Condensing the Old Testament

This explanation of why and how I condensed the Old Testament is divided into three parts:

1. Rationale
2. Method
3. Safeguards

The third part includes the provisions I’ve made to make sure that the parts of the OT not included in the condensation do not become forgotten or set completely aside. Far be it from me to say that any word in the Bible is unimportant!

1. My Rationale for Condensing the Old Testament

The most challenging aspect of constructing a Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan is deciding exactly how to incorporate the Old Testament. Now, it’s not as if the OT makes no reference to Christ. On the contrary, the OT is full of references to Him. In fact, you can rightly say that all of it points to Him (#FJOT)! But if you are familiar with the OT, you know that most of these references are far less explicit than NT references to Him. Assuming three chapters of the Bible is an appropriate daily portion for an average man, then it only makes sense to take two of the chapters from the NT and one of them from the OT. That choice is not difficult. However, the OT is roughly three times as long as the NT. This presents a dilemma.

One horn of the dilemma is that reading one chapter a day in the OT will only get us a third of the way through the OT in a year. The other horn is that if we bump up the OT chapters to 3-5 per day so that we can complete the OT in a year, then the OT will end up dominating our Bible reading time (3-5 versus 2) – reducing the Christ-Centered focus. It would also increase the number of chapters to read from 3 to 5-7. This sends us back to the first horn: spreading the OT chapters over a three-year period. But that would only increase a reader’s chances of “losing the plot,” or getting bogged down in the minutia of genealogies, Levitical ordinances, and such.

These frustrations led to my deciding in 2023 that the only solution was to condense the OT so that the gist of it could be read in a year. I wanted readers to be able to grasp the historical arc of the Old Testament to further demonstrate how Jesus was the point to which it was headed.

The condensation took months, but would allow me to start using that condensation on January 1, 2024. This condensation covers all the history that is in the OT, and supplements it with samplings from the books of wisdom and prophecy. Basically, I was able to condense the length of the OT by focusing on history and reducing duplication. There’s more nuance to it than that, as the next section will, to some degree, demonstrate.

2. My Method for Condensing the Old Testament

I describe now the process I followed to produce a condensation of the Old Testament that would allow completion in one year at the general rate of a chapter a day.

The Reader’s Digest Bible

Remembering that the Reader’s Digest folks had produced a version of the Bible in the early 1980’s, I thought it might provide the answer to the problem. Tracking down a copy at the local library, however, I discovered two insurmountable problems. First, they had only reduced the Old Testament content by 50%. That would take it from 929 chapters to 465 – still 100 too many for a year-long Bible reading plan. Second, and more importantly, this condensation did away with all the Bible’s chapter and verse divisions. That is, when you’re reading in, say, Genesis you only know you’re in Genesis – there nothing to tell you which chapter in Genesis you’re reading. Even the Psalms were stripped of their numbers, meaning you couldn’t easily turn to Psalm 23; you’d have to flip pages looking for “The Lord is my shepherd” in the midst of the text. Without chapter divisions, there was no way to trace which parts of the Bible were being omitted, and no way to correlate the text with any other Bible except at the book-by-book level. I would have to do my own condensation which would preserve the chapter distinctions.

Guidelines and Goals

• Try to stick to a chapter a day. The downside of this is that the words read per day can sometimes vary greatly because range of verses per chapter can vary a lot. The upside is a chapter a day keeps things a lot simpler, especially for those new to the Bible – which describes the target audience of the condensation.

Starting Point: Books and Chapters

The Protestant version of the Old Testament consists of 39 books organized into three categories:

• Books of History (17)
  • Chapters in the Books of History (436 = 47%)
• Books of Wisdom (5)
  • Chapters in the Books of Wisdom (243 = 26%)
• Books of Prophecy (17)
  • Chapters in the Books of Prophecy (250 = 27%)

Related: The Symmetry of the Testaments

Allocation of Chapters

My first step was to choose history as the foundation of the condensation. I figured it was better to give samples of the Wisdom and Prophecy books than samples of history. Therefore, I attempted to include all the history, omitting what was generally repetitive (like 1 and 2 Chronicles), what

