About

A Wider Study of the Bible

This site exists because the story of the Bible is wider than any one printed volume can hold.

A standard Bible gives you the 66 books of the Protestant canon, in the order the church has printed them for centuries. That canon matters, and it comes first here. But it is not the whole library. The early church also read the Apocrypha. The Jewish Tanakh arranges the same Old Testament books in a different order, ending not with Malachi but with Chronicles and the call to return and rebuild. The Ethiopian church kept books like 1 Enoch and Jubilees in its Bible when every other tradition let them go — and fragments of those same books turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls, proving how widely they were read in the time of Jesus. Jude even quotes Enoch directly.

No single bound book gathers all of that together with maps, timelines, and full-color pictures of the places and objects archaeology has uncovered. This site tries to provide more resources.

What 'wider' means here

• The full Bible, all 66 books of the canon
• The complete Apocrypha
• The Tanakh's arrangement of the Old Testament alongside the familiar one
• Ancient texts from the world of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including 1 Enoch and Jubilees
• Full-color archaeological photographs, maps, and timelines throughout

Every page is labeled honestly

Wider study does not mean pretending every text is the same kind of book. Each page on this site is labeled with the collection it belongs to — Canon, Apocrypha, Tanakh, or Ancient Text — so you always know what you are reading and how the church has regarded it. The canon is Scripture. The rest is here to study: to understand the world the Bible came from, and the books God's people were reading along the way.

Read it your way

Every text on this site can be read two ways:

• In canon order — the order the books sit in a printed Bible
• In chronological order — arranged by when the events happened, with the Psalms and Prophets woven into the history they belong to, and the intertestamental writings in the centuries between Malachi and Matthew

Switch between the two from the index pages at any time. Each study page also notes when its text was actually written, which is not always when its story is set.

Why study wider?

Because the Bible did not fall from the sky in a single binding. It was written, copied, argued over, hidden in caves, and preserved by real people across two thousand years. Seeing the whole library — and the world it came from — makes the center of it clearer, not smaller. The center is Jesus.

Welcome to the wider study. Start in either order.