Reading the Old Testament

We learned last week in my hermeneutics class that the Hebrew Bible, what we call our Old Testament, is arranged in a different order than our standard English translations. I’ve decided to read it in this order for my trip through the Bible this semester. I thought others might be interested to see this order as well.

Moses
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy

The Prophets
Joshua, Judges, Samuel/Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, The Twelve (“minor” prophets)

Hagiographa (“Holy Writings”)
Ruth, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Daniel, Esther, Ezra/Nehemiah, Chronicles

Two notes from this order that I thought were particularly interesting:

• One had to do with the book of Ruth. In this order it comes just before the book of Psalms. Why? Because it serves as an introduction to the Psalms, ending with a genealogy of David, who wrote most of the Psalms.
• The second is the placement of the book of Chronicles. It always seemed somewhat oppressive to have to read Chronicles immediately after Samuel/Kings. It repeats much of the same information and it seems like the history of Israel drags on and on. But it is different than Samuel/Kings. It begins not with the story of Israel in Canaan after the Exodus, but back at Adam in the garden. It’s almost like a summary recap of everything that has gone on in the whole of the Old Testament. And it restates the whole as a single story, which looks ahead to the fulfillment that we find in the New Testament.

So I’ll give this order a try this semester and see how it works out. I think that putting Chronicles at the end will be extremely helpful, not just in keeping me reading but also in really understanding and remembering the content of the Old Testament.
 
 
 

Spring Lawnmower Brain

The second week of classes is over, and I think this one flowed a little more smoothly than the last. My calcified brain is starting to remember how to study again, but I still have a ways to go before all the neurons are firing in sequence.

It’s like trying to start the lawnmower for the first time in the Spring. It’s been sitting all winter and the gas has gone bad; the cord seems stuck in the case; and you wrench your back trying to get the engine to turn over. Maybe it does turn over a few times and bellows thick smoke from the exhaust. But then it dies and you repeat the process again. Prime. Pull. Don’t over prime or you’ll flood the engine. Pull. Eventually (if you’re lucky) it’ll start and you can get down to the business of lawn maintenance. If only you’d done a little better job of lawnmower maintenance you wouldn’t have to suffer every year. But once you do get it started, it usually works fine all Summer.

Okay. So that’s how my mind is right now. I think it might have been flooded last week with more information than is good for it.

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I’m hoping my posts here won’t always be so lame. So far they have mostly been subjective and vague reports of what’s been going on in my life and how I’m adapting to school. Those kinds of posts are not unvaluable. I like being free to talk about my experience of life and what’s happening in the moment. But there’s only so much I can say about me. “I’m at school… and, um, I’m at school. Yeah.” I’m exaggerating, of course, but…

…my goal is to post something about something in the next week that doesn’t have anything to do with me. A book. (That would be novel.) An idea. An argument. An event. Something. Something that’s not me. A story. A joke. A review. Who knows. I need to branch out. Maybe once the crazy Spring lawnmower brain stops sputtering…