Bible Studies · The Overview

What Is The Bible? A Library With One Story

Sixty-six books, two testaments, a dozen kinds of writing and a string of covenants, all heading somewhere. Here is the shape of the whole thing and how to read it without getting lost.

By Apostle Johnny Ova · Sound of Heaven · 9 Min Read

The Short Answer

A Library That Tells One Story

Straight Answer

So what is the Bible? It is a library, not a single book: sixty-six books in the Protestant canon, written over many centuries, in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, gathered into two testaments.

It holds law, history, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, gospels, letters and apocalyptic vision, and it tells one story: God making covenant with people and bringing that story to its fullness in Jesus.

Most people who give up on the Bible do it somewhere in Leviticus, because they opened it like a novel and expected page one to lead neatly to page two. It does not work that way. Once you know what kind of thing you are holding, it starts to make sense.

This page is the overview. It will not settle every question about the Bible, and a few of those questions have their own pages, which I will point you to as we go.

What Is On The Shelf

Eight Kinds Of Writing

Law

Genesis through Deuteronomy, the Torah. The word means instruction. It holds story as much as statute, and it sets up Israel's covenant with God.

History

Joshua through Esther, plus Acts. Narrative told from a point of view, with the writers choosing what to include and why.

Poetry and Song

Psalms, Lamentations, Song of Songs. Prayers and songs that argue with God, grieve before Him and praise Him, often in the same breath.

Wisdom

Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes. Proverbs gives general patterns, and Job and Ecclesiastes push back when the patterns fail.

Prophets

Isaiah through Malachi. Covenant messengers speaking to their own generation, calling Israel back and warning about what was coming.

Gospels

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Four portraits of Jesus, each shaped for a particular audience, written within living memory of Him.

Letters

Romans through Jude. Real mail to real churches with real problems. Read one as a letter and half the confusion goes away.

Apocalyptic

Parts of Daniel, and Revelation. Symbol-heavy Jewish writing about the end of an age, addressed to people living through it.

That is why the Bible can feel uneven when you read it straight through. You are moving from a law code to a love poem to a letter about a church dispute. Each one asks to be read on its own terms. You do not read a psalm the way you read a census list, and you do not read Revelation the way you read Romans.

The Protestant Bible counts sixty-six books, thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New. The Hebrew Bible holds the same content as that Old Testament but groups it into twenty-four books under three headings: the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include several more books. If you want the full count and how it came about, see how many books are in the Bible, and for the letters in particular, the epistles.

Takeaway

Before you ask what a passage means, ask what kind of writing it is. Genre is the first key, and most misreadings start by skipping it.

The Arc Of Redemption

One Story From Start To Finish

Underneath all those genres there is a plot. It is not always told in order, and it doubles back on itself, but it moves. Here is the spine of it.

Genesis 1 to 11

Creation And The Break

God makes a good world and puts people in it to carry His image. They reach for life on their own terms, and the rest of Genesis 1 to 11 shows the damage spreading.

Genesis 12

A Family For Everyone

God calls Abraham and promises that all the families of the earth will be blessed through him. One family, chosen for the sake of all of them.

Exodus

Rescue, Then Covenant

God frees Israel from slavery in Egypt and only then gives the law at Sinai. Rescue comes first. The law describes how a rescued people should live.

Samuel And Kings

A King And A Temple

David is promised a throne that will last. The kings after him mostly fail, and the prophets keep holding the promise up anyway.

The Sixth Century BC

Exile And Return

Babylon destroys Jerusalem and the temple. Some return and rebuild, but the prophets say something bigger is still coming: a new covenant, a new heart, God's Spirit poured out.

The Gospels

Jesus

Everything the story had been straining toward shows up in a person. His death and resurrection open the new covenant, and He pours out the Spirit.

AD 70

The End Of The Age

Jerusalem and the temple fall within the generation Jesus warned. The old covenant order closes, and the Kingdom He announced stands on its own.

“And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.”

Luke 24:27

That verse is Jesus on the road to Emmaus, teaching the Bible to two confused disciples. He does not pick a few proof texts. He walks them through the whole thing and shows them where it was going. A few verses later He names the three parts of the Hebrew Bible, the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms, and says they were written about Him.

