How to read the Bible chronologically (two different ways)

The short answer

Reading the Bible chronologically means one of two orders. Most chronological plans follow the order of events: they cut books into passages and read Job among the patriarchs, Chronicles beside Kings, psalms inside David's life and Paul's letters inside Acts. The other order keeps every book whole and reads them roughly as they were written, from Job and Genesis to John's writings, with Paul's first letters before the Gospels. Either way it is 1,189 chapters in a Protestant Bible, about 3.3 a day for a year.

In this guide

1. What reading the Bible chronologically means
2. How an order-of-events plan works
3. Why chronological plans disagree
4. The catch: the Gospels arrive in autumn
5. Reading the Bible in the order it was written
6. Chronological or canonical: which one suits you?
7. How long a chronological Bible reading plan takes
8. Staying with a chronological plan
9. Questions people ask
10. Sources

To read the Bible chronologically sounds like following one settled order, but the plans that use the word run on two different clocks. Most arrange the Bible by when its events happened, so a single day’s reading can come from three books. A few keep every book whole and arrange the books by when they were written. The two put some books months apart, and even plans of the same kind disagree with each other, so it helps to know which one you are choosing before you start.

• 1,189chapters in the Protestant Bible, in any order
• 3.3chapters a day to read them in a year
• 929of them in the Old Testament
• 260in the New Testament

What reading the Bible chronologically means

Reading the Bible chronologically means reading it in time order instead of the printed order, and there are two kinds of time order. An order-of-events plan follows the story as it happened, cutting books into passages and placing each one where it belongs in the history. An order-written plan keeps each book whole and reads the books in roughly the order they were composed.

Both exist because the printed order, called the canonical order, groups books by kind rather than by date. The Protestant Bible (66 books) puts the law first, then history, poetry and the prophets, then the Gospels, Acts, the letters and the Book of Revelation. So the same years can be told twice, as 1 and 2 Chronicles retell much of Samuel and Kings, and a prophet can be printed long after the reign he spoke into. Isaiah opens “in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah,” kings whose reigns are told in 2 Kings 15 to 20.

Here is how the two time orders treat the same books:

How an order-of-events plan works

An order-of-events plan reads each passage at the point in the story where it happened, and it is the kind most published chronological Bible reading plans are. Blue Letter Bible describes its one-year plan as “compiled according to recent historical research, taking into account the order in which the recorded events actually occurred.” The chronological plan from Back to the Bible, published on the ESV website, shows what that looks like day by day:

• Job goes into Genesis. Genesis 8–11 is read on January 3, all 42 chapters of Job from January 4 to 15, and Genesis 12 on January 16.
• Chronicles is read beside Samuel and Kings. May 23 is 2 Samuel 24, 1 Chronicles 21–22 and Psalm 30. June 11 pairs 1 Kings 5–6 with 2 Chronicles 2–3, two accounts of Solomon building the temple.
• Psalms go where their headings point. Psalm 59 is headed “when Saul sent, and they watched the house to kill him,” so it is read on April 13 with 1 Samuel 18–20, where that happens. Psalm 51, headed “when Nathan the prophet came to him,” comes the day after 2 Samuel 11–12.
• The prophets go into Kings. Jonah is read on July 7, between 2 Kings 14 and 15, because 2 Kings 14:25 names him. Isaiah and Amos follow within days, and the first verse of each names King Uzziah.
• The Gospels are woven together. October 9 is Matthew 12:1–21, Mark 3 and Luke 6, so you read the healing of a man with a withered hand three times in one sitting, once in each Gospel’s words.
• The letters go into Acts. James is read on November 22, between Acts 13–14 and Acts 15–16. Galatians follows Acts 15–16, and the two letters to the Thessalonians follow Acts 17:1–18:18, where Paul moves on from Thessalonica to Athens and Corinth.

Passages, not chapters

Because events cross chapter breaks, an order-of-events plan counts passages, and how finely it cuts them varies. The Back to the Bible plan splits a few chapters: Psalm 119 is read over two days, and Lamentations breaks at 3:36. Tyndale’s reading guide, the one featured in The One Year Chronological Bible, cuts at the verse throughout. Its January 4 is Genesis 11:1–26, then 1 Chronicles 1:24–27, then Genesis 11:27–14:24, so the genealogy from Chronicles is read where its names appear in Genesis. Blue Letter Bible’s version, by contrast, keeps every reading to whole chapters.

