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Bible Studies Understanding Scripture
Understanding the Old Testament
Three quarters of the Bible, and the part most often skipped. How it is arranged, and how it holds together.
Three quarters of the Bible, and the part most often abandoned. It holds together better than it first appears, and this study is about the shape of the whole.
What you’ll explore
- 01 How the Old Testament is arranged
- 02 Covenant as the spine of the story
- 03 Law: what it was for
- 04 Prophets: mostly not prediction
- 05 Poetry and wisdom
- 06 The parts that trouble modern readers
- 07 How Christians have read it as pointing to Christ
How the Old Testament is arranged
Read Luke 24:44
Jesus refers to the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms — the Hebrew Bible’s own three-part division, which is not the order most English Bibles use. Recognising the blocks helps: five books of law, a long historical narrative, poetry and wisdom, then prophets who comment on that history. It is not chronological end to end.
Covenant as the spine of the story
Read Genesis 12:1-3; Exodus 19:3-6; 2 Samuel 7:12-16
God makes promises to Abraham, to Israel at Sinai, and to David, and the rest of the story is largely about those promises being kept, broken, and renewed. Genesis 12’s "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" is the thread the New Testament picks up. Follow the covenants and the plot becomes visible.
Law: what it was for
Read Exodus 20:1-17; Deuteronomy 6:24-25
The Ten Commandments open with what God has already done — "I brought you out of Egypt" — so the law follows rescue rather than earning it. Much of the remaining legislation regulates a specific ancient society: agriculture, slavery, warfare, disease. Christians have long distinguished its enduring moral claims from provisions tied to that setting, and exactly where that line falls is disputed.
Prophets: mostly not prediction
Read Amos 5:21-24; Isaiah 1:16-17
The prophets spend far more time on injustice, idolatry and hollow worship in their own day than on the distant future. Amos says God hates their festivals and wants justice to roll down like waters. Read them first as preachers to their own generation; the forward-looking passages land differently once you do.
Poetry and wisdom
Read Psalm 1; Ecclesiastes 1:2-11; Job 3:1-10
Proverbs states how life generally goes; Job and Ecclesiastes press hard on the cases where it does not. Holding all three is the point — the wisdom books are in conversation with each other, and Job is a sustained protest against a simple reading of Proverbs. Scripture includes the argument.
The parts that trouble modern readers
Read Deuteronomy 20:16-18; Psalm 137:8-9
The commands to destroy the Canaanites and the closing lines of Psalm 137 are genuinely disturbing, and pretending otherwise convinces nobody. Christians have answered in several ways — divine judgment on specific societies, accommodation to an ancient world, hyperbolic conquest rhetoric — and no answer has settled the matter. The honest posture is to name the difficulty and keep reading.
How Christians have read it as pointing to Christ
Isaiah 53 describes a servant wounded for the transgressions of others, and the church has read it of Christ since Acts 8. Jewish readers have long understood the servant as Israel, and the debate is old and serious. Naming it as the church’s reading rather than as the only possible one is the more honest way to hold it.
Questions to sit with
- Which Old Testament book have you never read?
- Which of the four covenants above was new to you?
- What do you do with the passages that trouble you — and is it honest?
Every passage in this study
Go deeper
Where this connects
This study sits inside a larger story. Read the passages above in their own books, and follow the thread back through Scripture as a whole.