One of the bigger challenges in getting some traction in the Scripture and its story has to do with understanding its chronology. The books in the Bible are arranged only in a general way according to the history they contain. This means that if you started in Genesis and read all the way through to Revelation, you would for the most part be moving from earlier to later—but not always—and that’s what makes it challenging.
For example, the book of Daniel comes after the book of Ezra in the Bible, but what you read about in the first chapter of Daniel happened before the events recorded in Ezra 1. Then to further complicate matters, the contents of some books are not in chronological order (Jeremiah is an example). All this can be a little confusing and potentially overwhelming for the person who sits down to study the Bible with the expectation that the sixty-six books of the Bible are in chronological order.
F. LaGard Smith and others have helped us by organizing the Bible chronologically (Smith’s work is The Narrated Bible). But for most of us, it’s still quite helpful if we can learn how to relate to the Bible in its traditional arrangement.
I’ve adapted the following outline quite a bit from something I came across years ago by Ray Baughman called Bible History Visualized. Like all outlines, you’ll find that it omits some things and perhaps gives too much emphasis to other things. Still, I think it’s helpful in getting a handle on the chronology of the Bible and its different books.
There are two basic things to understand to get a handle on the Bible’s chronology:
1) We need to understand the span of history that is covered in the Bible—which is from creation until about 100 AD. The outline below will divide this span into 13 periods.
2) We also need to understand where the different sixty-six books of the Bible belong in relation to the different historical periods. Here’s a breakdown of the history covered in the Bible and the corresponding sections of Scripture.
1. Creation (Genesis 1-5)
2. Cleansing (Genesis 6-10)
3. Calling (Genesis 11-50)
4. Chains (Exodus 1-11)
5. Crossings (Exodus 12-Deuteronomy)
6. Conquering (Joshua)
7. Crown (Judges-1 Kings 11; 1 Chronicles-2 Chronicles 9)
8. Crisis (1 Kings 12-2 Kings 23; 2 Chronicles 10-35; Isaiah; Hosea; Joel; Amos; Jonah; Micah)
9. Captivities (2 Kings 24-25; 2 Chronicles 36; Jeremiah; Lamentations; Ezekiel; Daniel; Obadiah; Nahum; Habakkuk; Zephaniah)
10. Construction (Ezra-Esther; Haggai-Malachi)
11. Coming (Matthew-John)
12. Church (Acts)
13. Correspondence (Romans-Revelation)
In part 2, I’ll expand upon this outline.
A Taste of Grace with Bruce Green 