Why chronological plans disagree

Chronological Bible reading plans are not all the same, because most passages carry no date and someone has to decide where they go. A few places where published plans part ways:

Job. The book opens with “a man in the land of Uz” and names no king and no year. The Back to the Bible and Blue Letter Bible plans read it after Genesis 11, before Abram is called. Tyndale’s guide reads it after Genesis 50, in the second half of January, and starts Exodus on February 1. The question is old: the Babylonian Talmud records opinions placing Job in the time of Jacob, of Moses, of the judges, of King Ahasuerus, and among those who came back from exile at the start of the Second Temple period.

Psalms without a heading. A heading tells a plan where a psalm goes; Psalm 1 has none. The Back to the Bible plan reads it on May 5, the day after David brings the ark to Jerusalem. Tyndale’s guide reads it on July 6, among the readings for King Hezekiah’s reign.

Psalms with a heading. Psalm 90 is headed “A Prayer by Moses,” which still leaves the moment open. Back to the Bible reads it with Numbers 14–15, after the spies come back from Canaan. Blue Letter Bible, whose plan is otherwise very close to it, reads it with Deuteronomy 32–34, at the end of Moses’ life, and Tyndale with Deuteronomy 31:30–32:52, which holds the Song of Moses.

The Gospels. John tells of Jesus driving the traders out of the temple in chapter 2, early in his ministry; Matthew, Mark and Luke tell it just after he rides into Jerusalem, a few days before his death. A harmony has to decide whether that was one event or two. The Back to the Bible plan reads John 2 on October 6 and Mark 11 on November 3, leaving each where its Gospel puts it.

None of this makes a plan wrong. Each is one careful reconstruction, and any of them takes you through the whole Bible. If the reasoning matters to you, pick a plan whose editors explain it.

The catch: the Gospels arrive in autumn

In a one-year order-of-events plan the New Testament fills the last three months, so the first Gospel reading comes in late September or October. The Back to the Bible plan reaches Luke 1 on October 1, Blue Letter Bible’s on day 274 (the same point in the year), and Tyndale’s guide reaches the Gospels on September 24.

That is not peculiar to chronological plans. The Old Testament holds 929 of the Protestant Bible’s 1,189 chapters, about 78 percent, so any plan that reads it first reaches the New Testament in autumn: a start-to-finish plan at an even pace begins Matthew around October 13. If nine months before the Gospels sounds long, there are two simple answers. Choose a plan that reads some of both testaments most days, or read a Gospel chapter alongside the plan. Our guide to the best order to read the Bible compares these routes, and which Gospel to read first helps with the second.

Reading the Bible in the order it was written

The other way to read the Bible chronologically keeps every book whole and reads the books in roughly the order they were written. BibleRing’s “In the order written” plan is one version of it:

1. Job, then Genesis to Deuteronomy
2. Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and 1 and 2 Samuel
3. Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs
4. 1 and 2 Kings, then the prophets from Obadiah, Joel and Jonah to Ezekiel and Daniel
5. Haggai, Zechariah, Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah and Malachi, then 1 and 2 Chronicles to close the Old Testament
6. James, Galatians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians and Romans
7. Mark, Matthew, Luke and Acts
8. The later letters, from Ephesians to Jude
9. John’s Gospel, his three letters and Revelation

With a wider canon, the plan reads the books the Protestant Bible does not include (Tobit, Sirach, the Maccabees and the rest, and in the Ethiopian canon Enoch, Jubilees and the Meqabyan) after Chronicles, before the New Testament.

Two points in the New Testament part of this order have broad support among scholars: since the late 19th century most have held that Mark was the first of the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), and most date the Gospel of John to AD 90–100. Where the New Testament starts is one view among several. A majority of scholars date 1 Thessalonians to AD 49–51 and take it to be the earliest Christian writing that survives. Putting James and Galatians before it follows those who date both before the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, while scholars who think James was written later in his name date it from the late first century to the mid-second.

The Old Testament is harder to date. Traditional dating follows the writers Jewish and Christian tradition has named; the Talmud, for instance, credits Moses with the Torah and with Job. Critical scholarship places many books later and reads several as edited over generations: most modern scholars hold that the Torah reached its present form after the exile, and many date Job between the 6th and 4th centuries BC. So treat any order-written list as one defensible sequence rather than a fact. The books of the Bible in the order they were written sets out both sets of dates, book by book.

At an even pace over a year, the Protestant version of this order opens with 13 days of Job, starts the New Testament with James in mid-October, and reaches Mark in early November.

Chronological or canonical: which one suits you?

Choose by what you want from the read-through: the order of events for the history as one story, the order written for how the writings grew, and the printed (canonical) order for whole books with nothing to look up.

