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Come, Follow Me runs through the Old Testament in the order the books are printed. The books are not printed in the order the events happened. For most of the year that does not matter. For a few weeks it matters a great deal.
The problem with the order
Follow the course as written and you will read about the Babylonian exile, then go back several centuries to read prophets who were warning about it. You will read the whole of Job in the middle of a run of poetry, without being told where in the story he stands. You will meet Isaiah and Jeremiah as books rather than as men speaking into particular crises with particular kings on the throne.
None of that makes the reading useless. It does mean that a good deal of what the text is doing goes past unseen, because the thing it is responding to was read months earlier or has not been read yet.
Why the canon is not in date order
The Old Testament is grouped by kind, not by date. Law, then history, then poetry and wisdom, then the prophets, with the prophets themselves split into longer and shorter books rather than earlier and later ones.
That arrangement is old and it is deliberate. It puts like with like and it makes the collection navigable. It is a library catalogue, and a library catalogue is not a timeline.
The consequence is that the historical books run to the exile and stop, and then the prophetic books start again from several centuries earlier and run through the same period a second time.
Job is the clearest case
Job sits between Esther and Psalms, in the poetry section. Read in that position it appears to belong to the period after the return from exile, because that is where Esther sits.
The book itself gives a different impression. Job's wealth is counted in livestock. He offers sacrifice himself, as head of his household, with no priesthood, no tabernacle and no temple in sight. He lives to an enormous age. There is no mention of Israel, of Moses, of the law, or of the covenant.
Those are the marks of the patriarchal age, and that is where most readers have placed him — somewhere around the time of Abraham, give or take. It is an inference rather than a statement, and the book is deliberately vague about its setting, but the vagueness points backwards rather than forwards.
Reading Job as a patriarch-era book changes it. The questions he is asking are being asked before there is a law to appeal to.
The prophets and the kings
This is where the payoff is largest.
Isaiah is not a book of general religious poetry. It is a man speaking in Jerusalem while Assyria is destroying the northern kingdom and then coming for Judah. Chapters 36 and 37 describe Sennacherib at the walls in 701 BC, an event Assyrian records also describe. Read Isaiah beside 2 Kings 18 to 19 and the two accounts illuminate each other.
Jeremiah is speaking in Jerusalem in its last years, under the last kings of Judah, as Babylon closes in. Read him beside 2 Kings 24 to 25 and the fall of the city stops being a summary and becomes something happening to somebody.
Amos and Hosea are speaking to the northern kingdom before it falls. Haggai and Zechariah are speaking to people trying to rebuild the temple after the return. Each one has a moment, and the moment is the point.
The course reaches the prophets late in the year, months after the history that produced them. That is the single largest gain available from rearranging.
The Psalms are not a book
The Psalms are a collection assembled over centuries. Some are attributed to David, some to the sons of Korah, some to Asaph, one to Moses. Psalm 137 is written by somebody sitting in Babylon.
Reading them as a single book in one sitting is like reading a hymnal front to back. It works, but the individual pieces lose the occasion that produced them.
This is the one place where rearranging is hardest, because most psalms cannot be dated at all. The realistic gain is smaller here: notice the handful that can be placed, and let the rest be what they are.
How to do it without falling behind
A warning first. Reading the Old Testament in strict historical order is a bigger project than it sounds, and it will put you out of step with the lesson everyone else is preparing.
There is a middle way that costs almost nothing, and it is the one worth recommending.
Keep the course order. Add the context. Before each week, spend two minutes finding out when the passage sits and what else was happening. That is it. You read what everyone else is reading, and you read it knowing where you are standing.
Three habits make the difference:
- For any prophet, find the king. Most prophetic books name the reigns they cover in the first verse or two. Look up that king in Kings or Chronicles first.
- For any narrative, find what came immediately before. Not the previous chapter — the previous event in time.
- For anything undatable, notice that it is undatable. That is information too, and pretending otherwise is worse than admitting it.
Using the timeline for it
This is what the study mode on this site is for. Press CFM on the timeline and the history gives way to the year's course, with each week placed at the point where its passage happened.
Open the current week and you get the reading, the events around it, the places involved, and the way through to the text. What you also get, which is the part that matters here, is everything on either side.
The scripture study page does the same job in list form. The Readings tab is every passage in date order rather than canonical order, which is exactly the rearrangement described above, already done. The Kingdoms tab draws the empires, the kings of Judah and Israel, and the prophets as overlapping bands, so you can see at a glance which prophet was speaking under which king.
For a prophet, that one view answers most of the context question in a few seconds.
Is it worth the trouble?
For most weeks, honestly, no. Genesis is already in order. So is Exodus. So is most of the narrative.
For the prophets it is worth a great deal, and for Job it changes the book.
The general principle is the one this whole site is built on. Scripture was written by people at particular moments, into particular situations, and a passage read without its moment is a passage read with the sound turned down. You do not need a chronology degree to fix that. You need to know roughly when, and what else was going on.
The how to use page walks through study mode with pictures. The eras themselves are laid out on the history pages.