Chapters of History Books Omitted

• Exodus 21-23, 25-31, 35-40 – (16) –
• Leviticus 1-9, 11-27 – (26) –
• Numbers 1-9, 15, 18-19, 26, 28-30, 33-35 – (19) –
• Deuteronomy 1-33 – (33) –
• Joshua 12-22 -(11) –
• Judges 1-2, 17-21 – (7) – Miscellaneous historical and descriptive accounts, but not flowing chronologically with the main narrative of the book (that is, “appendix” or “epilogue” type material)
• 2 Samuel 21-24 – (4) – Same as Judg 1-2, 17-21 above
• 1 Kings 4-7 – (4) – Extended descriptions of Solomon’s officials, power, wealth, temple, palace, and temple furnishings
• 1 & 2 Chronicles – (65) – These books of history generally repeat the same history as found in the books of Samuel-Kings, but focusing on the southern kingdom (Judah).
• Ezra 2 – (1) –
• Nehemiah 7, 11-12 (3) –

Historical Chapters of Wisdom and Prophecy Books Added to History

Even though the amount of history in the books of History was great, and needed to omit all I reasonably could, I also felt there was some history in books of Wisdom and Prophecy that was important enough to add.

• Job 1,2, and 42 – (3)
• Jer 39-44 (6)
• Daniel 1-6 – (6)
• Jonah 1-4 – (4)
• Total Wisdom and Prophecy Chapters Added to History: 19

Net Results

Chapters	Full Bible	Condensation
History	436 (47%)	263 (72%)
Wisdom	243 (26%)	51 (14%)
Prophecy	250 (27%)	51 (14%)
Total	929 (100%)	100%

• Some chapters were short enough to combine with another (Job 1-2; Est 9-10; Ps 117-118; Habak 1:2; Hag 1-2; Mal 3-4
• Ps 119 (176 verses) is broken into six pieces, and treated as if it were six chapters.
• There is at least one chapter from each of the 39 books of the Old Testament, except for 1 and 2 Chronicles.

3. Safeguards for Condensing the Old Testament

In Defense of the Old Testament’s Importance

Let me say a further word of support about the Old Testament lest anyone think I am relegating it to lesser importance. First, every word of God – from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21 – is important just because it’s God’s word. Any man who says otherwise is playing with fire. The thing we have to remember is that Jesus explained the Old Testament to His fellow Jews and we need to read the Old Testament through His interpretive lens. If we don’t read the Old Testament according to Jesus’ interpretation of it, we’re not going to properly understand it. That’s why we have to get thoroughly grounded in the New Testament – to be able to get from the Old Testament what He did. Somehow, He got out of the Old Testament that God was love. That’s the kind of thinking in which we want to get immersed. Then we can appreciate the Old Testament in all its glory. Then we can start to understand all the Old Testament has to say about Christ – and I assure you that it has much more to say about Him than most people realize.

In the end, we’ll see that the New Testament and the Old Testament cannot survive apart from each other. The New Testament is branches and fruit, while the Old Testament is trunk and root. Without each other, they’re just the remains of a dead tree. Together, they’re a tree of life. What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder!

Just because “Christ” is the Bible’s most important word does not mean that any of its other words are unimportant. On the contrary, “Christ” helps us understand the proper place of all those other words – New Testament and Old Testament.

Side Reading

You could occasionally spend time some weekend perusing chapters that are not included in the condensation. You can know what those chapters are simply by noticing which chapters get skipped when going from one day to the next in the BRP.

BRP’s for Reading the OT in Three Years or One

Once you are grounded enough in Christ, and especially grounded in how the anticipation of Christ permeates the Old Testament and the history it records, you will want to incorporate the entire Old Testament into your daily Bible reading. This CC-OT BRP will help you accomplish that, giving you a choice between spreading your reading of the entire OT over a three-year period or achieving it all in one year’s time. If the former, go to columns 4-6; if the latter, go to column 7 (OT/All>). Just be sure that before you do this, you have the grounding I mentioned in the beginning of this paragraph.

Back to Extended Explanation of the Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan