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Are you tired of flipping through pages of Hillbilly names and ancient cities, hoping to find the page before the preacher stops reading? Do all the books of the Bible seem to be just a jumble?
You can learn to know where the book you want is through a memory device that organizes this study. I will show you the main plot of the Bible, describe the books and their natures (and give hints on the correct use of each of them).

The Old Testament

Books of the Bible
Genesis	Moses	Histories	Wisdom	Prophets	Gospels	Church
			*
1	4	4	4	4	4	7
		e l f 2 e l f		12	A 13 h	R
//-----------------Old Testament-----------------//					New Testament
The lesson for Today is from the Table of Contents

The New Testament

The Bible is usually divided up into six groups;
The Law (which is Genesis and Moses)/ The Histories of the Israelites in Israel/ The Wisdom Books/ The Prophets (that fit in the end of the histories)/ The Gospels (Books of the Messiah)/ and The Writings of the Church.

From these groups I have devised a skeleton line of seven digits - one book, five sets of four books, and seven books; (one, five fours and seven).

and for each of these sets of books, for each numeral on the skelaton line, are four aspects.

The First Aspect is most often the flashiest and most memorable
The Second Aspect is the simplest and most characteristic of that set for that numeral in the skelaton line
The Third Aspect most often refers to priests or geography,
and the Fourth Aspect is the more disputed and mystical.

Each numeral on the skelaton line has four aspects (except the first has three sets of aspects to provide needed background.)
Actually, I have included three sets of four aspects in delving into Genesis, because Genesis gives so much background to the whole plot of the Bible, that that much intro, at least, is needed.

The Law is known by many names;

Torah,
the Pentateuch,
the Books of Moses,
The Law,
Moses;

all of these expressions refer to the same group of five books. Though they are called Moses, Moses does not appear in the first book.
A knowledge of the first book of the Bible is necessary for the understanding of the rest.

We will deal more with Genesis than with the other books in order to form the correct background. Specifically, we will deal with four eras, with four Promises of God to Abraham and the four generations of Patriarchs (Abraham is the first).
It begins with the Creation, the1st aspect, the most well known, and certainly one of the most flashy parts of the Bible.
It goes on to the times before the flood (called Antediluvial, considered the simplest statement and 2nd aspect, because here is a whole creation piece from beginning to end; the people multiply, the angels get involved, a selection of the people is made (Enoch is chosen for angelhood), evil abounds, and the Lord saves a small remnant for the next step.
Genesis continues with the geographic dispersal of mankind over the face of the earth, the 3rd aspect.
The Fourth Aspect of the Book of Genesis is the dealings of the Creator God with Abraham and his family.

THE Patriarchs and THE PROMISES

Abraham is the most memorable, the flashiest of the Patriarchs. He is described as God's friend and he is the one whose belief in the promises is counted by God to be Righteous.

God made four promises to him.

1.that he would have a Son
2 that his sonwould become a people
3. That the people would live in a promised land
and
4. that all of the families of the earth would bless themselves by their deal, and both Abraham and God's names would be great.
The Fourth Promise, and the one most mystical and disputed, is that through the deal God was making with Abraham, all of the other families of the Earth would be blessed.

God did not say, but perhaps we might consider, that for every promise God made to Abraham, God also would have a match. As time progresses, God also promises that He will have a long awaited son who will become a promised people who will live in a promised land, and all the families of the earth will recieve a blessing, that the deal God made with Abraham would be open to them.

TABLE 1: THE FOURS OF GENESIS

THE ERAS

1. CREATION
2. BEFORE THE FLOOD AND NOAH
3. SCATTERING OF THE PEOPLE
4. GOD'S DEAL WITH ABRAHAM

THE PATRIARCHS

1. ABRAHAM
2. ISAAC
3. JACOB (named Israel)
4. 12 SONS WHO BECOME 13 TRIBES

THE PROMISES OF GOD TO ABE

1. IN HIS OLD AGE HE WOULD HAVE A SON.
2. THE SON WOULD BECOME A NUMEROUS PEOPLE.
3. THEY WOULD OWN A PROMISED LAND ( which we call today ISRAEL)
4. THROUGH THEIR DEAL ALL THE NATIONS WOULD BE BLESSED AND ABRAHAM AND YHWH'S NAME WOULD BE GREAT.

