by Stephen Rodgers

I know what you’re thinking: “Is this guy ever going to do the Prophetic Books?”

Lord willing, yes.  But not this week. Because this week, (and for the next couple weeks), we’re going to play a little game of catch-up with the BOB series. Let me explain. (“No, there is no time; let me sum up.”)

I recently fielded a question about the BOB series from a church member who wanted me to know that they felt that the BOB series had a particularly glaring deficiency, because it didn’t have a section articulating exactly what happens in each book of the Bible. I explained that wasn’t an oversight, that was deliberate. After all, the hope with BOB is that it will provide a helpful reference for books of the Bible, but it’s not intended to obviate the need to actually read them.

That being said, I do think there’s some value in having an overview of the events and/or structure of the books, so I’ve put together something that I think is interesting. I’ve taken the outlines from three different study Bibles (MSB, NET, NIV), which are published by three different publishers (Thomas Nelson, whoever publishes the NET, and Zondervan). I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s any crossover when it comes to the scholars and writers on those content committees, so we should wind up with three uniquely sourced outlines. I’ve then laid out those outlines side-by-side, and will be releasing a new section each week until we catch up to the Prophetic books.  From that point on, I’ll include the outlines everytime we get to a new section, so that you’ll have something to refer to as you read the BOB articles. (I’ll also edit the old section articles so that people reading through this series in the future will have them from the beginning).

Now, a couple of disclaimers:

• I really wanted to include the ESVSB outline, but since they’ve recently relocated that behind their paywall, I’m not sure of the propriety of that. My life is pretty exciting already; I don’t need to be getting C&D letters from Crossway.
• While these are comparative outlines, they are not parallel outlines.  What’s the difference you ask? A parallel outline is where certain internal markers are used to hold the lines/rows constant with each other. That’s a really cool resource to have, but it would take more time than I have to create. If anyone really wants to give that a whirl, let me know and I’ll send you the editable files.

Alright then. For those of you who are interested, here’s the first outline for the books of the Pentateuch. I’ve also updated the original article on the Pentateuch to contain that as well.  See you next week with the History books!