Was Isaiah the first prophet? No, wait, why are we talking about the nation of Judah again – weren’t they conquered already? Hold up.
But it kept scrambling after this, the epic of scripture leaping forward and backward across time. Finally, the story would move forward again in Joshua. But then I would read Exodus, which was very different in tone, and have to “go back” to Leviticus. It’s operatic in a way, the tragedy of human experience. I suppose that is the storyteller in me – watching the narrative of this family through generation after generation, making the same mistakes.
For years, since I was a child, I had tried to read it forward – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and so on. I started with Revelation and read each book until I finished with Genesis. When I read the entire (Christian) Bible for the first time, I did it backwards.