The second generation of the Patriarchs is Isaac, that promised son of Abraham. Isaac is the centerpiece of the Patriarchs because he is the first answer to God's Promises.
When God asks Abraham to sacrifice his promised and only son, Abraham does not withhold this sacrifice from God. God's sacrifice of His Own Son sealed the deal on God's part, as Abraham would have done if God had let him carry through.
. Isaac has two sons, but can only pass the heritage on to only one of them, the younger as it turns out, Jacob, who travels at least as much as Abraham.
Jacob, renamed 'Israel' by God, passes the heritage on to his twelve sons. He inherited the blessing to Abraham over his brother, but got to pass it on to each of his sons.

See the first appendix for an explanation and comparison of all the 12s and 13s in the Bible.

The life of Moses

The life of Moses is told in four of the so called Books of Moses, and our four aspects are each of these books.
The first, Exodus, is the most memorable and flashiest because it is in this book that Moses is born, flees Egypt, returns again to Egypt to cast plagues upon the nation until it lets the Israelites go, and takes the narrative all the way to Mount Sinai and the giving of the Law on the Two Tablets.
Leviticus is the second book and is almost all laws, the epitome of the books called the Law.
Numbers is the third book, and narrates the 38 years of travelling through the desert.
Deuteronomy is the fourth book of the Life of Moses, which tells of Moses' parting speech where he sums up what has happened. Many scholars consider it to be a seperate work.

In Egypt the sons of Israel became a numerous people, as promised by God to Abraham; but they were enslaved there for 400 years.
Moses was born to a hebrew woman when the Egyptians had decreed that no hebrew males were to be born, so Moses' mother put the baby in a basket and set him adrift on the nile where he was picked up by the ruler's daughter and raised in the ruler's house. The analogy with the birth of Jesus is this, that Herod had the male children of Bethlehem killed, but Jesus and his family escaped to Egypt.
The Messiah was, through a prophesy of Moses (in Deuteronomy) to be a prophet like Moses; all the other prophets would prophesy from visions or dreams and in oracles, but Moses and the Messiah would have plain teaching, because they talk with God face to face, as it were.
Other reasons that Jesus is like Moses is that the Spirit did not come until Jesus had left the apostles, which corresponds to Moses not being allowed to view the promised land.

Other types of Messianic prophesy, not realized at the time, but seen by hindsight to be literary-historical allussions to him (and called by some people "types and shadows") are when during the Passover of the angel of Death over Egypt the believing Israelites were spared because they put the blood of the Passover Lamb on the lintels of their doorposts, and when the Israelites were in the desert and they had no food, the Lord rained manna down from heaven like dew, prefiguring the sacramental communion.
The Ark of the Covenant also had no idol, no statue of God, and so did not the temple that was eventually built, to prefigure the great sign of the Messiah, the empty tomb; a symbol of God because of the conspicuousness of a body's absence.

Histories

Now we will have to make additions to the skelaton line. The four aspects of this numeral, this four, are the four books of the continuous history of the kings of Israel and Judah in the Books of Samuel and Kings.
These Histories are duplicated in the two books of Chronicles,
and before and after this history is the history of the (E) entry into the land, (L) living in the land, and a book named for and about a (F) female. I have code named these two groups of books 'ELF' - so this whole section in the finished memory diagram looks like this;

           4
     (elf) 2 (elf)

and a description follows.
The first ELF begins with the taking of the land from the Caananites under Joshua , the first Entry into the land, and a fulfillment of the third promise through the fulfillment of the second.
The next book tells of Living in the land before there was no king, when "Every man did what was right in his own eyes"; the book of Judges
The F stands for the book of Ruth, a Moabitess who was loyal to her mother-in-Law in their widowhoods, and as a result became the grandmother of David the King and a direct descendent of the Messiah.

