How to Read the Bible 5 min read Lesson 1 of 12

Sixty-six books, three languages, a thousand years, and what that means before you read a line

A Library, Not a Book

Open a Bible at random and you may land in a law code, a war diary, a love song, a court record, a hymn, a letter or a vision. They are shelved together and bound as one. The first question about any page is which of them you are holding.

Lesson 1 of 12 · What kind of book this is

The Bible is a library shelved in one binding: sixty-six books, by dozens of hands, in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, written across something like a thousand years. It says so itself. So the first question to ask of any page is not what it means but what it is, because a law, a story, a prayer, a proverb and a vision each ask something different of the person reading them, and a reader who does not know which is in front of them will get a true text wrong.

What the book calls itself

The word Bible is not in the Bible. It comes from a Greek word for a scroll or a book, and the early church used it in the plural: ta biblia, the books. The singular came later, when the books were bound together and the binding started to look like the author. The text itself never speaks of one book. When Jesus describes the scriptures he has just opened to two disciples on the road, he names a shelf.

He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you, that all things which are written in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms concerning me must be fulfilled.” — Luke 24:44 · WEB

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The law of Moses, the prophets, the psalms: three sections, which is how the Hebrew Bible was and is arranged. The letter to the Hebrews opens the same way, and makes the plurality the point.

God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, — Hebrews 1:1 · WEB

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At many times, in many ways. That is a description of a library, not of a book, and it is the Bible’s own.

βιβλίον biblíon G975

a diminutive of βίβλος; a roll:--bill, book, scroll, writing.

This is the word behind “Bible.” In the New Testament it is an ordinary noun for a scroll: the scroll of Isaiah handed to Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:17), the scrolls Paul asks Timothy to bring him (2 Timothy 4:13), the sealed scroll in the hand of the one on the throne (Revelation 5:1). The church took the plural of it for the whole collection. Biblion, the name over this page, is the singular, one book of the many.

Three languages and a thousand years

Most of the Old Testament is Hebrew. A few chapters of Daniel and Ezra, one verse of Jeremiah and two words of Genesis are Aramaic, the trade language of the Persian empire, which is also the language Jesus spoke at home. The New Testament is Greek, the trade language of the empire after that. So the Bible was written in the languages of three empires, by people who lived under all three, and no one of them ever held the whole book.

The oldest material in it is older than any date we can fix. The newest is from near the end of the first century. Between the two lie the whole of Israel’s kingdom and its ruin, an exile and a return, four hundred years in which no book of the Bible was written at all, and a Roman occupation. The writers did not know one another. Moses had never heard of Paul, and Paul, who had read Moses all his life, read him as a text already ancient. A book written across that span by people who could not have met is not one book in any sense that matters for reading it. It is a shelf.

One shelf, many kinds of writing

Take one sentence from eight of the books and set them side by side. Each is scripture. No two are the same kind of thing.

““You shall have no other gods before me.” Exodus 20:3 · WEB
A law, spoken by God to a people standing at a mountain.
“At the return of the year, at the time when kings go out, David sent Joab and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon and besieged Rabbah. But David stayed at Jerusalem.” 2 Samuel 11:1 · WEB
A story, told by a narrator who says what happened and not what to think of it.
“Yahweh is my shepherd; I shall lack nothing.” Psalm 23:1 · WEB
A prayer, written to be said back to God by whoever picks it up.
“A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” Proverbs 15:1 · WEB
A saying, true as a rule and not as a guarantee.
“But let justice roll on like rivers, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Amos 5:24 · WEB
A prophet, addressing a nation about its present, not our future.
“He spoke to them many things in parables, saying, “Behold, a farmer went out to sow.” Matthew 13:3 · WEB
A parable, a story told to make one point to one crowd.
“to all who are in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Romans 1:7 · WEB
A letter, with an address on it that is not yours.
“This is the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things which must happen soon, which he sent and made known by his angel to his servant, John,” Revelation 1:1 · WEB
A vision, in a kind of writing its first readers knew and you may not.

Every one of those is a different way of using words, and every one asks something different of a reader. A law asks to be obeyed. A story asks to be followed to its end before it is judged. A prayer asks to be prayed. A proverb asks for judgment about when it applies. A prophet asks to be heard by the people he was sent to, first. A parable asks for its one point and resists the rest. A letter asks who it was to. A vision asks what its pictures meant to the people who first saw them. The eleven lessons after this one take those kinds one at a time.

Why it matters

Because the commonest way to misread the Bible is not to misunderstand a sentence but to mistake its kind. A reader who takes a proverb for a promise will feel lied to when the pattern fails. A reader who takes a story for a command will do what David did. A reader who takes a psalm for a doctrine will end up teaching that God has forgotten him, because a psalmist said so at the bottom of a bad night. None of those readers has misread a word. Each has misread a shelf.

In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did that which was right in his own eyes. — Judges 21:25 · WEB

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That sentence closes a book in which the people of God do appalling things, and the narrator has described every one of them without a word of approval. The line is not a rule. It is a diagnosis. Read as a story, Judges is a warning; read as a code of conduct, it is a horror.

There is an honest objection here, and it is better said than avoided. Many readers hold that the Bible has one author, God, and that its unity matters more than the differences between its books. The Bible itself claims something like this: men spoke from God, carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21). Nothing in this lesson denies it. But the same passage says the men spoke, and the Spirit carried them rather than dictating to them, which is why Amos does not sound like Luke. One Spirit, many pens. The unity is real, and it is a reason to read the whole; it is not a reason to read a psalm as if it were a law.

What this series asks of you

Only this: that before you ask what a page means, you ask what it is. The next eleven lessons are the shelf, one kind of book at a time, each with its own way of being read. The question below is the one you will be asked in some form at the end of each.