I bought a chronological Bible this summer and started reading at the end of July. The thing about a chronological Bible is that you don't necessarily read all the stories in the order the appear in the Bible. Instead they're arranged by date. So the prophecies that were written during a given king's reign are printed during that part of Judges or I or II Chronicles or I or II Kings or whenever that king was talked about.
But when you get to the books of Chronicles especially, things can get a little, well, uninteresting. You have lists of names - which man fathered what son and who his sons were and so on. The majority of the names are really hard to pronounce, especially for those of us who never took Hebrew, so I look at them and say, "Maybe my siblings should have named their child that."
I've read through the Bible chronologically once before and thought it was pretty cool. So this time, I'm trying to notice things I hadn't before. And I did notice something recently. Most of the family lists are the sons, which makes sense since Israel was a patriarchal society. But then in I Chronicles 7, you come across Makir who had a sister. You run across Zelophehad, who only had daughters. You find Sheerah, a woman who built three towns. And Asher's sons had a sister, as did Heber's sons.
I found myself wondering about these women and why God felt it was important to include them in the family lists.
And then there are the different names the writers used for God. Jeremiah is fond of "the Lord of Heaven's Armies," while Ezekiel favors "Sovereign Lord." I've also been noticing how many times the prophets quote God saying "I, the Lord, have spoken" or "I, the Sovereign Lord, have spoken."
I don't really have anything profound to say about either of these things. I just thought they were interesting.