The two (2) under the history's 4 stands for the two books of Chronicles which tell the same continuous story that the four books of Samuel and Kings tells, except that Chronicles concentrates on the Southern Kingdom where Samuel and Kings tells the tale of both the Northern and Southern kingdoms. The Catholic names of the books of Samuel and Kings name them one to four Kings, so the protestant First Kings is the Catholic Third Kings. It is one continuous history, and is it the longest piece of the Bible?

First Samuel begins with the last Judge, the prophet Samuel, who the people ask to name a king. First he names a tall strong man name Saul as king, but Saul is sulking and a bit faithless. The exploits of David before he was king are also in this book; David and Goliath, David as an outlaw on the run, and all that.
Second Samuel, the second book in our set tells the story of the Kingship of David. This is the crux book of the set because David is the crux king of all the Israelite kings.
The third book of the set, the First book of Kings, tells the tale of the peaceful reign of Solomon and the split of the kingdom after him. The more pastoral southern tribes clung to the Davidic Dynasty, but the more sophisticated northern tribes got kings of their own.
The last book of this set, the Second book of Kings, tells of the fall of the kingdoms, first the northern kingdom, called Israel, and a hundred years later, the southern kingdom, Judah. The chronology of the writing prophets starts here.

[top]

wasn't it good of God to make it so easy for us English speakers to remember which kingdoms conquered the Jews in Biblical Times? The ASSYRIANS (A)conquered the Northern Kingdom, a hundred fifty years later the BABYLONIANS (B)conquered the Southern Kingdom,and seventy years later the CHALDEANS (C) AND THE MEADES (THE PERSIANS) conquered the Babylonians AND LET THE JEWS RETURN TO THE LAND

The second elf in our diagram stands for the three historical books that describe the time after the fall of the southern Kingdom. The e stands for the book of Ezra who returned to the land at the permission of the Persians. A very different Entry than before.
The l stands for the book of Nehemiah who rebuilt the temple (the l stands for living in the land, if you recall from the first elf segment).
The f (female) stands for the book of Esther, a jewish girl who became queen of the Persian Empire.
It is instructive for us, both as a memory prod and for wisdom's sake to compare the two entrys into the land, the two books of living in the land, and the two books named after women, but, barring some future stack, God willing, you're going to have to do that on your own, if that be your interest.

Wisdom

The first book that does not fit into my scheme ( but sinse this is a mere memory device, and not caballah, even the exceptions can be called easily to mind with the memory device, if they are few and memorable in themselves) - is the book of Job, an argument between wise men. Put a star * over this 4.

The Wisdom books that I have grouped into a set of four are the books named for the Davidic kings. Psalms is said to be written by David (and some of them no doubt were), and Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song are said to be written by Solomon (which, probably except for a few proverbs, were not). Wisdom leads to discretion and the search for truth and the best way to deal with things. If the people of old said Solomon wrote the Proverbs, it is shorthand to say "in Solomon it is written", but when, in the book, it reads, "The proverbs of the wise men of Hezekiah's time", and we know that Hezekiah is quite a few generations descended from Solomon, we must admit that the book of Proverbs was not written by Solomon, and that anyone who insists on it has not read the book.
The Psalms are the temple songs of the first temple (which was destroyed at the end of the book of Second Kings), songs of the exile, and probably songs also of the second temple. In them we find expressions of faith, exhortions to faith, words of comfort, and many mystical prophesies - surely the flashiest book of Wisdom.
Proverbs are mostly short wise sayings (though there are some notable longer and more mystical writings here) - the epitome of a wisdom book.
Ecclesiastes is an essay of a wise man who has been on a philosophical journey.
The Song of Solomon is a love poem, certainly different from the rest, which tells of the love affair of Solomon with a lovely lady, Christ and the believer.

