The featured studies

One study for each book, with the studies of how the Bible came to us and how its writers wrote. This is the place to begin a book from end to end.

7 studies

• PThe PsalmsIsrael's prayer book: the five books, the two ways, the genres of the heart, and every road running to the King on Zion who is Christ.
• PProverbs: the Study GuideSkill for living in the fear of the LORD, the six collections, the keystone that frames the book, and the genre key that keeps a proverb from being read as a promise.
• JJob: the Study GuideGod does not unseal the file on why the righteous suffer; He unveils Himself, the wager, the collapsing dialogue, the whirlwind.
• WWisdom and the PoetsFive Hebrew voices in verse — Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song — and how their poetry, built on paired lines, meets every season of a life.
• QThe Question of Suffering — Job 1–42Job never learns why he suffered: the whirlwind unveils the One who ordained it, not the reason he asked for.
• EEcclesiastes: the Study GuideEvery avenue of meaning under the sun run through the sieve of death, and what does not filter through: the gift, and the fear of God.
• SSong of Solomon: the Study GuideThe Bible's one book of pure love poetry, the six-movement garden path, its two refrains, and the church's two-thousand-year argument.

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.

16 studies, 8 as cards, 8 in the register

• LThe Lord Is My Shepherd — Psalm 23Six verses walked as a road through five terrains, and the shepherd-thread that runs from Psalm 23 to the Good Shepherd of John 10.
• PThe Penitential PsalmsSeven psalms read together as one set since at least the sixth century, each walking the same road from trouble owned to confession made to pardon received.
• TThe Tongue — Death and Life in ProverbsProverbs' speech-ethics kept as a ledger: the healing tongue and the burning tongue, with James 3 as the New Testament terminus.
• DDavid's Life in the Psalms: the thirteen historical titlesThirteen psalms whose titles name an event in David's life, each set beside the chapter in Samuel that tells it, in the order he lived them.
• AThe Acrostic PsalmsNine psalms walk the Hebrew alphabet from aleph to taw, and every one but Psalm 119 has a gap, a doubling or a line standing outside the scheme.
• IThe Imprecatory PsalmsPsalms 35, 69, 109 and 137 ask God to act against an enemy. The four with their occasions, the readings the church has given them, and the apostles' own use of two of them.
• SThe Shepherd's Life — Psalm 23Psalm 23 is built out of a working trade. What a shepherd in Judah did with a rod, a staff, a fold and a water source, verse by verse.
• TThe Two Ways — Psalm 1The gate of the Psalter: a tree planted by streams of water set against chaff the wind drives away.

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.

1 study

• TTwo Traditions, One SongAllegorical and natural, side by side against the same verses, two thousand years of argument, presented at full strength and attributed, not adjudicated.