How to Study a Book of the Bible from Start to Finish

This is the first post in a six-part series walking through my whole Bible study system, one piece at a time. 

 

When a woman says she wants to really study her Bible but has no idea where to begin, she often gets answers along these lines:

“Just pick a book and study it.”

Or

“Just start in Genesis and keep reading.”

Both of these really annoy me.

They're dismissive. They sound like help, but they aren't.

You're left asking, okay, but how? Which book? Starting where? Doing what, exactly? Do I read it first, or start writing things down, or look up the history, or find a commentary? And how am I supposed to know when I am actually studying it instead of just reading it slowly with a highlighter?

And “start in Genesis and keep going” is how a thousand well-meaning women end up quietly quitting somewhere in the middle of Leviticus, closing their Bible for the last time in March, and deciding they are just not the kind of person who is good at this. Which is not true.

They were handed a map with no roads on it and then blamed for getting lost.

For years I did my own version of the same thing. I opened to a random spot, read until my mind wandered, underlined a verse that sounded nice, and closed my Bible feeling vaguely like I had done something holy and mostly like I had no idea what I had just read.

What changed everything for me was not trying harder. It was having a system.

The big idea: from the lake to the little orange mushroom

My friend Lauren is on vacation in Wisconsin right now, and she has been sending me photos of the scenery while I sit here sweating through another Texas summer. Cruel, honestly. 

First she sent the view from her porch. A lake, and miles of woods stretching out around it.

Then a photo from inside those woods, standing among the trees.

Then a single fallen log, its whole surface covered in pale lichen.

And then, last, a tiny orange mushroom growing out of that log, small enough that you would step right over it if you were not looking down.

That is exactly how you study a book of the Bible.

You move from the biggest view down to the smallest, in order. The lake and the whole forest. Then the woods you are standing in. Then one log. Then the little orange mushroom you would have missed entirely if you had not slowed down and knelt in front of it.

In Bible study terms, that's four steps:

1. The whole book. What is this, who wrote it, and what is it about?
2. One chapter. What is happening in this section, and how is it built?
3. One verse. What does this specific sentence actually say?
4. One word. What did this word mean to the person who first wrote it?

Each step makes the next one make sense.

And here is the part that took me too long to learn. When you go in this order, you almost never end up with that scary feeling of having pulled a verse wildly out of context, because you built the context yourself before you got there. Let me show you the whole thing on one real book, so it stops being theory.

Let me be honest with you first

Before I walk you through this, I want to say something plainly, because I would rather you trust me than buy from me. I sell this system. Each of these four steps has a journal that goes with it, and there is a bundle that puts them all together.

So yes, when I show you how I do this, I am partly hoping you will love it enough to grab the tools I make. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But here's the part I mean just as much. You do not need to buy a single thing to do any of this. The whole system, all four steps, works with a Bible, a pen, and blank paper you already own.

I'm going to teach you the actual process, not a watered-down version that only works if you pay me. If you follow along with a spiral notebook from the dollar store, you will study Ruth just as well as the woman who bought the bundle. What my journals give you is not just the method. It is the structure, so you do not have to design the pages yourself or decide what goes where before you can start thinking about the Bible.

For some people that structure is the difference between doing this and not. For others, a blank notebook is freedom. You know which one you are, and I trust you to choose. Okay. With that out of the way, let’s study a book.

First, pick a short book (and why that matters)

We are going to study the book of Ruth. Four chapters. You could read the whole thing in about 30 minutes. I want you to start with a short book too, and not because you are not capable of more.

Start short because finishing matters. There is something that happens in your confidence when you take a whole book of the Bible from the first verse to the last and actually understand it.

That feeling is the whole point, and it is the exact thing the “start in Genesis and keep going” plan almost never delivers.

Ruth is perfect for this. It is short, it is a story so it is easy to follow, and it is quietly one of the most beautiful things in all of Scripture.

So let’s walk it through, step by step.

Step 1: Get the big picture

Before I study a single verse, I stand on the porch and look at the whole lake. I read the whole book through in one sitting, and I write down the basics.

This is where the Books of the Bible Journal lives in my system. Here is what I want to know before I go any deeper.

Who wrote it, and when? Who were they writing to? What was going on at the time? What kind of writing is this, a letter, a poem, a history, a story? And if I had to say what the whole book is about in one sentence, what would I say?

For Ruth, that looks like this. It is a story set during the time of the judges, which the book itself tells us was a rough and unstable era. It follows a woman named Naomi who loses her husband and both sons in a foreign country, and her daughter-in-law Ruth, a Moabite, who refuses to leave her.

In one sentence: it is a story about how God quietly provides and redeems in the middle of ordinary loss, through the loyal love of unlikely people.

Notice I have not studied anything closely yet. But look how much I already have. I know this is a story, so I will read it for plot and character rather than for step-by-step commands.

I know the setting is grief and scarcity.

I know to watch for provision and redemption, because I just told myself that is what the book is about.

That is the whole job of step one. You are not answering questions yet. You are learning which questions to ask. 

Step 2: Map the chapter 

Now I step off the porch and walk into the woods. For our purposes, chapter 1. This is where chapter mapping comes in.

