saved them; Philippians 4:13 is just as misreadable in Greek. The languages come later, if at all, and How to Study the Bible will show you how far the tools take you without them.

"Reading through in a year is the mark of a serious Christian." M'Cheyne, who wrote the year-plan, listed formality, self-righteousness, and careless reading as its first three dangers before anyone had used it.¹⁹ A year-plan is one good way to read. So is one Gospel slowly. A year-plan is one good way to read. So is one Gospel slowly. Neither is the measure, and the chapter count least of all.

"Study Bible notes are Scripture." They are one scholar's help, and a good study Bible says so on its own title page. Know who wrote yours. Weigh the notes as you'd weigh a good teacher: gratefully, and against the text.

"Reading alone is the ideal." Nehemiah 8 and Acts 17 are both crowd scenes, and M'Cheyne's calendar was written for a congregation. Solitary reading is fine and necessary; it was never the norm, and a reader with no one to ask "does that make sense?" is the reader most likely to keep a misreading for years.

Practice

Connections

This lesson gathers the course. Lesson 2 gave you the story and lesson 3 the genre rule; together they're questions 1 and 2. Lesson 7 gave you the basic rule and comparable particulars at full strength; they're questions 3 and 4. Lesson 5's lament shape turned up in Habakkuk, lesson 4's prophets in Jonah, lesson 10's three-way sort in the orienting data, and lesson 11's translation choice in the "read it fast first" advice. The test of whether this worked is narrow. Open a book you have never read, run the four questions, and see whether you come out with a reading you can defend from the page. If you cannot yet, the lesson to go back to is the one whose genre you stumbled on.

Where it leads: How to Study the Bible takes the tools named here and teaches the skills this lesson deliberately left alone (observation in depth, word studies, cross-references, commentaries). The Story of Scripture walks the six acts one by one. And the project is where this lesson stops being something you have read. One short book over fourteen days with the log kept, then one more straight reading and a guide written for somebody else.

Go deeper

• Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible Book by Book: A Guided Tour (Zondervan, 2002). The pattern this lesson's reading guide uses, done for all sixty-six books; keep it beside you for the project and check your orienting data against theirs.
• Howard Hendricks, How to Read the Bible Like a Seminary Professor, Dallas Theological Seminary, free. Four weeks of video on observation, interpretation, and application from the teacher who made those three words standard; the bridge to the next course.
• J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays, Grasping God's Word, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2020), the chapters on the Interpretive Journey. The four questions as a five-step procedure with exercises.
• Christine Hayes, RLST 145, lecture 24, "Alternative Visions: Esther, Ruth, and Jonah", Open Yale Courses. The critical reading of Jonah from its own teacher, free with transcript; hear it at full strength before you write your orienting data.
• Tremper Longman III and Raymond Dillard, An Introduction to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Zondervan, 2006), the chapter on Jonah. The standard evangelical introduction's treatment of the genre and historicity question.
• Robert Murray M'Cheyne, "Daily Bread" (December 1842), the two-page preface. Read the dangers and the advantages before you choose a plan; it is the wisest short thing ever written about Bible reading plans, by the man who wrote the hardest one.

