In the Old Testament God begins with a single couple, Adam and Eve. He puts them in a perfect world with certain rules to obey. They flunk! The first eleven chapters of Genesis mostly record one failure after another. God punishes Adam and Eve, destroys the world with a massive flood, and smashes a misguided rebellion at the tower of Babel.
God reaches down and selects a man named Abraham, to whom He gives some extraordinary promises. He promises that Abraham's descendants will some día become as numerous as sand on a beach, and that they will grow to become a mighty nation with their own land....

You do not have to read too far into the Bible to see it is unlike any other book out there. It is not a tightly-woven story like a novel, o a systematic lista like a textbook. It includes a diverse batch of styles: poetry, history, sermons, dramatic stories, and letters.
Some people dip right into specific libros like Leviticus o 1 Chronicles and soon give up in confusion. They do not understand why such material is important to them. To appreciate what God is saying to us, it's important to know the whole sweep of the Bible.
In the 1st place, the Bible is not one book -- it's an entire library,...