Book Order Bible

Frequently Asked Questions

This page contains answers to frequently asked questions. Read down the page to learn the answers to questions commonly asked of this project or click a specific question at the top of the page to read its answer.

• Is the Book Order Bible a Chronological Bible?
• Are chapter numbers reliable for establishing book order?
• Why are there numbers in front of the book names?
• Why is the book of James now Jacob?

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Is the Book Order Bible a Chronological Bible?

The Book Order Bible is not a chronological Bible and is fundamentally different than chronological Bibles in several important ways.

One of the foundational beliefs that lead to the discovery of using the book of Isaiah to discover the Bible's own definition of it's book order was the assumption that books are "whole literary units" whose component parts would never move around. Thus when the books of the Bible did not match the chapters of Isaiah at first, the books of the Bible obviously had to move around, not the chapters of Isaiah.

In contrast, chronological Bibles move chapters and even verses in the attempt to create a perfect chronology, thus breaking the integrity of the literary units. It's as if the editors want the Bible to read like a history book that treats history in a straight linear fashion rather than topically or recursively as the Bible does.

The second major distinction between the Book Order Bible and chronological Bibles is the use of extra-biblical sources. BOB assumes the Bible itself is all that is needed to correctly organize the parts of the Bible, while chronological Bibles have a goal of making the Bible chronological and when the Bible does not supply all the data they need to reach their goal they quickly subject the Bible to extra-biblical sources to "fix" the Bible.

Though chronological Bibles treat the Bible badly, the subject of time and chronology is pervasive in the Bible and begs to be understood. Rather than jumble the parts of the Bible in an attempt to make it conform to some extra-biblical sense of chronology, just extract the Bibles time references and draw them as a timeline formed around the Bible's calendar (which is not the Jewish calendar by the way).

Phil Stone, a team member on this project has a website that explains exactly how to construct the core chronology of the Bible as a timeline that turns out to be not only historical but predictive as well. If chronology or time or prophecy are important subjects to you visit the BibleTime website.

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Are chapter numbers reliable for establishing book order?

The beauty of studying book order is we need not reconstruct history to determine whether the chapter divisions of Isaiah reliably match the books of the Bible. Instead we simply try with what history has given us and if it works it works regardless of what kind of path the Bible may have traveled to come to us in it's modern form. So while the use and placement of chapter numbers has some history which is somewhat interesting, the question of whether we can rely on the divisions of Isaiah to organize the books of the Bible is answered by simply trying.

When we investigate the content in each chapter in the book of Isaiah it is clear that each chapter contains a "unique identifier" that causes it to match one book in the Bible. In other words content like "God said" or "water" or something common is not a good basis for matching chapter and book, but things like "Leviathan" or "naked prophets" which only occur once or twice in the Bible are "unique identifiers."

An audit on our work in Isaiah requires some knowledge of the Bible, but nothing beyond what a Highschool or ambitious Jr. High student can do with a concordance. After all, how many famous haircuts are there in the Bible? Isaiah 7 has one and I can think of one or two others (Samson and Paul). Just use a concordance to determine how many haircuts exist and you will have a good sense of whether it qualifies as a unique identifier.

The book order is also made robust by the fact each chapter in Isaiah has more than one match with the corresponding book. In most cases each chapter in Isaiah more or less completely relates to the correlating book, though often for reasons different than assumed.

The chapters in Isaiah also run in sequence such that the first chapter matches the first book, the second chapter the second book and so on for 66 chapters in a row. An isolated correlation between a chapter in Isaiah and book would not be too cool, but every chapter uniquely matching one book is a scriptural witness of what books belong in the canon and their proper order. A witness on God's authority, but auditable by everyone.

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Why are there numbers in front of the book names?

The addition of numbers to the books reinforces a sense of order. If there's no order to the books then of course you wouldn't number them sequentially, but with the books in order it makes perfect sense to number them. It gives the canon a sense of completeness and definition.

From a practical standpoint numbering the books of the Bible completes the numbering system that began with chapters and verses. Genesis 1:1 can more easily be rendered 1.1:1. The numeric address lends itself to jotting notes, citing scripture in academic papers and writting software.

Book numbers are also easy to remember since our brains naturally work well with numbers. If you have ever memorized a shopping list by first memorizing how many items are in the list then you understand the inherent value of numbering the books of the Bible to the task of remembering what's in the Bible. 66 may seem like a long list untill you realize you probably know that many people at school or work.

The most important reason, though, for numbering the books is we gain the ability to notate the places in the Bible where the books replay by simply inserting each book's number. By placing a circled number or "dot" in the text the reader is referred to the book with context for what they are reading.

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Why is the book of James now Jacob?

The reason we've used Jacob as the book name instead of James is based on a simple word study in the Aramaic and Greek manuscripts. Looking through the sources you will see many occurences of Jacob (or Yakub to get the pronunciation right), but you won't find a single occurence of the word James. Turns out Jesus never had a brother or disciple named James, their names were Jacob.

Jacob is a well known person in the Old Testament. He is the grandson of Abraham and father of the twelve boys from which the twelve tribes of Israel came. In fact Jacob's name was changed to Israel by God.

Now when translators changed the New Testament occurrences of the word Jacob to James they removed the ability for the reader to easily connect those stories with the Jacob of Genesis. This problem is clear in the opening to the book of James.

Sound familiar? The writter is Jacob and he's addressing his twelve kids out in the world somewhere, which sets the context for the rest of the book, but this simple correlation is obscurred by the fact that Jacob has been replaced with James and the book is titled James instead of Jacob. The reader could miss the fact the author assumes you know something about Jacob and his kids from Genesis and will use that information to unpack what is about to be said.

So why were the occurences of Jacob in the New Testament changed to James? I'm not entirely sure how to confirm this, it may be a rumor, but I've heard the switch from Jacob to James happened with the production of the King James Bible at the beginning of the 17th century.

Jesus' brother Jacob was a respected leader in the early church. His leadership is reflected in Acts 15 (44.15) and book 55 itself. So perhaps the King wanted his new edition of the Bible to project what type of leader he was going to be. Or maybe the translators did it in honor of the King or to curry favor with him. I don't know.

What I do know is that once everyone was familiar with James in the English Bible the tradition stuck. Even the 20th century Bible translations supposedly concerned about accuracy didn't fix this simple problem, probably for concern over what people would think (which is ironic if the name was originally changed to effect how people thought).

So while God changed Jacob's name to Israel he did not change it to James. So to be as transparent as possible to scripture we have elected to change the book name back to Jacob.