For some readers, yes.
If you've always wanted to read through the Old Testament but repeatedly lose interest somewhere among genealogies, laws, repeated stories, and prophets appearing hundreds of pages away, this series was created specifically to offer another way through.
You can read The Covenant Chronicles straight through as your journey through the Old Testament, read it beside your Bible, and check anything that catches your attention.
The biblical story.
What changes is the presentation.
Material spread across different biblical books is brought together. Parallel accounts are combined. Repetition, genealogies, and lists may be compressed. Historical and cultural context is added so that a modern reader can understand the world surrounding the text.
That makes this something different from a research translation—but also very different from a novel merely inspired by the text.
Mostly for people like me.
For people who have wanted to read and understand the Bible.
And you don't need to come in already convinced of what you believe. Curiosity is enough.
...I would also encourage anyone who has a preconceived idea of the "bible" to take a real look. It isn't rules and wrath, it is vastly different. See for yourself.
I'd love to !!
The moment I figure out how to do it well for over a thousand pages... and without butchering several hundred Hebrew names... this answer gets updated.
Something else. I've had trouble defining it.
It's not a translation of the Hebrew Masoretic Text like many Bibles. It is also not a paraphrase, which can often be a summary.
This is actually expanded and in some ways, but it is built on the original Hebrew.
I would classify it possibly as a modern take on the oral tradition.
Yes, and I think they should be.
This project works best when it sends someone back into Scripture with a better idea of what they are looking at.
The goal isn't for someone to say, “The Covenant Chronicles says this.” The better outcome is, “I never noticed that was there. Let me go study it.”
The full sweep of the Hebrew Scriptures.
I cannot say "absolutely everything", because I do condense repetition in areas, but it is all the books, the stories, the plots, the foundations.
If you can read through the Old Testament in its traditional arrangement and make sense of everything without leaning on someone to interpret, go for it.
I couldn't.
And I know I'm not the only one.
If these books do their job well, they should leave you wanting to return to Scripture with more context, more questions, and a stronger sense of what you are actually reading.
The choice isn't the Bible or these books.
For many, these books are what made it possible to finally read and understand the Bible.
No.
If you want the entire journey from creation forward, start with Roots.
But if you've tried to read the Old Testament before and already know many of the stories in Genesis and Exodus, I would seriously consider starting with Ascent. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Saul, and David give the project room to show what it does differently very quickly.
If the prophets have always confused you, Crossroads may be an even better doorway.
And if you simply want wisdom about life, suffering, work, relationships, meaning, and human behavior, Wisdom & Psalms stands comfortably on its own.
There is an order to the series. That doesn't mean everyone needs the same entrance.
Because one giant book would be enormous!
Or it would have tiny font and be very difficult to read.
A 250-350 page book is manageable and a pleasant experience.
Each book starts and ends, so you can finish one. You can start the next one.
They all connect and work together and there is no rule that starting on book one is required.
The original Hebrew Masoretic Text has been the primary textual foundation, while other ancient witnesses, including the Septuagint and Dead Sea Scrolls, have been useful where wording or textual questions matter.
I also compared numerous modern translations because differences between translations often reveal exactly where a Hebrew word, phrase, or passage deserves closer attention.
No single English translation was treated as the final authority for the wording of this series.
Carefully—and sometimes reluctantly.
There are places where scholars disagree by years, decades, or even much more. When there is a strong historical or textual reason for a placement, I use it. When several possibilities remain legitimate, I try to choose a fit that aids the reader without pretending the question has been permanently settled.
Nothing gives me special authority.
The work should stand or fall on whether it handles the biblical record carefully, accurately, and fairly.
What I brought to the project was persistence, a particular way of thinking, willingness, and apparently an unreasonable tolerance for going back through the same material over and over again.
Readers should still question it.
Yes and No.
Multiple AI tools helped sift through the ancient text and centuries of scholarship. They have been used through research, comparison, fact checking, and as a review tool. It has been useful for finding inconsistencies, comparing passages, challenging chronology, checking historical claims, exploring translation differences, and asking the same question from several different angles.
The words on the page are very much mine. What you are reading and what made the cut, came through time and trial and error and reading and re-reading and actually doing the hard work over and over again.
AI isn't an authority. It can be wrong—sometimes impressively wrong!
Just like human assumptions can be.
Just as the Bible reports them.
If the text says the sea parted, an angel appeared, someone was five hundred years old, fire came down, a prophet received a word from God, or someone was miraculously healed, I don't feel a need to provide a justification for what was written so that the account becomes easier for a modern reader to accept.
The reader can decide what they believe about those events.
My job here is to represent what the biblical record actually claims happened.
A Jewish reader is very much encouraged to read and challenge it considering the project is specifically the Hebrew Masoretic Text.
I deliberately tried not to force later Jewish or Christian theology backward onto the Scriptures, and invite readers from either tradition to challenge my choices against the text.
Because forcing them into the historical narrative would eventually damage what they are.
Some Psalms fit beautifully within known events and can illuminate those moments. But 150 Psalms deserve their own mantel.
Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs are even more distinct. They wrestle with suffering, wisdom, work, relationships, desire, mortality, justice, and meaning in ways that deserve room of their own.
So the main historical journey and the wisdom/poetry collections are connected, but they don't have to be forced into the same literary form.
Absolutely !!
If something is factually wrong, textually unsupported, misplaced, mistranslated, or simply deserves another look, I would rather know about it than defend it out of ego.
There will always be disagreements over interpretation. That's different.
But if I got something wrong, I want to fix it.
Yes. Many, many times.
Early in the process I made many mistakes, researched them, corrected them, and kept going. I still expect that process to continue. This is a VERY large project. One where very smart people disagree.
When there is a legitimate dispute, I generally don't think my job is to settle it.
Example: Isaiah is a good example. Scholars and traditions have debated the authorship and dating for a very long time. Was it one Isaiah? Deutero-Isaiah? Trito-Isaiah? I don't try to answer that question for the reader. I present Isaiah's words as Isaiah, but place the later material within the historical periods in which those words are addressing the story.
The words don't need to change for the historical setting to become clearer and I don't need to decide debated issues.
Because at some point I had to establish the boundaries.
The series is built around the Hebrew Scriptures and the books shared across the major Old Testament traditions. Catholic and Orthodox traditions embrace additional writings that are historically important and valued.
Their absence here isn't a statement that those writings have no value, where as their inclusion would be settling a debate that isn't mine to decide.
Historical and cultural context, yes.
New biblical events, revelations, theology, no.
Sometimes understanding an event requires explaining geography, customs, historical hindsight, political circumstances, travel, agriculture, or other things.
That material is there to help you see the world around the biblical account—not to manufacture a different one.
Because your Bible is also a strategic arrangement of the texts.
I chose to start at the beginning and move through in order, because that is the way that my mind works. I acknowledge that the original texts were never ordered and that some books are arranged poetically within themselves, but I personally process best linearly, like watching a movie or reading a book.