Prophets

Now we come to the writing prophets. There were prophets before them, Elijah, Nathan, Samuel, and all, but these prophets have left a written record of their prophesies. The 4 stands for the so-called Major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. The Minor prophets were shorter works than the first three of these, but were already collected in a book I suppose, before the book of Daniel reached popularity. (Zechariah, in the Minor prophets, is longer than Daniel.)
The writings of these prophets begin in the time of the book of Second Kings, some of them written by men who told the Northern Kingdom to straighten out or it will be carried away, others written to the Southern Kingdom, some written in the exile, and a few written after the return.
Isaiah was a prophet to the Southern Kingdom, Judah, when the Northern Kingdom was carried away. The book of Isaiah has the most memorable of the prophetic utterances, the most powerful of the prophetic poetry, truly the flashiest of the major prophets.
Jeremiah was a prophet to the Southern Kingdom a hundred years later when the South itself was to be carried away. Jeremiah had the task of telling Judah that it was to be taken away and to resist was foolish.
Jeremiah is the essence of prophecy because he had the harder job. The judgements of the Lord on the nation were carried out.
The second book that does not fit into my scheme is actually a continuation of Jeremiah; Lamentations, when Jeremiah looks over the destroyed city and weeps that it did not repent and now has been judged. It is noteworthy that Jeremiah's secretary's signet ring has been found of late.
Ezekiel was a priest who had been carried away, and in the spirit he is brought back to Jerusalem to see how corrupt the priests who were left have become.
Daniel is a wise man who becomes one of the wise men of the Babylonians first and then of the Persians. When he is old he is the one who read the 'hand writting on the wall' to the soon-to-be-fallen Babylonian king; "Weighed, weighed, found wanting, judged", sort of like 'measure twice, cut once.'
The Book of Daniel is the more mystical due to its being a bit more of apocalyptic than the odder parts of Ezekiel, and Daniel is the most disputed of the prophets, having the sole distinction of being included rather with the wisdom books and other writings by the Jews.

The twelve minor prophets were collected together in a scroll called the the 'Book of the Twelve'. First and third, Hosea and Amos, were prophets who warned the northern Kingdom, the third first.
The second and fourth are prophesies delivered to an unmentioned time (they are Obadiah and Joel).
The fifth and seventh, Nahum and Jonah were prophesies dealing with Ninevah, capital of Assyria
Between the prophets to Ninevah is the book of Micah, who lived at the time of Isaiah.
Eighth and Ninth, Habbacuck and Zepahniah, are prophets who lived close to the time of Jeremiah, the ninth before the eighth;
and the last three, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, prophesied after the return from the exile.
Apocalyptic, a kind of surrellistic prophesy, was present with the beginning prophets, but also grew in themes and use very organically over time, until by the post-exilic prophet, Zechariah, it has reached almost the maturity it has in the christian book, the Revalation of St. John.

So ends the books of the Jewish Scriptures, the so-called

Old Testament

All of these books were ancient and revered in the time of Hillel and Jesus; and among the Dead Sea Scrolls we have copies of all of them except Esther which were copied within a couple of hundred years before Jesus' time.

The New Testament quotes them, the Talmudic Mishna quotes them, and some pagan writers who mocked them quote them also. These books were also translated to other languages before Jesus' time. Any theory that claims to correct the Old Testament books that were corrupted by the church (such as the Old Testament parts of the Joseph Smith translation) ignores the fact that we have much more witness of these books than the church.

The Jews who are still among us (scriptures and quotations)
The church
The ancient pagan mockers
The newly found ancient manuscripts.
The ancient translations

Between the Jewish Scriptures and the New Testament, let us consider the various canons, the various arrangements of the books considered scripture by the churches.

The Jews put the prophets before the Wisdom books which they call the writings, and include Daniel and Esther in with the writings instead of where they ended up in the protestant Bible. The Empire Churches, the churches of the bishops of the Roman Empire, included certain other books to the old Testament from the greek translation, the Septuigent (LXX), which are also well attested to be ancient. These books are called The Apocrypha. First Maccabees has even been said to be the best history of the ancient era; Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon are wisdom books similar to the Proverbs, but very seldom read by either catholic, orthodox or protestant.

And of course, some other churches hold to books which are totally unattested.

Next - The New Testament

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