I read the chapter a couple of times and I look for a few specific things. Repeated words. The people, and who is doing what. The places. Any moment where the story turns. And then, in my own words, what this chapter is about.

When you do this with Ruth 1, one thing jumps off the page almost immediately. A single idea keeps repeating: going back. Turning back. Returning.

Naomi tells both her daughters-in-law to go back. One of them, Orpah, does go back.

And then comes the hinge of the whole chapter. Ruth does the opposite of going back. She clings.

You wouldn't necessarily notice that repetition just reading casually. But when you are watching for repeated words on purpose, the chapter basically hands you its main point.

Chapter 1 is about a fork in the road, and two women who choose opposite directions. See what happened there? I did not need a commentary to tell me what the chapter emphasizes. The chapter told me, because I mapped it instead of just reading it. 

Step 3: Map the verse

Now I crouch down at one fallen log. In chapter 1, there is one verse that everything else is leaning toward, so that is the one I map.

Ruth 1:16, where Ruth tells Naomi she will not turn back.

This is verse mapping. I take this one verse and I slow all the way down. I look at the key words. I read it in a few different translations. I chase the cross-references. And I ask what it meant then, before I ask what it means for me.

When I map this verse, here is what surfaces. Ruth, a foreign woman with every practical reason to go home to her own people and her own gods, instead binds herself completely to Naomi and, more importantly, to Naomi’s God.

The language she uses is covenant language. It is the language of a vow. She is not just being sweet to her mother-in-law. She is converting. She is choosing the God of Israel with her whole life, at the exact moment when following that God has cost Naomi everything.

That is a very different thing from the way this verse usually shows up, printed in pretty script on wedding decor. Which, to be clear, I am not against. But mapping the verse showed me it is not first a verse about romance. It is a verse about faith that costs you something. 

Step 4: The closest look, one word

Finally, the little orange mushroom. One word.

Word studies used to intimidate me, because, let's be real, I was doing good just to study in English, and throwing Greek and Hebrew into the mix seemed like more than I could handle.  But the truth is, to study a word in it's original language really just requires being willing to look a word up and do a little research.

The word I would chase through Ruth is hesed (Ruth 1:8, 2:20, 3:10) It is a Hebrew word that shows up at the key moments of this book, and our English Bibles translate it a bunch of different ways: kindness, loyalty, steadfast love, faithfulness.

None of those quite captures it on its own. Hesed is the kind of loyal, covenant-keeping love that keeps showing up for someone even when it is not required and even when it costs you. It is the word most often used to describe God’s love for His people.

And here is the payoff. Once you know that word, you see it running under the whole story like a current. Ruth shows hesed to Naomi. Boaz shows hesed to Ruth. And the whole time, quietly, God is showing hesed to all of them.

The little story about one grieving family turns out to be a picture of the way God loves. You cannot get that from reading fast. You get it from stopping on one word.

Putting it all in one place

So look at what we just did.

We took a whole book of the Bible from the lake all the way down to that one little orange mushroom, and every step made the next one clearer.

We started not knowing where to begin, and we ended understanding that Ruth is a story about the loyal love of God shown through ordinary, faithful people.

The reason this works is that the four steps are not four random activities. They are one system, and they build on each other.

That is also the reason I keep all four in one binder instead of scattered across notebooks and sticky notes and the notes app on my phone. When the book overview, the chapter maps, the verse maps, and the word studies all live in the same place, in order, you are not just doing Bible study. You are building something you can go back to. A year from now you can open that binder and see exactly what God showed you in Ruth, instead of trying to remember it. 

But realistically, how long does this take?

I know what some of you are thinking. This sounds like it takes a lot of time, and you don't have it. But, you don't have to do all four steps in one sitting. This is not a race. 

And honestly, I don't always do a verse map or word study for each chapter. I use those when something really stands out or I want to dig deeper, so no pressure to do all of the steps for each chapter.

Here is what it can actually look like in a real week. Monday, read the book and jot the big picture. Tuesday, map a chapter. Wednesday, map one verse from that chapter. Thursday, chase one word. 

Twenty to thirty minutes at a time, and by the end of the week you have studied a chapter of the Bible more deeply than most people study it in a year. A short book like Ruth, at that pace, is about a month. And it will be one of the better months you spend with your Bible.

You can do this

Go back to that annoying advice of “Just pick a book and study it.” “Just start in Genesis and keep reading.” Now you know the answer to every question they left hanging.

Where do I start? The big picture. Then what? One chapter, then one verse, then one word. How do I know I am studying and not just reading?

Because I am moving through a system on purpose instead of wandering and hoping.

So here is what I would love for you to do. Pick a short book. Ruth is right there and I could not recommend it more. 

And then follow along, because over the next several weeks I am going to walk through each of these four tools in detail, one post at a time.

And like I promised at the top, no purchase required. If all you have tonight is your Bible, a pen, and the book of Ruth, you have everything you need to start, and God will meet you there.

If you would rather not build the pages yourself, the Bible Study Binder Bundle has all four tools together (plus lots of other goodies!) and it is the exact system I use. Either way, the important thing is that you start.

Let’s study a whole book together.

Blessings,

Katie