Study
The featured studies
The studies in The Craft of Scripture, sorted by the kind of thing each one teaches.
Summary
The Craft of Scripture holds 16 of the site's 1112 featured studies, in 4 of the ten kinds.
- 1 study asks what one passage says, line by line.
- 3 studies ask what Scripture teaches on a subject, from its first text to its fullest.
- 2 studies ask why Christians read the same texts differently.
- 10 studies ask what one word or picture carries wherever Scripture uses it.
The studies by kind
Passages and psalms
These studies take a chapter, a song or a single teaching and read it line by line. Each stays inside one passage and follows its own movement.
1 studies, 0 as cards, 1 in the register
The register: 1 studies of this kind
What Scripture teaches on a subject, from its first text to its fullest. The traditions that formed the teaching are named.
3 studies, 0 as cards, 3 in the register
The register: 3 studies of this kind
Questions Christians answer differently. Each study sets out the texts both sides read, the positions with their holders, and where this site's tradition lands.
2 studies, 0 as cards, 2 in the register
The register: 2 studies of this kind
Symbols and words
A picture or a word traced across the canon, from its first mention to the place it comes to rest.
10 studies, 0 as cards, 10 in the register
The register: 10 studies of this kind
- Acrostics: From Aleph to TawAn acrostic is a poem whose lines or stanzas begin with the Hebrew alphabet in order, aleph to taw; this page teaches the form, then walks all fourteen acrostics in the Hebrew Bible, including the one letter that went missing.
- Bookends: How Scripture Frames ItselfAn inclusio is a bookend: a word or line that opens a passage and closes it again, wrapping everything between the two matching ends into one unit.
- Chiasmus: the Bible's Mirror WritingA chiasm is a mirror-shaped passage that walks to a center and back out in reverse, putting the meaning at the middle; this page teaches the form with one verse, then walks seven of the canon's great rings.
- Irony in Scripture: More Than the Speaker KnowsScripture's irony lets a speaker say more, or the opposite, of what they know, while the reader sees the whole picture; the device exposes the self-deceived in their own words and reaches its summit at the cross, where mockery states the gospel.
- Numbered Sayings: Three Things, Then FourThe graded numerical saying names a number and then raises it by one (three, then four; six, then seven) to say a case is complete and overflowing; the numbers are rhetorical weight, not a literal inventory.
- Parallelism: the Bible's Rhyme of Thoughts
- The Covenant Lawsuit: When God Sues His People
- The Craft of ScriptureScripture's writers worked with deliberate literary craft at every scale, from the sound of a single word to the architecture of whole books, and most of it disappears in translation.
- Type-Scenes: the Stories Scripture Tells TwiceA type-scene is a story template Scripture reuses on purpose, so that a reader who knows the shape notices exactly where a given telling departs from it; the departure is the narrator's commentary, delivered without a word of editorializing.
- Wordplay: the Puns of the ProphetsParonomasia is the sound-play the prophets and storytellers built into Scripture on purpose, so a hearer carries two ideas together by ear; this page teaches the term in one verse, then walks the canon's clearest examples in Hebrew and Greek.
Keep studying
On this page
People and groups1
The text itself3
The roster is the site’s own build manifest, so no study can be missing from it. A study leads its kind when it carries a line of its own and more of the other studies link to it; a register row with no line of its own borrows the first sentence of the study’s own summary. The pictures are public domain: engravings by Gustave Doré from Doré’s English Bible(1866), and paintings held at Wikimedia Commons. Each is named in full on the study’s own page.