Quick question.
I am not challenging any of the Books in the Bible. But I am wondering about the order in which they are presented.
I was thinking about this when reading Jeremiah today. I believe it was Chapter 26. Jeremiah is threatened with death. What saves him ... some of the elders quote verses from Micah. Clearly, they were aware of Micah's prophecies.
But in the Bible, Micah comes after Jeremiah.
It would be helpful if there was a Bible that is compiled in chronological order ... when God spoke to the people.
Any thoughts on this??
Blessings!!
There are different chronological Bibles, but this gets tricky quickly:
1) Do we list the books in the chronological order they were written or do we list the books chronologically in the order of their contents?
2) There are many cases where there is no clear answer about when certain books were written.
So let's imagine we are going to make a chronological Bible, and so our first book is going to be...well that's a good question. Genesis would seem to make the most sense, after all it opens up by talking about the creation. That said, Genesis wasn't the first book of the Bible that was written. Sure, some people believe that Moses wrote Genesis, but the general consensus among scholars is that Genesis is a redaction of earlier sources, and doesn't date until sometime around the time of the Exile. So if we are doing a chronology of contents rather than when the book was written, Genesis would come first. But then we run into another issue, what about Job? The story of Job supposedly takes place sometime vaguely in the era of the patriarchs, but Job definitely wasn't written that long ago, and in fact really probably shouldn't be taken as historical at all since it's not a work of history, but is categorized as wisdom literature (it's in the same genre as Proverbs, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes). Do we place Job after Genesis because the story takes place before Moses? Or where do we place it at all since the the book isn't a work of history at all?
As I said, this all gets pretty complicated, because pretty much any attempt to make some sort of chronological Bible is going get something wrong or be wrong in some way.
As it stands, the books of the Christian Bible are categorized not by chronology, but rather by broad categories (Deuterocanonical books listed in square brackets):
The Books of the Law (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy)
The Books of the Histories (Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1&2 Samuel, 1&2 Kings, 1&2 Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, [Tobit, Judith,] Esther, [1&2 Maccabees])
The Books of Wisdom (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, [Wisdom, Sirach])
The Major Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah with Lamentations [and Baruch], Ezekiel, Daniel)
The Minor Prophets (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi)
The Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John)
The Acts (Acts of the Apostles)
The Epistles of St. Paul (Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1&2 Thessalonians, 1&2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews*)
The Catholic Epistles (Hebrews*, James, 1&2 Peter, 1,2&3 John, Jude)
The Apocalypse (The Apocalypse/Revelation of John)
*Hebrews has a turbulent history, it has on-again, off-again throughout history been attributed to Paul, as such it is sometimes counted as the 14th epistle of Paul, but is generally regarded as non-Pauline, thus making it part of the Catholic Epistles, rather than the Pauline Epistles)
It's also worth adding that the list above is not totally complete, I have generally kept the books as they are found in the Septuagint and most Christian Bibles, but have generally restricted the listed books to the Western Canon (Catholic and Protestant), there are slight differences in Eastern Biblical Canons, such as the acceptance of 3 Maccabees or the Epistle of Baruch.
-CryptoLutheran