Sources

1. NET Bible, netbible.org, read via the bible.org API. Nehemiah 8:1 to 8; Acts 17:10 to 12; Philemon 1, 2, 8, 10, 16 to 19, 21; Jonah 1:1 to 3, 3:4 to 5, 3:8, 3:10, 4:2, 4:10 to 11; Matthew 12:39 to 41; Habakkuk 1:1 to 4; 2 Kings 14:25 (referred to, not quoted). 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. See Editorial Standards 4.7 for why this course uses the NET.
2. Fee, G. D. and Stuart, D., How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2014), chs. 1, 3, and 4. The basic rule, "a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or readers"; letters as occasional documents; Philemon as one of the few letters occasioned from the writer's side. As recorded in SOURCES.md and used in lessons 3 and 7.
3. Fee and Stuart (2014), ch. 4, the "comparable particulars" rule for applying an epistle. As used in lesson 7.
4. Dallas Theological Seminary, How to Read the Bible Like a Seminary Professor, taught by Howard G. Hendricks (1924 to 2013), "completely free", video teaching with reflection questions and assignments. Page read at draft time. The observation-interpretation-application scheme is the method associated with Hendricks and taught in DTS's Bible Study Methods course, as recorded in SOURCES.md.
5. Duvall, J. S. and Hays, J. D., Grasping God's Word, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2020). The Interpretive Journey: the text in their town; the width of the river; the principlizing bridge; the biblical map; the text in our town. As recorded in SOURCES.md.
6. Fee, G. D. and Stuart, D., How to Read the Bible Book by Book: A Guided Tour (Zondervan, 2002). Each book treated under Orienting Data, Overview, Specific Advice for Reading, and A Walk Through; the publisher's description of the four headings confirmed at draft time.
7. Crossway, "Infographic: You Have More Time for Bible Reading than You Think". "In August 2018, we surveyed over 11,000 readers"; "In just 12 minutes per day, you could read the whole Bible in a year"; "In just 6 minutes per day, you could read the entire New Testament over the course of 6 months"; "about 10 hours total to read all four Gospels and the book of Acts"; "about 15 hours to read all of the Prophets, from Isaiah to Malachi"; Ruth and Philippians about fifteen minutes each. The seventy-three-hour figure is twelve minutes multiplied by 365 days; the page does not state a total or say whether the pace is aloud or silent. Read at draft time.
8. Hayes, C., Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), RLST 145, lecture 24, "Alternative Visions: Esther, Ruth, and Jonah", Open Yale Courses (2006). "A comic tale about a reluctant prophet named Jonah"; "this little satire"; "The date of the book of Jonah really can't be ascertained and you will hear arguments in both directions." Transcript read at draft time.
9. The Society for Old Testament Study, "Jonah", study guide. "Though parabolic in intention, it is far too long to be a parable in the strict literary sense"; "a didactic story about a prophet"; some "have called it a satire"; "agreed by modern scholars to date from the post-exilic period, probably the 4th century BCE". Read at draft time.
10. Vatican Museums, Museo Pio Cristiano, Sarcophagus "of Jonah", inv. 31448, "c. 300", "discovered in the worksite of the new St. Peter's at the end of the sixteenth century", "the most beautiful example of the sculptural cycle that the first Christian artists dedicated to the story of Jonah"; scenes of Jonah cast into the sea, cast out onto the rock, and resting under the plant, with the raising of Lazarus and Peter. Photograph: Wikimedia Commons, "Fronte del sarcofago di giona, 280-300 dc., da necropoli vaticana 01.JPG", by Sailko, 26 November 2013, CC BY 3.0; licence and URL confirmed via the Commons API at draft time.
11. BibleProject, videos and reading plans. "Explore over thirty BibleProject reading plans available in YouVersion's Bible app"; the "One Story That Leads to Jesus" plan as the one-year plan with videos. The Jonah overview, YouTube dLIabZc0O4c, "Book of Jonah Summary: A Complete Animated Overview", channel BibleProject, verified via YouTube's oEmbed endpoint at draft time.
12. BibleGateway, reading plans: "Read the Gospels in 40 Days"; "New Testament in a Year"; "M'Cheyne Bible Reading Plan"; the chronological and Old/New Testament plans. Page read at draft time.
13. NET Bible, netbible.com: "over 60,000 notes in all", free online. Page read at draft time. SOURCES.md records the exact count as 60,932 from bible.org.
14. STEP Bible, stepbible.org, with its copyrights and licences page: the software freely distributed under a BSD licence; the tagged datasets "with attribution to Tyndale House, Cambridge UK" under CC BY-NC 3.0; a downloadable offline version. Read at draft time.
15. Blue Letter Bible, blueletterbible.org: "a free, searchable online Bible program" with "in-depth study tools", an "Inline Interlinear", lexical and morphology resources, cross-references, and text and audio commentaries. Read at draft time.
16. ESV.org and YouVersion (bible.com), as recorded in SOURCES.md under free resources.
17. Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T. and Rohrer, D., "Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis", Psychological Bulletin 132, 354 to 380 (2006). 317 experiments; spacing reliably beats massing; the best gap grows with the retention interval. As used in How to Learn Anything, lesson 4.
18. Roediger, H. L. and Karpicke, J. D., "Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention", Psychological Science 17, 249 to 255 (2006). Rereading wins at five minutes (81% against 75%) and loses at one week (42% against 56%). As used in How to Learn Anything, lesson 1.
19. M'Cheyne, R. M., "Daily Bread: Being a Calendar for Reading through the Word of God in a Year", dated "December 1842", in the edition prepared by David F. Haslam (January 2000) at mcheyne.info. "The Old Testament once, the New Testament and Psalms twice"; the calendar's Family and Secret columns with two chapters each, beginning Genesis 1, Matthew 1, Ezra 1, Acts 1; the four dangers ("Formality", "Self-righteousness", "Careless reading", "A yoke too heavy to bear") and the sentence "throw aside the fetter, and feed at liberty in the sweet garden of God. My desire is not to cast a snare upon you, but to be a helper of your joy"; the advantages, including "all might be feeding in the same portion of the green pasture at the same time" and "The sweet bond of Christian love and unity will be strengthened". PDF read at draft time.
20. Augustine, Letter 102 (to Deogratias), section 30, c. 409, NPNF translation at New Advent. On the questions about Jonah in the fish and the gourd: "Questions such as these I have seen discussed by Pagans amidst loud laughter, and with great scorn." Read at draft time.