I recently posted my New Testament reading plan that orders material around the four Gospels. Corresponding to this I needed some kind of order in which to read the Old Testament. Naturally this is more difficult to devise because of the amount of material and the difficulty (honestly) of ploughing through some of the laws, genealogies and even (despite their interest) some of the more bizarre/gruesome/immoral parts of the histories. For this reason I am hoping to get through the New Testament perhaps 3 times in the time it takes me to read the Old Testament, to help me keep my Christocentric focus! But I might leave explaining how to fit the New and Old Testament plans together for another post, especially as I’m not quite sure I’ve worked it out yet.
Anyway, below is the order I’ve devised for reading the Old Testament. It’s vaguely chronological, but nowhere near to the degree that some chronological schemes propose to be. However, by the time it gets into the era of the Kings and Prophets, I was able to drill down a little bit and insert prophets (roughly) where they might fit in the timelines followed by Kings and Chronicles.
Hopefully it’s self-explanatory; but the other thing to highlight is that after Solomon I divided the chronology between tracking the state of the Northern Kingdom of Israel as seems to be the focus of the books of Kings, and three of the prophets; and then returned to where Solomon left off to track the (somewhat more faithful) Southern Kingdom of Judah through the lens of Chronicles and the rest of the prophets. Hopefully this keeps it interesting.
I’d love to know if this is of any use to readers. Enjoy!
Ben David Trigg 