The Library · Table of Contents
Walk the shelves
Not one book but a library, law and history, poetry and prophecy, gospels and letters, written across a thousand years. Run your hand along the shelf: rest on a spine to hear what it holds, open it to study its story, people, and games.
Every book here can be read in full, the sixty-six in both the World English Bible and the King James, and the deuterocanonical books in the King James Apocrypha or, for the few it omits, in Brenton’s Septuagint. All public domain. The people and places are explained as you go, and the New Testament’s use of a verse waits in the margin.
or open John 1, Genesis 1, or Psalm 23
Rooms in the Library
The Old Testament
Grouped the way most Christian Bibles print them: Law, History, Wisdom, and the Prophets, roughly by kind, ending with Malachi's promise of a messenger.
The Law
the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch
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History
conquest, judges, kings, exile, and return
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Wisdom & Poetry
the soul's library, song, proverb, lament, love
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Major Prophets
major for length, not rank
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The New Testament
Four Gospels, the church's first history, the letters, and the unveiling, ordered the same way across the traditions.
The Gospels
four portraits of one Lord
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Acts
the Spirit and the church, Jerusalem to Rome
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Paul's Letters
to churches and co-workers, longest first
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General Letters
Hebrews to Jude, for the whole scattered church
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Apocalypse
the unveiling
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The Deuterocanon
the Apocrypha
Between the Testaments sit books that Christians shelve differently. Catholic and Orthodox churches receive them as Scripture, the “deuterocanon,” a second canon. Most Protestant traditions print them, when they print them, as the “Apocrypha”: the original 1611 King James included them between the Testaments, which is how they can be read here in full. We shelve them in the open and let you decide. Each book’s page says who receives it.
The Deuterocanon
received by Catholic and Orthodox churches; the “Apocrypha” of Protestant Bibles
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…and beyond
received in Orthodox canons
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Where traditions differ, which books, which order, we describe each faithfully rather than deciding for you. Orders and groupings follow common printed editions.