The Blue-Collar Bible Scholar: Reader's Guide to the Old Testament (Volume 2): The Major and Minor Prophets and The Writings

The Blue-Collar Bible Scholar's Reader's Guide to the Old Testament is the culmination of what Joel Edmund Anderson has taught in his Bible classes at both the high school level and college level over the past 25 years of teaching. Here in Volume 1, Anderson guides you through the literary and historical worlds of the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) and the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, First and Second Samuel, and First and Second Kings), helping you to understand what you are reading within the given historical and literary contexts of the Old Testament.Most Bible commentaries simply are not aimed at the average, sincere Christian who simply wants to make sense of what he/she is reading. Scholarly works are aimed at scholars that not only tend to focus solely on historical-critical questions and issues but often fail to read any given biblical book as a unified, literary whole. Simply put, most scholarly works on the Bible give a heavy dose of historical, archeological, and textual information about the biblical text, but they make very little effort to actually read the biblical text and help the reader understand it.This is where the BCBS Reader's Guide to the Old Testament is different. To be sure, Anderson gives enough historical background, both of the New Testament world and each individual New Testament book, so that the reader can get a grasp of the general time period, but his ultimate focus is to help the reader understand the biblical text itself.He does this by doing a number of things with each Old Testament book: (1) He provides a brief explanation of the time of writing and authorship of each book. (2) He provides a "Big Things to Know" section that highlights the major themes and literary imagery in each Old Testament book. This essentially is a "heads up" to the reader to look out for these themes and images as he/she reads any given New Testament book. (3) He provides a "Story Chart" or "Literary Map" of each Old Testament book that gives the reader a visual of the overall flow of each Old Testament book. This is extremely helpful, in that it helps the reader to follow the storyline and "literary flow" in each book. (4) He then provides a "walkthrough" of each Old Testament book, passage by passage, helping the reader understand how each Old Testament book fits together as a coherent whole. (5) Finally, in the corresponding BCBS Reader's Guide to the Old Testament Workbook, Anderson provides study/discussion questions for the reader as he/she reads through each book in the Old Testament. The workbook can be used in individual study, a Sunday School or Bible Study small group, or a high school Bible class. Read more