Books of the Bible

This section of my WEB site is dedicated to my understanding of the Bible. It will not contain any interpretation of individual scriptures, nor any particular insight into the nature of God. These will appear elsewhere. Rather, this will contain observations about individual books in the Bible as a whole book.

In understanding the Bible it is usually important to understand the world the bible came out of. This applies, in addition, to the books of the bible. An obvious case is at one point the Bible talks about a "people out of the North." I've seen people try to use this to mean that there is some land near the north pole that has some as yet unknown people in it, the people "out of the north." Yet, since this was written in Israel (more or less), the people out of the north could refer to to the Turks, or the Armenians, or the Russians. Or maybe just Europe in general.

This is also the case with speaking in tongues. That is, Paul traveled among many congregations of the church, many of whom spoke languages other than Aramaic, the language of Israel at the time. Therefore, he made the statement, "I speak in tongues more than anyone else," meaning he spoke in none Aramaic because he was a learned man, not because of any revelation from God. Yet this, and its related scriptures, are used to "prove" that if a person doesn't speak in tongues then they are not Christian.

This section tries to put the books of the Bible into their context, and will be arranged by book, no more than one entry per book.


Last Updated February 1, 2007. Home Page