Gordon D. Fee - How to Read the Bible Book by Book: A Guided Tour

ZONDERVAN

How to Read the Bible Book by Book

Copyright 2002 by Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart

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EPub Edition June 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-85364-0

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fee, Gordon D.

How to read the Bible book by book : a guided tour / Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-310-21118-2 (pbk.)

1. Bible Reading. 2. Bible Criticism, interpretation, etc.

I. Stuart, Douglas K. II. Title.

BS617.F44 2002

220.6ldc21

2001006893

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Most New Testament Scripture quotations are taken from the New Testament edition of the Holy Bible, Todays New International Version. TNIV. Copyright 2001 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.

Scripture references marked NEB are from the New English Bible, copyright 1970 by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. Used by permission.

05 06 07 08 09 / DC/ 15

For Walker, Maia, and Emma

Joshua, Julia, Cherisa, Nathan, and Benjamin

Zachary and Jackson

Maricel and Annalise

and

Meriwether and Honour

and Mcaela

that they may learn to read the Story well

and love Him whose Story it is

(Psalm 71:1418; Psalm 103:17)

This book is intended to be a companion to How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. That book was designed to help people become better readers of Scripture by taking into account the various kinds of literature that make up the Christian Bible. Through an understanding of how the various types work, how they differ from one another, and how they raise different kinds of hermeneutical questions, we hoped that one might learn to read the Bible in a more informed way.

The success of that first book has given us the courage to try another. The aim is still the same: to help people become better readers of Scripture. What we hope to do here is to go a step beyond the first book: Assuming the principles of the first book, here we try to help you readand understandeach of the biblical books on its own but especially to help you see how each one fits with the others to form the great narrative of Scripture.

But this book has undergone its own form of evolution. Some years ago we were asked to write a Bible survey textbook of the kind that many students have been exposed to over the years. For a variety of reasons, but mostly because we could never get our hearts into it, that project simply did not work out. To be sure, we hope this book will still serve the purposes of survey courses, but we have intentionally tried to write something quite different. These differences, as we perceive them, are several.

First, our goal is not simply to dispense knowledge about the various books of the Biblethe kind of knowledge that allows one to pass Bible knowledge exams without ever reading the Bible! Such books and exams usually deal with a lot of data but very often with little sense of how the various books of the Bible function as entities on their own or of how each fits into