HOW TO READ · 2026-10-12
The day's guides
Method
Read the Verse That Quotes Another Verse
When the New Testament says "it is written," it is handing you an address, and the address is worth visiting.
The New Testament is full of quotation. Matthew alone cites the Old Testament dozens of times, and Paul seems unable to write a page without borrowing from Isaiah, the Psalms or Deuteronomy. Most Bibles mark these in a footnote or in italics. Most readers, being busy, keep going.
Stop at one. Pick a quotation and follow it back to its source. Say Jesus in the wilderness answers the tempter with "Man shall not live by bread alone." That line comes from Deuteronomy 8, and if you read the chapter around it, you find Moses reminding Israel of forty years of hunger and manna in a different wilderness. The answer in Matthew stops being a clever retort. It is a man standing where Israel stood and passing the test Israel failed.
This is the main payoff: a quotation usually carries its original setting with it. A writer in the first century could cite a single line and expect the listener to hear the surrounding chapter, the way we might say "to be or not to be" and expect the rest of the speech to come to mind. When you read only the quoted line, you get a fraction of what was meant.
Pay attention to the small differences too. Sometimes the wording varies from your Old Testament, because the author was quoting the Greek translation rather than the Hebrew, or was paraphrasing from memory, or was trimming for a purpose. A footnote or a study Bible will often tell you which. Don't treat a difference as an error to be fixed. Treat it as a clue about what the writer wanted you to notice.
Notice, too, what was left out. Luke 4 has Jesus reading from Isaiah 61 in the synagogue and stopping mid-sentence, before the phrase about the day of vengeance. Whatever you make of that, you only see it by having the original open beside it.
Do this once a week and the two testaments begin to read as one conversation rather than two books bound together. You will not catch everything, and you don't need to. One quotation, followed carefully to its source and back, teaches you more about how scripture reads scripture than a shelf of summaries.
- Find a quotation: look for "it is written," "as the prophet says," or a footnote marking an Old Testament source.
- Turn to the original and read the whole paragraph around it, not just the quoted line.
- Note what the quoter kept and what was left out.
- Return to the New Testament passage and read it again.
15 MIN
Practice
Read a Psalm Through to the Turn
Many psalms change direction partway through, and the change is the whole point.
Psalm 13 opens with four "how longs" in two verses. The speaker feels forgotten, hidden from, wrestling with his own thoughts all day. Then, in verse 5, one word changes the air: "But I have trusted in your steadfast love." Nothing in his circumstances has been reported as different. The enemy hasn't left. Yet the psalm ends in singing.
Many psalms work this way, and once you learn to look for it, you can find the turn almost anywhere. Psalm 73 sits in envy of the wicked for sixteen verses, until the speaker enters the sanctuary and sees the matter differently. Psalm 22 moves from abandonment to praise in a single line. Sometimes the turn is a word like "but" or "yet"; sometimes it is a change from speaking about God to speaking to him.
The practice is simple. Read the psalm straight through once, at an ordinary pace. Then go back and put a small mark in the margin where the direction changes. Ask what happens right before it. Often it is a memory: the speaker recalls what God has done before. Sometimes it is an act, like going into the temple or simply deciding to speak. Occasionally nothing is given at all, and the turn is as unexplained as it can be in life.
That last case deserves honesty. A few psalms never turn. Psalm 88 ends in darkness, and its last word in many translations is just that. It is in the book anyway. Part of reading the psalter well is accepting that it allows both patterns: the lament that finds its footing and the lament that doesn't.
What this teaches is something about prayer itself. The psalmists do not tidy their complaints before bringing them. They begin where they are and say it plainly, and the movement comes in the saying. If you read this way for a few weeks, you may find that your own praying loosens a little, with less need to arrive at the right feeling before you start.
- Choose a psalm that begins in distress, such as Psalm 13, 22 or 73.
- Read it once straight through without stopping.
- Mark the verse where the tone shifts, often at a "but" or "yet."
- Ask what the speaker sees or remembers just before the shift.
10 MIN
Getting started
Pick the Book Nobody Told You About
Some of the best short books in the Bible are ones many lifelong readers have never opened on purpose.
Most people who start reading the Bible begin with a famous book and stall in a long one. There is another route: begin with a short book you have never read and finish it in a sitting. Habakkuk runs three chapters. Philemon is a single page. Haggai is two chapters. Jonah is four and reads like a story told to be enjoyed.
Take Habakkuk. It begins with a man shouting at God: why do you let violence go on, why do you not save? It is rare to find a book that starts with a complaint this blunt and keeps going. God answers, the prophet argues, God answers again, and by the last chapter Habakkuk is writing a song that includes one of the most remarkable sentences in scripture: though the fig tree does not blossom and there is no fruit on the vines, yet he will rejoice in the Lord. You can follow the whole arc in about ten minutes.
Or take Philemon. It is a private letter from Paul about a runaway slave named Onesimus, whom Paul is sending back with a request that he be received as a brother. It is short enough to read in the time it takes to boil water, and it shows you the apostle doing something other than arguing doctrine: asking a favor, carefully and with some tact.
The method is plain. Read the whole thing aloud first, because short books are meant to be heard at one go. Then read it again with a pencil, and write a single sentence at the top: who is speaking, to whom, and what do they want? Don't hunt for application yet. Just get the situation straight.
There is a quiet benefit to finishing a book. You discover that the Bible is made of individual works with their own voices, rather than one undifferentiated block. After Habakkuk, Jonah and Philemon, you will find that the longer books feel less forbidding, because you have learned what it is to read one on its own terms. Pick one this week and finish it before the weekend.
- Choose one of Habakkuk, Philemon, Jonah or Haggai.
- Set aside twenty minutes with no other task.
- Read it through aloud once, then again with a pencil.
- Write one sentence about who is speaking and why.
20 MIN
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