Know the Bible
Who is this? What is this place? What does this mean?
The people, places, objects, events, groups and ideas you meet while reading — explained in their own context first, then opened up through symbolic and personal reflection that is always labelled as reflection.
Concepts
What does this mean?
- Concept
Covenant
A binding relationship with stated commitments, closer to a treaty or a marriage than to a contract. Scripture describes several: with Noah, Abraham, Israel at Sinai, David, and what the New Testament calls the new covenant.
Remember: Not a contract you can exit — a relationship with promises attached.
- Concept
The kingdom of God
The central theme of Jesus' preaching: God's reign breaking into ordinary life. It is spoken of as both present and still to come, and Jesus mostly describes it in parables rather than defining it.
Remember: God's way of running things, arriving in ordinary life.
- Concept
The Law (Torah)
'Torah' means instruction as much as legislation. It refers to the first five books of the Bible and to the commandments within them, given to a people already rescued from Egypt.
Remember: Instruction for a people already rescued — not the price of rescue.
- Concept
Faith
In Scripture, faith is closer to trust and faithfulness than to intellectual certainty. The Hebrew and Greek words carry the sense of reliability — being able to lean on something, and being someone others can lean on.
Remember: Trust you can lean on — not certainty you have achieved.
- Concept
Wisdom
Practical skill in living well, shaped by reverence for God. Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes form Israel's wisdom literature, and they do not always agree with each other — which is itself instructive.
Remember: Skill in living, starting with knowing you are not the measure of reality.
How it all connects
A few short threads through the story. Only connections seeded in this library are shown — it is a map of what we have written, not of the whole Bible.
The line of promise
Genesis follows one family across four generations — and ends with them in Egypt.
From slavery to a people
The exodus is the event Israel keeps returning to when it asks who it is.
Jerusalem, temple and the last week
One city holds kingship, worship and the events at the centre of the Gospels.
Loss, exile and return
What happens to a people when the land, the temple and the king are gone.
From Galilee outward
The movement begins in fishing villages, not in the capital.
Instruction, ark and temple
Where the covenant terms were kept, and how instruction stayed at the centre of worship.
One kingdom becomes two
A king who would not listen, two kingdoms, and the long road to exile.