That is why Revelation is not the end of the story in the sense most people mean. It was written to seven real churches in Asia before AD 70, and it speaks to what they were about to live through. We are not waiting for the last chapter. We live in the Kingdom it announced. The book of Revelation summary walks through that in detail.

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The Frame

Five Covenants Hold It Together

If the story is the plot, covenants are the structure. A covenant is a binding relationship with promises and obligations on it. The Bible is organized around a handful of them, and each one builds on the one before. There is more on the idea itself in what a covenant is.

Noah · Genesis 9

God commits to creation itself. The rainbow is a promise that He will not give up on the world.

Abraham · Genesis 12, 15, 17

Land, descendants and blessing, with a purpose that reaches past Israel to every nation.

Moses · Exodus 19 To 24

The Sinai covenant, the law, the tabernacle and the sacrifices. A way for a rescued nation to live near a holy God.

David · 2 Samuel 7

A son of David on a throne forever. The promise the prophets kept pointing back to while the actual kings kept failing.

The New Covenant · Jeremiah 31, Luke 22

The law written on the heart, sins forgiven, God known from the least to the greatest. Jesus says at the Last Supper that His blood is this covenant.

This is also what the word testament means. The Old Testament and New Testament are the old covenant and the new covenant. Paul calls it exactly that in 2 Corinthians 3:14. The division in your Bible is a covenant division before it is anything else. The new covenant is not a patch on the old one. It is what the old one was pointing to.

What does the word testament mean in Old and New Testament?

A collection of eyewitness statements

Covenant

A period of history

It comes through the Latin testamentum, used for the Greek diatheke, which the New Testament uses for covenant. The two testaments are the old covenant and the new covenant, which is how Paul describes the reading of the law in 2 Corinthians 3:14.

Saying It Plainly

It Is Not A Flat Book

Here is where people get hurt. If you treat every verse as carrying the same weight and the same final word, you can build almost anything out of the Bible, and people have. Slavery was defended with verses. So was keeping women silent and treating outsiders as enemies.

The Flat Reading

Every verse is equally authoritative and equally clear. Pull a line from anywhere and you have heard God's final word on the subject.

The Library Reading

Real books, real authors, real covenants, moving somewhere. Read each part in its setting, then read all of it through Jesus.

“In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.”

Hebrews 1:1 to 2

Notice what Hebrews does. It honors everything that came before, and then it ranks it. Many times, many ways, through prophets. Then, in the last days of that old covenant age, through the Son. The Son is not one more voice in the chorus. He is the one the chorus was about.

Where We Stand, Plainly

At Sound of Heaven we believe the Bible is God-breathed and that it came through human authors who wrote in their own language, culture and moment. It is progressively revealed. What starts in shadow comes into focus, and it comes fully into focus in Jesus. He is the final and perfect revelation of who God is.

That means some things said or done in God's name in the Old Testament do not show us what God is actually like. People wrote honestly about what they believed God wanted, and sometimes Jesus corrects it. He does it openly in Matthew 5: you have heard it said, but I tell you. So we read the whole library, and we let Jesus have the last word on all of it.

The opposite mistake is just as real. Some people hear that and throw the Old Testament out. That is wrong too. Jesus did not throw it out. He opened it up. You cannot understand Him without it.

There is a bigger question underneath all this: in what sense is the Bible the word of God, and what does it mean that John calls Jesus the Word? That deserves its own page, and it has one. Read is the Bible the word of God for how we hold inspiration and authority, and Jesus is the Word for John's opening line.

Practical Ground

How To Actually Read It

A few words behind the names help. The Bible got its name from plain vocabulary for books.

Greek And HebrewTa Bibliaτα βιβλíαThe Books

Biblion

The ordinary Greek word for a scroll or a book, especially a book as one part of a larger work.

Ta biblia

The plural, the books. Latin carried it over as biblia, and English eventually made it Bible. The name itself says library.

Diatheke

Covenant. Rendered testamentum in Latin, which is where Old and New Testament come from.

Tanakh

The Jewish name for the Hebrew Bible, built from its three sections: Torah, the Law; Nevi'im, the Prophets; Ketuvim, the Writings.

