The 66 Books of the Bible in Order — and Why They're in That Order

The order is by kind, not by date

The first thing to know about the order of the Bible is that it is a library shelved by genre. Law sits with law, history with history, poetry with poetry, prophecy with prophecy. Chronology is a secondary concern: Job may be the oldest story in the book and it sits in the middle; the letters of Paul were written before the Gospels and come after them.

That is not a flaw to be fixed. It means each group of books has a job, and once you know the groups, you know roughly what a book is trying to do before you open it. The lists below follow the standard Protestant order, with each group's role in a sentence.

Old Testament: Law (5 books)

The Pentateuch, or Torah — the foundation the rest of the Bible assumes. Creation, the patriarchs, the exodus from Egypt, the covenant at Sinai and the law given there, and the forty years to the edge of the promised land.

• Genesis
• Exodus
• Leviticus
• Numbers
• Deuteronomy

Old Testament: History (12 books)

Israel's story from entering the land to returning from exile, roughly 1400 to 400 BC: conquest, the judges, the united kingdom under Saul, David and Solomon, the split into two kingdoms, their fall, and the return under Persian rule.

• Joshua
• Judges
• Ruth
• 1 Samuel
• 2 Samuel
• 1 Kings
• 2 Kings
• 1 Chronicles
• 2 Chronicles
• Ezra
• Nehemiah
• Esther

Old Testament: Poetry and wisdom (5 books)

Books written to be prayed, sung, memorised and argued with rather than read as narrative. They can be read in any order and at any point in a plan, because none of them depend on the story around them.

• Job
• Psalms
• Proverbs
• Ecclesiastes
• Song of Solomon

Old Testament: Major Prophets (5 books)

"Major" means long, not more important. Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel are the three longest prophetic books; Lamentations is attached to Jeremiah by tradition, and Daniel is placed here in Christian Bibles (the Hebrew Bible shelves it with the Writings).

• Isaiah
• Jeremiah
• Lamentations
• Ezekiel
• Daniel

Old Testament: Minor Prophets (12 books)

Twelve short books that were a single scroll in the Hebrew Bible, "The Twelve." Together they cover about three centuries and are in rough chronological order — Hosea and Amos speak to the northern kingdom before its fall, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi to the returned exiles after it.

• Hosea
• Joel
• Amos
• Obadiah
• Jonah
• Micah
• Nahum
• Habakkuk
• Zephaniah
• Haggai
• Zechariah
• Malachi

New Testament: Gospels and Acts (5 books)

Four accounts of Jesus's life, death and resurrection, then Acts — written by Luke as a second volume — carrying the story from the resurrection to Paul under house arrest in Rome, about thirty years later.

• Matthew
• Mark
• Luke
• John
• Acts

New Testament: Paul's letters (13 books)

Ordered by length, longest first, not by date — Romans leads because it is the longest, and the letters to churches come before the letters to individuals (1 Timothy onward). Galatians or 1 Thessalonians is probably the earliest; Romans was written years later.

• Romans
• 1 Corinthians
• 2 Corinthians
• Galatians
• Ephesians
• Philippians
• Colossians
• 1 Thessalonians
• 2 Thessalonians
• 1 Timothy
• 2 Timothy
• Titus
• Philemon

New Testament: General letters and Revelation (9 books)

Letters by other apostles and early leaders, addressed to the church broadly rather than to one city — hence "general" or "catholic" epistles — closed by Revelation, a letter to seven churches in the form of an apocalypse.

• Hebrews
• James
• 1 Peter
• 2 Peter
• 1 John
• 2 John
• 3 John
• Jude
• Revelation

Why other Bibles order the books differently

The Hebrew Bible has the same Old Testament books but arranges them in three sections — Law (Torah), Prophets (Nevi'im) and Writings (Ketuvim) — and ends with Chronicles rather than Malachi. In that arrangement Ruth sits after Proverbs, Daniel among the Writings, and the twelve minor prophets count as one book, which is how 39 books become 24.

Catholic Bibles follow the Christian genre order but include seven further books — Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) and Baruch — plus additions to Esther and Daniel, placed among the history and wisdom books. Orthodox Bibles include those and a few more. Protestant Bibles left them out at the Reformation, following the Hebrew canon; some printings keep them in a separate section called the Apocrypha.

The New Testament order is the same in all three traditions.

What this means if you're reading through

Because the order is by genre, reading cover to cover means roughly 200 chapters of law and history before the first psalm, and the prophets — the hardest books to read cold — arrive in a block of 250 chapters right before the New Testament. That is where most straight-through attempts stall, and it is the reason most one-year plans mix an Old Testament reading with a Psalm and a Gospel each day rather than moving through the shelf in order.

If you want the story in the sequence it happened, a chronological plan reorders the same books by event; if you just want to start, a Gospel is the usual advice. Either way, the shelf order above is worth knowing — it is how every reference, index and footnote in the Bible is organised.