The schedule for 2025 aims to lead us through the Bible in chronological order. That turns out to be a little tricky, because sometimes there’s a significant gap between ‘when something happened’ and ‘when someone wrote about it.’ The goal here will be to present the order of events, rather than the order of writing about events. Historians offer significant debate about the dates of certain items; I won’t be offering much in the way of absolute dating, but will hope to have events in the correct relative order.

Presenting the scriptures this way means setting some of the documents in a different order than we are used to. For example, the narratives regarding the kings of Israel and Judah are told twice in the Bible: four books give a perspective on these years (I & I Samuel, I & II Kings), and then two other books give a somewhat different perspective on this same material (I & II Chronicles). These two renderings of the history of the kingdoms have been interlaced, so that you can see how the narratives support, supplement, and contrast with each other. Also appearing in unexpected order: the book of Job, many individual psalms, quite a number of the prophets.