An order-of-events plan asks for more bookkeeping than the others: days with two or three references, chapters cut at verse numbers, and no reading straight on from where you stopped. That can suit a second read-through better than a first, when the stories are familiar and the arrangement shows how they fit together. If this is your first time through, reading the Bible cover to cover describes what the printed order holds, book by book.

How long a chronological Bible reading plan takes

Changing the order does not change the length: the Protestant Bible is 1,189 chapters however you arrange it, about 3.3 chapters a day for a year and 1.6 for two. The 73-book Catholic Bible has 1,334, about 3.7 a day for a year. The order-of-events plans quoted here follow the Protestant Bible and include none of the seven deuterocanonical books in the Catholic Bible; a Catholic Bible reading plan covers all 73.

The minutes assume about 3.3 minutes a chapter. An order-of-events plan is uneven from day to day, so read them as an average. In the Back to the Bible plan, May 2 is Psalm 133, three verses long, and May 29 is 1 Kings 1–2 with Psalms 37, 71 and 94, about 4,200 words by our count in the World English Bible. For other finishing times, see how many chapters a day to read the Bible.

Staying with a chronological plan

A chronological plan is easiest to keep when the day’s references are where you read, chapters are counted when you finish them, and the slow stretches are expected.

• Keep the plan next to your Bible. Three references from different books are easy to lose; a printed sheet or a bookmark in the plan saves looking each one up.
• Count a chapter when you finish it. When a plan cuts a chapter across two days, mark it on the second. A record in whole chapters is the one that shows what is left.
• Expect the long stretches. In the Back to the Bible plan, Leviticus and Numbers run from February 13 to March 10. From July 9 to the middle of September most days are a prophet: Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, with the shorter books and a few chapters of Kings and Chronicles between them.
• A missed day is only a missed day. Read the next reading on the list. Nothing has to be doubled; the finishing date can move instead.

If you cannot decide, start the plan whose first week you would most like to read, and change your mind later. A chapter read counts in any order.

Questions people ask

Are all chronological Bible reading plans the same?

No. They agree on the outline but differ in the details, because many passages carry no date. Two published one-year plans read Job after Genesis 11, while Tyndale's reads it after Genesis 50. Psalm 1, which has no heading, is read in May beside King David in one plan and in July beside King Hezekiah in another. Some plans cut chapters at the verse; others keep to whole chapters.

Where does Job go in chronological order?

Usually among the patriarchs of Genesis, though the book itself names no king and no year. Back to the Bible's plan and Blue Letter Bible's read it after Genesis 11; Tyndale's reads it after Genesis 50. A list in the order written can put Job first, following the tradition, recorded in the Talmud, that Moses wrote it. The Talmud also records opinions placing Job anywhere from the time of Jacob to the return from exile.

Is it better to read the Bible chronologically or in order?

Neither is better in general; they suit different goals. An order-of-events plan shows the history as one story, with prophets and psalms beside the events they belong to. The printed order keeps every book whole and needs no plan sheet. The order of writing keeps books whole too and shows how the writings grew. On a first read-through, whole books ask the least bookkeeping.

What is the difference between canonical and chronological order?

Canonical order is the order the books are printed in, grouped by kind: law, history, poetry and prophets, then the Gospels, Acts, the letters and Revelation. Chronological order rearranges them by time, either by when the events happened, which splits books into passages, or by when each book was written, which keeps every book whole.

Is the chronological Bible accurate?

A chronological Bible or reading plan uses the same text as any other edition of its translation; only the order changes. The order itself is a reconstruction. Many books carry no date, and scholars disagree about when some events happened and when some books were written, so each plan reflects its editors' judgment. It is best read as one careful arrangement, not a settled timeline.

Sources

1. Chronological Bible Reading Plan, Back to the Bible, published by ESV.org (PDF)
2. Daily Bible Reading Program, Chronological Plan (1 year), Blue Letter Bible (PDF)
3. The One Year Chronological Bible Daily Reading Guide, Tyndale House Publishers, via Walk Thru the Bible (PDF)
4. Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 14b (William Davidson translation), Sefaria
5. Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 15a (William Davidson translation), Sefaria
6. Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 15b (William Davidson translation), Sefaria
7. First Epistle to the Thessalonians, Wikipedia
8. Markan priority, Wikipedia
9. Gospel of John, Wikipedia
10. Epistle to the Galatians, Wikipedia
11. Epistle of James, Wikipedia
12. Dating the Bible, Wikipedia
13. World English Bible, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org