Two popular claims need correcting, even though they get repeated in churches all the time. The first is that the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 voted on which books belong in the Bible. It did not. The canon took shape gradually through how churches actually used these books, and the story is laid out in how the Bible was put together. The second is the neat line about forty authors over fifteen hundred years. The general point is fair, but some books went through editors, some have no name attached, and nobody can prove those exact numbers. See the authors of the Bible for what we can and cannot say.

The text has also been passed down with remarkable care. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran is dated to about 125 BC, and the Israel Museum notes that it contains all 66 chapters of Isaiah and is “generally in agreement with the Masoretic or traditional version codified in medieval codices”, with many small variant readings. That is centuries of copying with the text still recognizably intact. There is more on it in the Great Isaiah Scroll.

So, practically. Start with a Gospel. Mark is short and fast, and Luke is fuller. Meet Jesus first, because He is the lens for everything else. Then read Acts to see what happened next, then Genesis and Exodus to see where it all started. Read whole books rather than single verses, and read with other people. Use a translation you can actually understand, and if you are unsure which, why there are so many Bible translations will help you choose. There is a longer guide in how to read the Bible.

Takeaway

Ask three questions of any passage: what kind of writing is this, who was it first written to, and how does Jesus bring it into focus.

Where This Lands

The Book Points Past Itself

Jesus once told some of the most careful Bible readers of His day something that should stop all of us. They studied the Scriptures because they thought eternal life was in them, and He said those Scriptures testify about Him, yet they refused to come to Him to have life. That is John 5:39 to 40.

The Bible is not the destination. It is the road to a person. You can know every covenant and every genre on this page and still miss Him. Or you can open it knowing almost nothing, meet Jesus in a Gospel, and find that the rest of the library starts to open up because of Him.

That is what the Bible is for. It shows us who God is, and it shows us fully in Jesus. It shows us who we are and invites us into the life of the Kingdom now, not someday.

For related reading, see the Old Testament and the New Testament, how many covenants are in the Bible, and if you would like someone to pray with you as you start reading, send us a prayer request or come visit us on Long Island.

The Whole Thing In One Line

The Bible is a library of sixty-six books in many genres, organized around covenants and moving through one story of redemption that arrives in Jesus, so read each book on its own terms and read all of them through Him.

Starting The Bible And Not Sure Where To Begin?

Tell us where you are and what you are wondering about, and someone at Sound of Heaven will pray with you and help you take the first step.

Questions People Ask

Questions About The Bible

What is the Bible in simple terms?

The Bible is a library of books that Christians read as God-breathed Scripture. The Protestant Bible has sixty-six books, thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New, written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek over many centuries. It includes law, history, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, gospels, letters and apocalyptic writing. Taken together it tells one story, God making covenant with people and bringing that story to its fullness in Jesus, who is the clearest picture of God we have.

How many books are in the Bible?

The Protestant Bible has sixty-six books, thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New. The Hebrew Bible contains the same material as that Old Testament but counts it as twenty-four books, grouped as the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include several additional books in their Old Testament. The New Testament is the same twenty-seven books across all of these traditions.

What is the difference between the Old and New Testament?

Testament means covenant. The Old Testament is the story and Scripture of God's covenant with Israel, from creation through the law, the kings, the prophets and the exile. The New Testament tells of Jesus, the new covenant He opened by His death and resurrection, and the first churches living in it. The Old sets up the promises and the New shows them fulfilled in Jesus. You need both, and you read the first through the second.

Who decided which books are in the Bible?

No single person or meeting decided it. The popular idea that the Council of Nicaea voted on the books in AD 325 is not true. The collection took shape gradually as churches across the Roman world read, copied and relied on these writings, and later lists recognized what was already in wide use. The Hebrew Scriptures were largely settled in Jewish practice before that. The details of that process are a history of their own.

Where should I start reading the Bible?

Start with a Gospel. Mark is short and moves quickly, and Luke gives a fuller account. Meet Jesus first, because He is the lens for reading everything else. After that, read Acts to see what happened to the first believers, then go back to Genesis and Exodus to see where the story began. Read whole books rather than scattered verses, use a translation you understand, and if you can, read alongside other people who can talk it through with you.